Online Personals Watch: News on the Dating Industry and Business

Women Are More Sexually Promiscuous

SILICON.COM -- Oct 17 -- Thanks to the internet, women are more sexually promiscuous than ever before according to PlentyofFish, an online dating site with more than 10m registered users. The number of women looking for sex has doubled since 2004. Three years ago, men who were looking for intimate encounters online outnumbered women 10 to 1 - now, the ratio is only five to one. FULL ARTICLE @ SILICON.COM

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Matrimony Sites To See 20.8 Million Registrations By 2010-11

CIOL -- Oct 30 -- According to a recent report "A Web Partner for Life" from EmPower Research the online matrimonial industry will reach 20.8m registrations with revenues of $63 million by 2010-2011. EmPower also sees that within three to five years, the online matrimonial industry in India will converge with other online offerings such as job search and career planning, under one consolidated brand and seamless user experience. FULL ARTICLE @ CIOL

Mark Brooks: BharatMatrimony and Shaadi are the leaders in India.

Mark Brooks To Provide iDating Intro Course At iDate

NEWSWIRE -- Oct 29 -- Mark Brooks, publisher of Online Personals Watch, will provide a 3 hour intensive session on starting an online dating business at iDate2009 in Miami. It is designed for entrepreneurs seeking to enter the market. The pre-conference will cover:

- Overview of the Online Dating Industry
- Business Models for Online Dating
- Financial Examples of Online Dating Businesses
- Software Choices, Selection and/or Programming
- Marketing Strategies
- Latest Business Trends
- New Technologies including Mobile
- Customer Service Issues
- Pitfalls Other Sites Faced
- Buyout Opportunities
FULL ARTICLE @ NEWSWIRE

Mark Brooks: I'm also looking after the agenda for this years Internet Dating Conference and Social Networking Conference. For iDate, we're inviting an all CEO cast. For SNC, we're inviting Fortune 100 companies and leading SNS. Marc Lesnick figured the two might want to meet. Rest assured, we're all going all out to make these the most useful and largest iDate and Social Networking Conferences to date.

Matchmakers, Singles Station & The Right One Affiliate

PR WEB -- Oct 28 -- Under the agreement, Singles Station will fly under The Right One's banner while remaining The Singles Stations in its nine current markets - Tulsa and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Bentonville, Fort Smith and Little Rock, Arkansas; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Springfield and St. Louis, Missouri; and two future ones in Wichita and Kansas City, Kansas. Singles Station will in turn, utilize The Right One's systems and technologies, while The Right One works with them in a consulting capacity. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

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OnlineBootyCall.com Is The Most Popular Dating Site In Iraq

PR NEWSWIRE -- Oct 28 -- US troops make Iraq OnlineBootyCall.com's second largest member base. Alexa currently ranks OnlineBootyCall.com as the 129th most visited overall website in Iraq. "there's definitely a booty boom going on right now", said Moses Brown, founder and CEO of OnlineBootyCall.com. FULL ARTICLE @ THE EARTH TIMES

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AskMen And Match.com Launch Dating Service

MARKETING WEEK -- Oct 27 -- AskMen.com, the male lifestyle web portal, has formed an alliance with Match.com to launch a new dating service. The site will offer readers of AskMen access to Match.com's nationwide database but will have a "slick, male-oriented" site. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKETING WEEK

Mark Brooks: AskMen.com formerly worked with TRUE.

