Online Personals Watch: News on the Online Dating Industry and Business

Social Network LiveJournal Offers Internet Telephony

INTERNET WEEK -- Oct 19 -- LiveJournal (10 million users) on Tuesday rolled out Internet telephony and instant messaging services from SIPphone as a free download. The Gizmo Project for provides PC-to-PC calls, as well as calls to landline and mobile phones.

The full article was originally published at Internet Week, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: Internet dating companies must consider telephony options now. The time is ripe.  Technology is available. Users are sophisticated enough to handle it. Users want connections. Real world connections. Women like to gage a guy by the sound of his voice and what he has to say. Let's give the ladies what they want. Voice connections before the coffee date.

Fastest Growing Sites by Country

PARADIGM SHIFT BLOG -- Oct 19 -- PlentyofFish growth. Right now Alexa Radar is showing the top fastest moving sites and a break down of sites traffic per Country.

The full article was originally published at Paradigm Shift, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: Very cool. The graph shows PlentyofFish as the 2nd fastest growing site in Canada.  Myspace is the 2nd fastest growing site in the USA. Love21cn.com shows up as the fastest growing site in China.

Dating Websites Can Miss Criminals

KUTV -- Oct 18 -- TRUE promises safer relationships through background checks but admits that sex offenders and convicted felons can still make their way into the site. Convicted child molester and registered sex offendor, Robert Wells, registered on the site. “If we find [a member has] a felony conviction, we're going to turn [them] in for wire fraud,” said CEO Herb Vest. TRUE uses a criminal screening company called "Rapsheets," which has  ~94% of U.S. felony convictions,” said Vest.
He says Wells lives in a country that does not provide criminal data to certain companies. A quick search on the government-funded national sex offender registry - and we found Robert Wells. Vest says the sex offender registry isn't commercially feasible to use. Rapsheets performs thousands of background checks instantaneously. “There's no database, there's nothing I could do to possibly get all of the convicted felons,” said Vest. TRUE will debut a new, more thorough data provider early next year which should nab 96% of criminals.

Mark Brooks: TRUE is doing the best it can with the services currently available. If other major dating sites had offered background checks perhaps the rate of improvement would have been faster.  Rapsheets offers affordable, value background checks. They're not 100%, but they're better than nothing. Other, more thorough, services exist but are cost prohibitive. The arguments from other sites against bg checks goes as follows. We don't offer bg checks because: 1. They're way short of being foolproof (and fairly pricey), 2. Most felony charges are talked down to misdemeanors and misdemeanors are way more difficult to search for, 3. Users can lie about their identity which renders the background checks useless. TRUE states on their home page "If you are a convicted criminal, be aware that you could be guilty of fraud and subject to civil and criminal penalties."  That's more compelling.  That's where the teeth are in TRUE safety offerings.

fyi, TRUE's business development team made their background checking system available to other dating sites several months ago. Noone has taken them up on it yet. Enabling their system on other dating sites would undermine their differentiation but proves they are more committed to the cause of safety than they are given credit for. Checks would be ~$5 each using the Rapsheet system.

Internet Service that Breaks Up for You

DATING GAMES -- Oct 17 -- uBreakup.com does the dirty work for you! Record your message and schedule it to arrive on his/her phone.

The full article was originally published at Dating Games, but is no longer available.

Internet User Admits 'web-rage'

BBC NEWS -- Oct 17 -- An internet user has been found guilty of what police said was Britain's first "web-rage" attack. The pair met in an internet chatroom called Islam 10 (Yahoo). Both had an interest in the Muslim faith but exchanges soured after Gibbons accused Mr Jones of spreading rumours about him. Gibbons traced Jones to his home using personal details about himself that he had put online. A fight broke out. Essex Police said the case demonstrates the importance of protecting one's identity on the internet.

The full article was originally published at BBC News, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: TRUE has been raising awareness of the risks associated with internet dating. MySpace has been in the news constantly on the subject. The internet is still safer than meeting people randomly in the real world. Users should, however, not share contact information such as address and telephone numbers. I'm working on Vumber and we'll release a simple 'throw away number' telephone service for singles at the internet dating convention in January. 

New Dating Reality Television Show From Fox

CORANTE -- Oct 17 -- My Dating Place, a local half-hour strip, will be tested on Fox-owned MyNetworkTV affiliate KUTP Phoenix starting late this year or early 2007. Would-be daters can apply on the station's Website.

The full article was originally published at Corante, but is no longer available.

Teen Using MySpace to Lure Bands to L.A.

BBSPOT -- Oct 18 -- A thirteen-year-old girl posing as a record executive on MySpace has lured several bands to Los Angeles with promises of a record contract.  One record executive said, "I'm not surprised. Most of these bands are as dumb as dirt." FULL ARTICLE @ BBSPOT

NeoConnections Sketch

OPW -- Oct 18 -- Here's a daft sketch from 'Real Time with Bill Maher' that explores a dating website for neoconservatives entitled NeoConnections.com. SEE VIDEO @ YOUTUBE

News Sources

OPW -- Oct 18 -- Every morning I personally review all of the following 80 blogs (thank you Google Reader) for the top internet dating and social networking stories. The relevant core intelligence from Yahoo News and these blogs is then added to Online Personals Watch, Mobile Dating Watch and Frequent Flirters for you to digest. Sign up for the daily emails if you really want to stay on top of the online personals industry.

