Online Personals Watch: News on the Dating Industry and Business

RateItAll Adsense Rev-Share with Members

PR WEB -- May 18 -- RateItAll.com social network and review community has leveraged the latest Google Adsense API to enable revenue sharing for its contributing members. Members earn cash for using adding listings, creating a profile with a photo, and referring new members. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

Mark Brooks: Buy.com tried luring users/business in with a social network called yub.com, paying commission on sales to members. Nice try. However, 'connectors' won't connect en masse when there's a real and apparent commercial agenda.

MobileDatingWatch.com Launches

PRWEB/PRNEWSWIRE -- May 30 -- The goal of both MobileDatingWatch.com and OnlinePersonalsWatch.com is to provide news updates to executives, allow the press to research the industry and connect with executives, and be a watchdog protecting user interests. MobileDatingWatch.com: No ads, no fluff, just raw news relevant to the emerging mobile dating industry. FULL ARTICLE @ PRWEB

eHarmony Marriages

OPW -- May 26 -- I'm on eHarmony's mailing list and just got an email through from them. "eHarmony is responsible for over 33,000 members getting married within a 12 month period, according to a recent poll by Harris Interactive". That's more than 90 singles who met on eHarmony getting married every single day! See who got married on May 20th, 2006. Nice move eHarmony. Nothing is more compelling than real testimonials from real people...en masse. They've also tracked more detailed stories of 19 couples from 2003 through 2005. I'd love to hear of a top dating site employing someone full time just to source and track success stories. For good PR and improved conversions, find a bubbly journalism student fresh out of college and hire them to 100% focus on telling your client success stories. Your ROI will take one year on this headcount, but it will be significant. - Mark Brooks 

MySpace Future Integration into Newspapers

MARKETING VOX -- May 26 -- News Corp. is expected to integrate MySpace with its newspaper properties. Murdoch, who was initially skeptical of the internet, now thinks online media operations are fundamental to the survival of publishing. News International publishes The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World. FULL ARTICLE @MARKETING VOX

Mark Brooks: OLD WAY: Pick up the newspaper in the morning. NEW (MORE ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY) WAY: Check Yahoo/Google News, NY Times and CNET news and keyword based news alerts. Get daily news via email from favorite industry specific news services/blogs (e.g. OnlinePersonalsWatch.com). CONSEQUENCES: Newspapers acquire online media to quickly learn and retool for the new news way.

MySpace, Bebo Battle it Out

NETMIPERATIVE -- May 26 -- According to Nielsen//NetRatings, MySpace and Bebo, are the fifth- and sixth-biggest brands online in terms of total web page views for April. 33% of Bebo users visit MySpace. 25% of MySpace users visit Bebo. 69% of MySpace's audience is 18+ while the majority of Bebo users, 54%, are under 18. Both Bebo and MySpace have more than 1.2 million female users, but Bebo's smaller size means a greater percentage of its users are women. Bebo reports the higher number of page views and amount of time spent online, 1 hr 52 mins, per user each month.

Jambo Brings Social Networking Into the Real World

NEW.COM -- May 26 -- Jambo tells you who in your network is nearby by checking to see if people you know are attached to the same Wi-Fi access point and then use Jambo's built-in instant-messaging client. Jambo is in testing on Windows Mobile phones and is working on supporting Symbian, RIM, and Palm OS. The Jambo technology is available for license to social networking sites. Other interesting experiments in finding Wi-Fi access point locations are SkyHook, Wigle, and Microsoft's own Location Finder (part of Windows Live Local). Social networking projects that track people and their locations include Dodgeball and Plazes. FULL ARTICLE @ NEWS

Mobile TV Audience Breakdown

RED HERRING -- May 26 -- 2 million+ U.S. wireless users subscribe to mobile TV, ClickZ reported, 1.4% of the country's user base. Mobile TV users pay ~$40 more each month on wireless services than typical mobile phone subscribers. Minority groups more so. Hispanics comprise 23% of mobile TV subscribers, while they represent 10% of the U.S. wireless user population. African Americans represent 19% and comprise a 11% of all wireless users in the U.S. Caucasians account for 47% of mobile TV subscribers but make up only 47% of mobile TV subscribers.

Mark Brooks: Mobile dating numbers tell a similar story with minorities taking the lead in usage over Caucasians.

