WLD -- July 8 -- WhiteLabelDating.com introduced the ability for its members to upgrade using mobile payments last week. Since this introduction, they've seen a 10% increase in new partner revenue. FULL ARTICLE @ WLD BLOG
MARKETING VOX -- July 6 -- Borders UK runs Happily Ever After, a
service for single customers looking to meet other singles with an
interest in books. According to The Bookseller, for an introductory
period the monthly membership fee is approximately $1.66 USD. The fee
will eventually rise to about $16.60 USD, writes Retailer Daily. In
addition to dating services, Happily Ever After features dating books
for discounts as high as 25%. Online dating support services company
Whitelabeldating.com provides the software and database, as well as
payment processing, customer support and hosting services. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKETING VOX
WLD BLOG -- July 2 -- There are still people out there that would rather seek friendship in the hope that it turns into more. Friendsormates.com, friendsofyours.com and ukfriendsda
WHITE LABEL DATING BLOG -- June 23 -- Frank Dethridge, former CEO of World Dating Partners, has joined WhiteLabelDating.com as Affiliate Manager. Dethridge will be launching an affiliate system and working closely with WLD partners to help them make the most from the affiliate channel. FULL ARTICLE @ WLD BLOG
PRESS RELEASE -- May 27 -- fish4, the online portal to find jobs, homes, cars and holidays anywhere in the UK and White Label Dating (WLD), the provider of software and services that enable brands to create their own online dating sites, have launched fish4love. WLD will provide the back-end systems, software, customer support and access to its extensive database for fish4’s new dating site. FULL ARTICLE @ PR-INSIDE
WLD BLOG -- May 1 -- fish4
is, one of the UK’s leading websites, launches a dating site on WLD.com platform called fish4love.co.uk. The fish4love.co.uk
has been developed by two regional newspaper groups - Newsquest Media
Group, Trinity Mirror plc who publish around 500 daily and weekly
regional newspapers between them. FULL ARTICLE @ WLD BLOG
Online Personals Watch News Summary, May 1st, 2009 from Mark Brooks on Vimeo.
Meetic tops in UK. Public health professionals turn to social networks to help combat HIV/AIDS. White Label Dating moves up. Viximo introduces modular virtual goods platform for the web and iPhone. iovation introduces risk assessment module. Diller eyes Yahoo Personals. IAC Q1 results out, subscription base up 6%, but revenue down due to exchange rates.
NEW MEDIA AGE -- Apr 30 -- The UK dating services industry is
worth an estimated £600 million a year and, according to Hitwise, there are
more than 1,300 dating sites in operation. Meanwhile, Jupiter Research predicts
the number of paying members of dating sites will reach 6 million in the next
three years, rising from 2.6 million in 2006. In the midst of such vast
anticipated growth, two of the biggest players — Meetic, which owns Dating
Direct, and IAC, owner of Match.com — have agreed to a deal.
Industry reaction to the owners of Match.com and Dating Direct getting into bed together seems to be one of general puzzlement. IAC plans to sell its European operations of Match.com to Meetic in return for €5 million (£4.5 million) and a 27% interest in Meetic. So why would the world's largest dating site suddenly decide to sell its profitable European operation? Ross Williams, co-founder of WhiteLabelDating, which powers dating sites for publishers, sees the strategy behind the decision. "There was a clause in the announcement that didn't make many of the headlines, but I think will tell you the direction IAC is going in: Match has the option to buy Meetic in its entirety in about three years. So this is kind of phase one of setting the limits of both businesses."
There's a general feeling in the industry that the Meetic/IAC deal will be just the first of a number of unions in a sector that has hundreds of competitors. Markus Frind, founder and CEO of free dating site Plenty of Fish, believes we'll see more forced marriages in the UK market. "A lot of dating sites have been losing traffic over the last two years and some aren't even profitable; that can't go on forever," he says. But it seems the economic squeeze isn't impacting the bigger players in this sector. eHarmony launched in the UK last October saw an almost 2% increase in the number of pages people viewed on days when the Dow Jones was down 100 points or more. Match.com has also seen a 35% increase in sign-ups since the beginning of the year.
With so many players in the market, differentiating each dating service arguably comes down to how effectively sites match individuals. While approaches differ slightly, no one player seems to be doing anything radically different. Online dating service Parship claims to have been the first in Europe to offer a scientific approach to matchmaking, with its psychometric compatibility test, taken by more than 9 million people to date. eHarmony uses an in-depth 250-question questionnaire based on 35 years of clinical psychology research. Tapping into this trend, Match.com launched its work-in-progress personality test in December 2008.
Another growth opportunity for the buoyant dating market is the 'second' generation of single people, who are gradually putting their trust online. WhiteLabelDating, which runs Fun at Fifty, has seen a "massive increase" in the popularity of its over-50s dating site. Launched in October 2008, user numbers have risen each month, with March 2009 showing visits up by 47% on the previous month.
See all posts on Meetic See all posts on PlentyofFish
See all posts on Dating Direct See all posts on eHarmony
See all posts on Match.com See all posts on Parship
See all posts on WhiteLabelDating
WLD BLOG -- Apr 27 -- According to the New Media
Age report, White Label Dating is now the second
largest paid dating site in the UK,
and the folks at WLD could not be more excited! “With the effective merger of
Meetic and Match this now means that we’re the number 2 paid dating site in the
UK…experiencing greater growth than all of our competitors over the past year
with visitors up 205%. It’s no wonder our partners want to choose the most
successful platform in the industry!” FULL ARTICLE @ WLD BLOG
Online Personals Watch News Summary #1, 4 3 09 from Mark Brooks on Vimeo.
This weeks news covers Skout, eHarmony, IC3, and Mobestar along with my favorite April 1st joke, Steve Wozniak in the new Footloose movie.