Affiliate Blog, Affiliate Blog by Shawn Collins, Affiliate Blog UK, Affiliate Classroom Blog, Affiliate Summit Blog, Alex Schultz: APIs, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, apophenia, BGSL, Clicks2Customers, CPAEmpire.com Blog, Dating Dames, digg, Ensight, eWhisper.net, Fast Company Now, Find-a-Sweetheart Blog, Geekfishing Blog, GigaOM, Google Blogoscoped, Goyami, how to get the guy, Ideas are Worthless Unless Acted Upon, Inside AdWords, Internet Dating Dirt, Janus Friis, JenSense - Making Sense of Contextual Advertising, John Battelle's Searchblog, kottke.org, Many-to-Many, MarketingVOX, Mathew Ingram, Matt Cutts: Gadgets Google and SEO,  Media Buyer Planner, /Message, Micro Persuasion, MobileCrunch, Netimperative Marketing, Netimperative Media, Netimperative Mobile, Netimperative News and Analysis, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Online Dating Insider, Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed, People Search News, PPC Expert & SEO Strategist Blog by Gordon Choi, Read/WriteWeb, Redeye VC, Release1.0, ReveNews, Ross Mayfield's Weblog, SCI FI Tech, Scobleizer, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch Blog, SearchQuant, SearchViews, SEO by the SEA, Sifry's Alerts, Signal vs. Noise, SiliconBeat, Smart Mobs, Startup Review, Super Affiliate Marketing Blog, TechCrunch, Techmeme, The Blogging Times, The Dating Weblog, The Internet Dating Guide, The Jeff Pulver Blog, The Paradigm Shift, The Social Networking Weblog, The Social Software Weblog, the vc in me...., Thought Flickr's, Valleywag, VentureBlog, Vinny Lingham's Blog, Web Publishing Blog, Website Publisher Blog

There seems to be at least twenty times more stories on social networking than internet dating these days.  Should I break out social networking onto a different blog, or are you happy combining the news in one place, on OPW? - Mark Brooks

PlentyofFish on Canadian News TV

GLOBAL NATIONAL -- Oct 18 -- Last year 12% of newlyweds in the U.S. met through the Internet. So we can assume a similar number of Canadians did. Clearly there are plenty of fish available out there and tonight we're profiling one of the biggest nets that catches them. She was HorseLady3, a small town B.C. girl. He was HappyDaddy, a Vancouver chef whose search for love took him on the Internet. "I needed an escape because the separation from my marriage was kind of hard." It wasn't long before the two found each other. "We hit it off and we haven't looked back since." Markus Frind is the Vancouver web guru who just happens to be one of the world's biggest matchmakers. His site, Plentyoffish.com brought together HorseLady3 and HappyDaddy and thousands of other couples and he runs it all from his tiny Vancouver office. "I am the largest website run by one person. I'm doing about 600 million pages a month." His website is part of a new wave of companies making money on content generated not by them, but by users. The biggest example is YouTube, the online video site that Google recently bought for $1.65 billion. Like YouTube, Frind's site is free to use and is bringing in a heap of cash. [Google Adsense] ads make him more then $10,000 a day. "The tellers always look at me real funny. They're like are you some kind of criminal? Why do you come in with a $900,000 check? I suppose if I went paid, this site could make hundreds of millions but it just wouldn't be fun anymore and I would have to hire people and I don't know, I just like what I'm doing right now."  FULL VIDEO @ GLOBAL NATIONAL (via YOU TUBE)

Mark Brooks: This story gives some insight on Markus. Every American dreams of making big bucks working on their own terms, from home. Markus is the poster boy for the internet fringe of one-man-band success stories. This fringe is growing but it's a rarity to see them pop their heads up. He's ranked #1 in Canada on Alexa, and #6 in the Hitwise USA rankings of internet dating sites. Markus said in this interview, " I am the largest website run by one person." That's a lot of mental ownership. He's gunning to be the top internet dating site in the U.S.A. Your comments please.

Former Facebook Engineer Spills Beans

GIGA OM BLOG -- Oct 17 -- Baloun is no master wordsmith, and he errs on the side of over-moralizing, but not without giving valuable glimpses into the inklings of greatness he felt while working as an engineer at Facebook2 from 2005 to 2006. The PDF book is $9 at fbbook.com. FULL ARTICLE @ GIGA OM BLOG

Mark Brooks: Looks like the site is down. Must be popular. If you pick up a copy, please post comments here.

Web Numbers: What's Real?