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Cupids Coach to Provide Matchmaking Event At iDate

PR NEWSWIRE -- Oct 27 -- A special one day Matchmakers business conference has been added to the agenda of the January 21-23, 2009 Miami Internet Dating Conference. Julie Ferman, CEO of Cupid's Coach, will provide a 3 hour intensive session on the business of matchmaking. It is designed for both new and existing matchmakers. The pre-conference will cover:

• Overview of the Matchmaking Industry
• Business Models for Matchmaking
• Financial Examples of a Matchmaking Businesses
• Matchmaking Business Trends
• How to Start a Database
• Local Marketing Strategies
• Customer Service Issues
• Pitfalls Other Matchmakers Face

FULL ARTICLE @ PR NEWSWIRE

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Number Of Women Looking For Sex On Casual Dating Sites Doubled

PR NEWSWIRE -- Oct 26 -- PlentyofFish.com, a free online dating site with over 10m registered users, has released data that shows promiscuity among women has doubled since 2004.  PlentyofFish.com, which generates revenue from sending members to other dating sites, tracked 315,478 users going to casual only dating sites in 2004. Of those users, the number of women who were looking for sex through the "intimate encounter" option was about 9%. Among users tracked in 2008, the number of women who were looking for an intimate encounter rose to 18%. FULL ARTICLE @ PR NEWSWIRE

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Lessons In E-commerce

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS -- Oct 27 -- Rich Barton founded Expedia.com in 1994 and Zillow.com in 2006 and learned a few lessons along the way. "If it can be known, it will be known. If it can be rated, it will be rated. If it can be free, it will be free." Those three are true now, Barton says. "There are only a couple words in marketing that work every time. Free is one of them." He pointed to plentyoffish.com a free dating site that is taking over the dating world. FULL ARTICLE @ ROCKY MOUNTAIN

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This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.

eHarmony Buys JustMommies.com

EHARMONY BLOG -- Oct 26 -- Six months ago we hinted that eHarmony will be acquiring online businesses. Here is one of them, announced officially on 15 August 2008. JustMommies.com is an online community and resource site on pregnancy and raising children from infancy to preschool. The original owners were two mothers named Patty and Teresa. FULL ARTICLE @ EHARMONY BLOG

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The Web Of Desire Or Just Deceit?

THE OBSERVER -- Oct 26 -- The web has become a place through which to contact, meet and have sex with real people. Some sites are quite explicit about their offerings. AdultFriendFinder claims to be the world's biggest adult social network and sex personals site. The site claims to have more than 2.5m members registered in the UK. Other sites quite evidently do as they promise, such as Hookuparea.com and BeNaughty.com. And when a marriage is under strain, spouses no longer have to go very far out of their way to cheat. Illicit Encounters asks on its homepage: 'Married but Feeling neglected? Illicit Encounters launched in October 2003 and now has 245,000 members, mostly in the UK. 65% of them are male. The site provides a guide on how to conduct an illicit affair, with advice tips including using a separate SIM card in their mobile phone, paying with cash instead of credit cards and never giving their surname, exact location or workplace. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK 

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eHarmony Seeks New VP For Research

EHARMONY BLOG -- Oct 24 -- eHarmony posts a job opening for a new VP of R&D. The job's #1 responsibility is: Setting strategy for and developing eHarmony's research agenda. The research agenda will focus on 1) the efficacy of current eHarmony products and services in producing highly compatible and satisfying long-term relationships and 2) exploring and validating ways relationship science can contribute to more effective matching results, customer satisfaction and new product creation. Dr. Galen Buckwalter, who held eHarmony's VP Research position for ~10 years, leaves the company to start a job site called MBAInteract that matches MBA professionals and employers using a preliminary personality survey. FULL ARTICLE @ EHARMONY BLOG

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Oregon Trail Facebook App To Be Replaced With Speeddate.com

CNET NEWS -- Oct 24 -- SpeedDate.com, the purveyor of the Web video-based online dating service snatched up the rights to the Oregon Trail Facebook application, which will soon be replaced with the service's existing speed-dating application. The practice of changing an application's functionality and namesake is fair and legal according to Facebook's platform application guidelines and terms of service. Developers are free to make these drastic changes to their applications as long as they stay within Facebook's relatively loose rules. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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Personal Ads + Google Maps = HookupMaps

CNET NEWS -- Oct 22 -- A mix of Google Maps and Craigslist classifieds has resulted in HookupMaps, a service that shows you exactly where the people wanting to "hook up" in your city are. For instance, in San Francisco, there are currently 518 people seeking people. It will also tell you the age and gender of each poster. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