NEW MEDIA AGE -- Mar 26 -- Express Newspapers Group has launched a branded online
dating service on The Daily Star site powered by WhiteLabelDating.com
(WLD). The service is targeted at the title's 18-35-year-old male
demographic and will be cross-promoted online and via print. FULL ARTICLE @ NEW MEDIA AGE
OPW -- Mar 1 -- With more
than a third of Americans over 50 being divorced, widowed, separated or
perpetual bachelors, according to a 2006 statistics from the U.S.
Census Bureau, seniors are increasingly flocking to online dating
sites. Members 50 and over comprise 35% of WhileLabelDating.com's
overall member database according to WLD's managing director Steve
Pammenter. No more friend referrals or waiting on barstools in hopes
of
finding the on. “What’s happening now is quite unprecedented,” said Mark Brooks, a
consultant and editor of Onlinepersonalswatch.com. “Experts are teaming
up with
dating sites for better understanding on how personalities are
compatible.” For Paul Falzone, CEO of The Right One, PhD’s and
psychologists lack the personality needed
for this industry. “I want people working for me who love people and
who really want to help them."
According to Jupiter research, the dating industry made
$889m in global net. By 2012, their analysts predict $1.9 billion. FULL ARTICLE @ OPW
See all posts on WhiteLabelDating.com
See all posts on TheRightOne
WLD BLOG -- Feb 26 -- Two partner managers from White Label Dating were nominated as
finalists in two separate categories at the National Sales Awards that
took place on Park Lane in London. Laura Cowell was a finalist in the category of “Account Manager of
the Year” and Gary Taylor in the category of “Young Sales Professional
of the Year”. FULL ARTICLE @ WLD BLOG
PRESS RELEASE -- Feb 24 -- WhiteLabelDating.com (WLD) enables brands to create their own online dating sites and has appointed Rick Jones to the new position of marketing director and board member. Jones has 11 years online marketing experience and joins WLD from Greenbee.com, John Lewis' services arm. Since August 2008 WLD has increased it's traffic by 23.35% and in Jan '09 the revenue was 73.48% higher than in Aug '08 according to Ross Williams, Chairman and founder of WLD. FULL ARTICLE @ REAL WIRE
Mark Brooks: WLD business is going from strength to strength. They also just signed a deal with Independent Newspapers, the leading Irish newspaper group. (Full Disclosure: WLD is a client of Courtland Brooks)
COMPUTERWORLD -- Feb 13 -- The biggest barrier to entry in the online dating business is "inventory". It's a chicken and egg problem - and one reason why newcomers need at least $10m to start their own online dating business and compete against the big guns today, according to Mark Brooks, editor of onlinepersonalswatch.com. Prospective online dating entrepreneurs can buy a plug-and-play online dating site, complete with inventory, through WhiteLabelDating.com, a hosted service provider. "You put your brand onto it, and you market it. We do everything else," says Ross Williams, CEO of the UK-based company, which claims to host 2,500 participating sites and 1m registered users worldwide. FULL ARTICLE @ COMPUTERWORLD
Ross Williams, CEO of Global Personals, believes
members will not cut back. "You get what you pay for," says Mr
Williams. "Users don't want a free-for-all. They want to know that
their potential dates are serious about relationships."
FULL ARTICLE @ FINANCIAL TIMES
COMPUTERWORLD -- Feb 13 -- Dating services don't delete your data. "We have an archiving strategy, but we don't delete," says Joseph Essas, eHarmony's VP technology. Users who return later don't have to fill out the 400-question profile again. TRUE retains the data indefinitely. But PlentyofFish deletes records after six months to a year of inactivity. Though rare, legal actions have been filed in cases ranging from date rape to sexual harassment. Ross Williams, CEO at White Label Dating, says the prospect of offering highly targeted advertising based on demographic, behavioral, psychological and profile data is attractive. "If I have a hair product for men, I don't think there are any places online other than online dating where you can get that [demographic data]." That type of information, Williams says, gives online dating sites a unique competitive opportunity, if they're willing to exploit it.
Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch, sees highly targeted
marketing as inevitable. He says traditional "interruption marketing"
-- rollovers, pop-ups and so forth -- hasn't worked well on Internet
dating sites because users don't pay attention to the ads and thinks
ad-supported sites such as PlentyofFish should leverage profiles to
target users with contextual offers that would be of most interest to
them. "Advertising is an annoyance. The only way it will work [well] is
through the power of the friendly referral," he says. But for now,
PlentyofFish's Frind says the site's current advertising model, which
lets advertisers target users based on basic demographic information,
is working just fine, with a higher click-through rate than social
networking sites and $10 million in ad revenue last year.
FULL ARTICLE @ COMPUTERWORLD
Mark Brooks: Advertising that is highly targeted, timely and relevant is a service to your users. iDating sites have the richest profile info on the net. Eventually we'll make use of this data to serve our users more effectively by 'recommending' interesting lifestyle products to them. (Full Disclosure: POF and White Label Dating are current clients of Courtland Brooks)
See all posts on eHarmony
See all posts on TRUE
See all posts on Plentyoffish
See all posts on WhiteLabelDating
Mark Brooks: This is quite simply the strongest offer I've ever seen for any affiliate program hands down. The motivation is rapid growth in the USA. I'm signing up for a few white labels TODAY! (Full Disclosure: WLD is a client of Courtland Brooks)
See all posts on WhiteLabelDating
This post also appears on FrequentFlirters
WLD BLOG -- Jan 20 -- WhiteLabelDating will be attending iDate Miami as
Platinum Sponsor. They'd like to meet with people who can help them with:
- Growth in USA and Canada
- Partner managers in USA and Canada
- Development support
- Marketing
FULL ARTICLE @ WLD BLOG
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