BUSINESS WEEK -- Oct 17 -- Seth Sternberg dropped out of Stanford Business School to work full-time on instant messaging service, Meebo. Today Meebo is going gangbusters with almost a million users every day. There's just one hitch.  They have a hard time proving the site is as popular as they say it is. comScore says European competitor eBuddy.com is four times as big but Alexa shows Meebo is bigger. Which is true? Probably neither.  Sternberg's best guess is that the two rivals are about the same size. The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web. Valuations for startups such as Facebook Inc. and YouTube Inc. appear to be doubling every few months, but those numbers are based on traffic figures that could be misleading. Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore recruit Web surfers to record their mouse clicks and argue that there are many reasons not to just count the clicks off a Web site's server logs. comScore points out that servers would count pop-up ads as a page view if the tracking service didn't filter them out. Alexa and Hitwise are muscling onto the scene with alternatives. Some say Alexa favors early adopters and techies and the opposite complaint is made about comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings.

The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: I learned about comScore and Nielsen//Netratings in September 2003 while working at FriendFinder. I bought a month of numbers from comScore for $5500 and they did a custom 'roll up' of FriendFinder properties to show that the FriendFinder network of 15 sites (at the time, now they have 20+ sites) was bigger than other online personals leaders. Nielsen were kind enough to show me their numbers to compare...and the difference was astonishing. Nielsen reported 8x less uniques. All their numbers for unique visitors were way off comScore numbers. A lot has happened in the last three years and comScore and Nielsen//Netratings have dramatically expanded their panels and extended their services, however, take a look at the left bar for the USA online personals top sites. Hitwise/comScore/Nielsen still disagree.  They probably always will. It's best to make a list of what intelligence you most want, call all three services (comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen) and choose the one that delivers what you require, in a timely manner, at the best rate, ...but take the intelligence with a pinch of salt. If you're going to base major business decisions on the information they feed you, have a conversation with your gut, then call around and try and find another verifying source. Some of the services offer a layer of analysis that can help you come to better conclusions. Talk to the analysts at the service you use, and ask for confidence levels in mission critical data. At the top of your 'must have' list should be source/loss info for your competitors and the keywords they're bidding on. Be prepared to sift through a lot of data to find the golden nuggets. Also, bear in mind, if you want to quote numbers or rankings in your press releases, you should be a paying subscriber to the appropriate service, or your numbers might not look good the following month ;-) Also, the press generally regard it as 'not cool' if they call up comScore/Hitwise/Nielsen to verify numbers and the analyst they talk to reveals you used the numbers without their sign off.

Sequoia Reportedly Invests in SF Blog for Women

VENTURE BEAT BLOG -- Oct 16 -- Michael Moritz, venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital, and backer of Google and Yahoo, is apparently funding a blog company called Sugar Publishing (1.5 million uniques), which runs four popular blogs, including flagship PopSugar, that caters to young, hip women. FULL ARTICLE @ VENTURE BEAT BLOG

Mark Brooks: Hey, internet dating bus dev and trafficing managers...there's a nice target for you. The CEO is Brian Sugar. Properties include popsugar, fabsugar, and dearsugar. Ad rack rates run $4-$10 CPM  Ick! Try halving that for a decent 90 day ROI. My guess is you'd see ~10% 30 day ROI at the rack rates (with targeted, quality creatives) but you'd gain a valuable audience. Email contact is advertising@sugarpublishing.com. 

Viacom Buys Quizilla (Female Teens Social Network)

YAHOO NEWS -- Oct 16 -- Viacom's MTV Networks is buying Quizilla.com, a top five community for female teenagers to create and share quizzes, fictions, poetry and other content. Quizilla was started in 2002 and draws 4.7 million uniques (comScore) around the world.  In August, MTVN bought Shockwave.com and AddingtingGames.com. In September, Nickelodeon launched ParentsConnect.com.

Mark Brooks: Users first joined social networks (Friendster) to check out their friends buddy lists. But they needed something more. MySpace beat Friendster because of their connection with music. WAYN.com is doing well (and charging membership) by allowing users to express their travel interests. Quizilla is perfect for MTV, and I bet they got a good deal on this slightly 'off the radar' site. They have mopped up a sizable batch of market key influencers.  Social networking sites will niche out around demographic targets, interests and we could still see a technology leader emerge with some next generation compelling functionality. I'm still waiting for the 'iPod' of social networks.

Media Titans Pressure YouTube Over Copyrights

WSJ -- Oct 14 -- A number of major media companies have banded together to explore the legal implications of the video site's unauthorized use of copyright material. YouTube contends that it hasn't run afoul of copyright laws, because it immediately removes clips when rights holders complain. YouTube could be liable for $150,000 per unauthorized video. Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons made ominous hints about what course he would pursue if YouTube doesn't agree to a deal. Google has partnerships and ownership stakes in a number of media companies which could ease negotiations. So far, YouTube has struck deals with NBC Universal, CBS Corp. and with most of the major music companies and is building a system that would help automate identification of videos containing copyright material, and share af revenue with content owners.  FULL ARTICLE @ WALL STREET JOURNAL

Mark Brooks: Google must have been very confident in it's deal making abilities to make the YouTube deal. Google has charted a course towards offline media advertising, which would make them both a friend and foe of the companies they will need to appease over the copyright infringements. Watch this space.