OPW Interview - Adam Small, CMO of Sexsearch

OPW INTERVIEW -- May 28, 2006 -- Sexsearch is different. It's glossy, sexy and growing gangbusters. The casual dating and, at the other end of the spectrum, serious/relationship dating segments are growing ever stronger. Sexsearch has been barreling along for a couple of years now. Now they are second only to AdultFriendFinder in the casual/adult segment. I interviewed (ex-Yahoo) Adam Small who is CMO of Sexsearch. - Mark Brooks

What’s your story Adam?
After school I moved to New York City and I worked as a financial manager for Prudential. From there I decided I wanted to run my own company and I started a website for college students which was called CollegeU and we ran a discount card program for students and local businesses. I had a friend who was working at Yahoo, and he convinced me to join Yahoo in New York, where I worked for a number of years. I worked with clients such as Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, American Express. I met Damian, the owner of my current company through some of my Yahoo friends and decided to move to Toronto to start building SexSearch.

What's the Sexsearch story?
Sexsearch took us one and half year s to build...and we launched it in January a little over two years ago. We knew how well dating did, we had worked with Adult Friend Finder and we actually approach them to see if we could do more marketing for them but they weren‘t interested in allowing us to have a private label site at the time. So, we decided to build our own dating site with an adult twist to it. We liked certain aspects of what they had and we added all our own bells and whistles and gave the site a unique design with a more straight-to-the-point focus.   

Who is your target market?
Our target market is anyone over the age of 21 who is interested in sex...which is almost everybody. Other personals sites beat around the bush. We get straight to the point. We know that there‘s lot of people out there who are interested in sex.

How many members do you have now?
We have a little over 6.5 million registered users...and it’s growing fast! 

Are online personal users moving more towards casual dating sites or towards relationship dating sites?
I think online personals users are moving towards lot of different niche dating sites and I think they are definitely moving more towards casual dating sites. We‘ve seen a big increase in the number of members and I know there’s been a decline with some of our main stream competitors. So, I definitely see a trend of users moving more towards casual dating sites like SexSearch. 

What do you have in store for SexSearch?
Towards the end of the summer we will be launching private labels capability, which will allow us to launch more sites for ourselves, such as a mainstream dating site with an edge, of course. We will also launch a gay dating site. Offering private label sites will give us the ability to do deals with other companies who are interested in using our very established database and back-end to offer their own dating site.

13% of Australians Social Networkers

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL -- May 25 -- A telephone survey of 1013 Australian adults revealed 78% had used the internet, 13% to form online social relationships. Those forming online relationships tended to be students, young, single, comfortable with new technology. FULL ARTICLE @ AJ

Friendster Raises $3.1 Million

SILICON BEAT -- May 25 -- Friendster's original investors Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark have reset the company's value, and invested $3.1 million (in what is called a recapitalization). Friendster will release some more online features and a revised home page. Friendster will give users a way to know when their friends have added new photos, written new blog postings or changed their profile and will also make its site searchable by Google and other search engines for those members that choose to make their profiles public. FULL ARTICLE @ SILICONBEAT

Mark Brooks: These tweaks may help tip a little more viral activity. Friendster has suffered from feature creep of late and needs a usability overhaul. 

Yonja? Who?

OPW -- May 25 -- The world of social networking extends far beyond Myspace and Friendster. Case in point, Yonja, Turkey's leading social network, and Grono the leader in Poland, Yeeyoo, hot in China, Cyworld, South Korea's titan. Check out the Handy Little Lists on the left bar of OPW for more Popular Social Networks.

...Some more info on Yonja: Offices in San Francisco and Istanbul, launched Jan 2004, 2.2 million members, #2 most trafficked Turkish Website, ~600 million page views a month, 670,000 unique logins in last 30 days, profitable.  The Turkish market is the youngest and fastest growing population in Europe with more people between the ages of 7-14 than all EU countries combined. - Mark Brooks

Feedblitz Updates

OPW -- May 25 -- Feedblitz rocks! If you'd like to get daily updates of new posts added to Online Personals Watch, just sign up to the Feedblitz email list at the top of the left bar on OPW. I'm very impressed with this service. RSS is fine, but email still rules. Feedblitz will keep you on top of things. - Mark Brooks

Money-Making Woes for Chinese Dating Sites

IOL -- May 24 -- "How to make money is the problem for every Internet dating company in China," said Zhang Kuan, president of dating site Jiaoyou. Chinese men are increasingly moving from their home towns to large cities where they have a limited social network to find a mate, according to Jason Tian, CEO Baihe.  iResearch estimates the Chinese online dating market could reach $82-million (about R543-million) in 2008. The potential will hinge partly on a migration away from a free business model. "High quality services cannot be free," said Dr Song Li, CEO of SinoFriends. The solution, according to eFriendsNet.com (Yeeyoo.com) CEO, Marine Ma, is to blend social networking and Internet dating services. eFriendsNet (5 million users, $3m irevenue in 2005) charges a subscription fee for enhanced services such as the ability to chat with a potential date by mobile phone using a secure connection that protects both parties' identity. FULL ARTICLE @ IOL

Mark Brooks: Dr Li encouraged the Chinese dating industry to start charging for their services at the Asian internet dating convention. 