SpeedDate.com Celebrates Successful First Year

MARKETWATCH -- Oct 20 -- Since launching in October 2007, speeddate.com raised over $8m in VC funding and hosted 18m online dates. SpeedDate.com allows singles to meet each other through 3-minute online speed dates using webcams, audio, and IM. SpeedDate is also available as an application on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and meebo. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKET WATCH

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Match.com Notches Up Billionth Connection

POCKET-LINT -- Oct 20 -- Match.com is celebrating that fact that over one billion emails and one billion winks have been sent globally on the site since it launched in 2001. People are looking for love even if business is bad. In a recent survey of over 1000 match.com members, 85% of people said that they would spend between £30 and £51 on a date – the same as they would have done six months ago. FULL ARTICLE @ POCKET-LINT

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NeoCom Media and WhiteLabelDating.com To Launch Gay.co.uk Dating

PRESS RELEASE -- Oct 16 -- NeoCom Media, together with WhiteLabelDating.com, are launching online dating services on Gay.co.uk, a high end lifestyle site. Dating Gay.co.uk is set to go live at the end of October. NeoCom Media owner Chris McEldowney decided to add dating services to Gay.co.uk after the success of his adult dating site Adult.Chat.co.uk, which launched in February 2008. WLD will provide the backend systems and management services for the site as well as the full access to its gay members. FULL ARTICLE @ OPW

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Stock Market Quote Of The Week:

"This is worse than a divorce; I've lost half my net worth and I still have a wife."

Paul Falzone, The Right One & Together Dating CEO Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Oct 18 -- I interviewed Paul Falzone, CEO/Founder of The Right One and Together Dating at The Matchmakers Conference last month. We were in New Jersey, with NYC as the backdrop. Paul has been busy acquiring and merging with companies and building International Dating Venture. (Full Disclosure: International Dating Ventures is a client of Courtland Brooks). - Mark Brooks

Paul can you tell us a little bit more about International Dating Ventures and the acquisitions you’re working on?
International Dating Ventures is a holding company that we established this year. We are aggressively acquiring companies. We just acquired LoveAccess.com, which will be changing its name to eLove.com. The reason we bought the online company was to show the online world that we can convert online leads at a large price point. Its worked out incredibly so we’re very fortunate so far to have LoveAccess to make our business models much more efficient.

We’re also expanding our footprint across the US. We just finished an acquisition with another offline service, increasing us by 11 locations. We’re in about 35 cities across the US now and by the end of the year we’re looking at being in about 50 cities across the US. My goal is to continue to make our footprint larger and take online leads and convert them to paying members in the offline space at probably 100 times the price point the online company can.

How are you expanding? What kind of companies are you focusing on?
We’re focusing on well run, efficient, small locations. 9 or 10 services in all different parts of the US. And I’m focusing on taking the matchmaking end of it and bringing our management teams in and making these companies much more profitable. And so by year end these people will be happy they joined part of our team. They will be reporting on our CRM systems. We have got the metrics of this industry down. We know exactly how many minutes it takes to convert an online lead to be an offline appointment. We know how many leads we need to bring in for a location to make that a profitable location. We know what multiples we need to use. It’s all mathematical equations and its all part of lead flow.

Everybody is talking about a recession in 2008 and thank goodness this is a very recession proof business and our cash flow has never been stronger.

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Match.com Launches Consumer Dating Panel

MARKETING WEEK -- Oct 17 -- Match.com is launching a new consumer panel that aims to provide an "on-the-ground" view of dating in 21st century Britain. The "match100" panel will also be consulted on potential new services from the dating site. Jason Stockwood, international managing director for match.com, says: "The 'match100' is a vocal, diverse group of all ages from across the nation and their opinions and experiences will make a huge impact on our business." FULL ARTICLE @ MARKETING WEEK

See all posts on Match.com