Cell-Only Population

PEOPLE PRESS -- May 23 -- Households paying a cell phone bill but not a landline bill rose from 0.4% in 2000 to 7.8% in Q1 2005 (U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey). Cell-only Americans are younger, less affluent, less likely to be married or to own their home, and more liberal on many political questions. FULL ARTICLE @ PEOPLE PRESS

Bebo Secures Funding

NET IMPERATIVE -- May 22 -- Benchmark Capital (eBay, betfair, MySQL) has taken a stake in Bebo for $15m. Bebo will use the funding to expand the US team and open a London office, maintain its market leading position, and develop the business in its other core markets. Bebo is now the largest social networking site in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand and is also growing rapidly in the U.S., Australia and Canada, with 24m members and 2.5 billion monthly page views.

AOL, Start-ups Emerge to Challenge MySpace

USA TODAY -- May 22 -- MySpace's user base quadrupled to nearly 80 million over the past year, with as many as 270,000 joining every day. CollectiveX launched this month as a network for professionals and other pre-organized groups. Famoodle started in April as a MySpace for families. Tagged and Varsity World are billing themselves as safe havens for teens. AOL's AIM Pages is building upon its IM user-base of 49 million. A Microsoft spinoff company plans to launch Wallop later this year. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Mark Brooks: The social networking snowball keeps on rolling. 

Let More of the World Access the Web

I'm at 38,000 feet on a Lufthansa flight  (Beijing>Munich) as I make this post.  Internet service for $27 for my 9 hour flight, at 300k+ according to testmy.net. Nice.  Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, wrote a noteworthy article in todays Financial Times...

FINANCIAL TIMES -- May 22 -- Today there are more than a billion people online. But that is still less than one-fifth of the world’s population, and most of those people live in developed countries. I believe, that internet access via mobile telephony will have such an important part to play in helping close the knowledge divide between rich and poor. Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they increasingly have internet access. Mobile is going to be the next big internet phenomenon. FULL ARTICLE @ FT

Mark Brooks: Case in point, I learned at iDate Asia that there are ~50 million PC's in China, and ~400 million mobile phones. I think we'll get the mobile phone internet experience right in the next three to five years. What's right? Webdate describes itself as channel agnostic. That's the best approach. Extending content seamlessly onto the mobile phone. Easier said than done, I know.   

Let More of the World Access the Web

I'm at 38,000 feet on a Lufthansa flight (Beijing>Munich) as I make this post.  Internet service for $27 for my 9 hour flight, at 300k+ according to testmy.net. Nice.  Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, wrote a noteworthy article in todays Financial Times...

FINANCIAL TIMES -- May 22 -- Today there are more than a billion people online. But that is still less than one-fifth of the world’s population, and most of those people live in developed countries. I believe, that internet access via mobile telephony will have such an important part to play in helping close the knowledge divide between rich and poor. Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they increasingly have internet access. Mobile is going to be the next big internet phenomenon. FULL ARTICLE @ FT

Mark Brooks: Case in point, I learned at iDate Asia that there are ~50 million PC's in China, and ~400 million mobile phones. I think we'll get the mobile phone internet experience right in the next three to five years. What's right? Webdate describes itself as channel agnostic. That's the best approach. Extending content seamlessly onto the mobile phone. Easier said than done, I know. 

China's Online Dating Market to Hit 653m Yuan in 2008

XINHUA -- May 20 -- China's online dating market is expected to reach 653 million yuan (about $81 million) by 2008, with an annual growth rate of 60%, according to a recent iResearch report. The report values the online dating market at 37 million yuan (~$4.5 million) for 2004 and 91 million yuan ($11.2 million) for 2005. The US market was $520 million for 2005, and the European market, $110 million. There are more men than women in China's 1.3-billion population. Baihe claims to be China's largest dating site and received $11 million dollars of investment after attracting more than 5 million users in 2005. FULL ARTICLE @ XINHUA NET

Friendster Tries For A Comeback

YAHOO NEWS -- May 19 -- Friendster has new architecture and is preparing to launch an instant messaging service. With more than 27 million page views, the company nearly tripled performance and page views in about one month. The improved performance has also enabled increased advertising and revenue.