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

Baihe CEO, Jason Tian - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Mar 31, 2007 -- Baihe.com is China's 'eHarmony.' Baihe received funding last year from Mayfield's partner in China, GSR Ventures. They received $11 million of funding in 2005 after attracting 5 million free members. I interviewed Baihe.com's CEO, Jason Tian. - Mark Brooks

How and why did you start Baihe.com?
When Myspace started there were many companies similar to it in China and none of them had a revenue model. We found most users are actively seeking dating relationships, so we wanted to do something in the dating area and we wanted to be more focused. Then we researched the other online dating models and services and we found the eHarmony personality test based model to be the most effective, so we decided to do something like that. Then we launched Baihe.com in May of 2006. In Chinese, Baihe has three meanings: “one hundred years happy marriage”, “100% match”, “lily flower”.

How is it going so far?
We are the first in China to launch that type of service and we executed correctly so we’re growing very fast.  We have more than 8 million users to date.

It’s a free site, isn’t it?
We have tried to collect membership fees for some time but we found that in China the online payment system is very weak, so out of ten people who want to pay only one can pay successfully. If we charged now it would delay our growth. In China, at this stage, online dating is in its early growth stages. So we decided to offer our service for free, and this should help us to grow fast.

In late 2006, we launched a VIP service offering for busy professionals. We trained love consultants to serve them, to filter and verify identification of potential candidates and to help them in communicating with each other. In Q2, 2007, we are planing to launch more automatic value added services which will generate revenue for Baihe.

How is Baihe.com most different from eHarmony?
eHarmony is a paid service and we offer a free service. We also offer search for the users. eHarmony doesn’t allow their users to search but we allow Baihe users to search. Also, we sponsored top psychological research centers in China to develop a personality test and matching system for Chinese people.

What do you think are the main differences between the Chinese online dating market and the American online dating market?
In the Chinese market, I think the people treat marriage more seriously in general. We have a lot of users that are seeking serious relationships and they are in their early 20’s. For girls, maybe after 25, they are very seriously seeking a husband. I suppose in the U.S., and on eHarmony, users will be about 30 but in China the age will be younger than in the U.S.

The second difference is, the serious online dating market in the U.S. already has 10 years of history. But in China there isn’t a dominant player in the market. We only started to enter the market last year, so we’re in the very early stages in China.

Have you ever considered offering your site in English and reaching out to the American market like Asia Friend Finder?
For us, we think the China market is large enough. Secondly, we don’t think we understand the U.S. market well. Compared with eHarmony, we haven’t found any competitive advantage besides the cost. Maybe our R&D cost is much lower than eHarmony. We can translate our website into English and launch in the U.S. but we don’t know how to market in the U.S.  English is not our priority at least for the next two years.

Is Mobile Internet Dating big in China?
Yes. There are 400 million mobile phone users. This year there are 80 million new users in China, so we also launched a mobile service several months ago and we have around a half million users now. They are very active.

What do you hope to achieve through the end of 2007?
We want to establish our revenue model. It is our top priority for 2007, and to break even by the end of 2007 is our goal. 

The Accidental 'Friend' Finder

BUSINESS 2.0 MAGAZINE -- Mar 30 --  Andrew Conru, a mechanical engineering Stanford PhD, started the first online dating site, WebPersonals, in the early '90s, sold it in 1995, [started again in 1996] and now owns 27 sites under Various Inc. which control twice as much online dating traffic as Match.com.  AdultFriendFinder accounts for 60% of the revenue. Conru's privately held, 450-person company brings in well over $200 million in annual revenue, and averaged 40% annual growth for the past nine years.  With more than 35 million visitors in 2006 and 75,000 new users registering each day, AFF ranks among the 100 most popular sites in the U.S.A. It's become so mainstream that a joke about it appeared in the Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore romantic comedy, Because I Said So. "In Hugh Hefner's day, it was 'It's OK to look at sexuality,'" Conru says. "Now it's OK to be sexual." The average AFF user pays $20 a month; others shell out as much as $50. "The more niche you get, the more value per member," Conru explains. To expand without investment capital, Conru invented a massive affiliate program, in effect outsourcing his marketing to the public. Various now has more than 500,000 affiliates.  This year his goal is to buy six businesses. So far he's done well with the three purchases he's made (Gradfinder.com, Bondage.com, and FastCupid.com). FULL ARTICLE @ CNN

Mark Brooks: Here's the Quantcast numbers for the top adult dating sites...
AdultFriendFinder - 9.6m uniques/month
SexSearch - 3.3m uniques/month 
Mate1 - 2.5 million uniques/month
I worked for Andrew in 2003 and remember Andrew walking into the marketing office one day and declaring part serious, part in jest, 'who can I fire today.' He was on his third marketing team in two years. Six months later one third had quit and the other third had been canned.

Singapore Dating Agencies get Funding

CHANNEL NEWS ASIA -- Mar 30 -- Four dating agencies received endorsements from the Social Development Unit and between $22k and $49k to nudge singletons to get in the mood for love. The founder of "Lunch Actually" wants to broaden her business to provide real names of people dating online and verify their identities.  The other three dating agencies provide services from dating on demand to movie dates. These agencies have all tapped on a million-dollar fund set up by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports to get Singaporeans to date. 

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

Mark Brooks: Cool. They actually came through with grants. I was contacted about this a couple of years back by an official from Singapore who was researching the U.S. dating industry. 

Matchmaking in China

CBN -- Mar 29 -- A social institution from the early days of the Song Dynasty until the Communist Revolution in 1949, the matchmaker lost favor along with arranged marriages and other traditional customs.  Chinese matchmaking has come back into fashion. There are now 20,000 matchmaking industries legally registered with the Chinese government.  According to iResearch, the Chinese matchmaking industry in 2004 grossed ~$11 billion RMB (~$1.3 billion), exceeding the $1 billion matchmaking industry of the U.S. But unlike the U.S. industry, Chinese online dating sites only accounted for 0.3% of the market, but is expected to grow to 4% by next year. Match.com recently purchased Chinese site eDodo.com.

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

TRUE Sues Again

PR NEWSWIRE -- Mar 29 -- TRUE filed a civil lawsuit in Texas against a convicted felon and registered (child) sex offender in Florida, Edward Alvin Hodges, Jr., for misrepresenting his felony status when attempting to access TRUE's members. The felon was prevented from communicating with members due to TRUE's proactive policy that requires background screenings on all of its communicating members.  According to the Department of Justice's Criminal Offender Statistics,  ~67% of convicted criminals released from prison are rearrested for a felony or serious crime. In addition to background and marriage screenings, TRUE has developed a member safety program, led by former Dallas police chief William Rathburn, that further protects members each day by identifying and removing scammers and other fraudsters; reviewing e-mails, profiles and photos; and monitoring chat room discussions. TRUE also employs a number of private investigators and former policemen from major cities around the country who lend their expertise in support of TRUE's prosecution efforts.

Chemistry.com Matching

OPW -- Hand size matters, according to Helen Fisher at Chemistry.com. Apparently the difference in finger length makes a difference. Your comments please...

Oodle Report

PRESS RELEASE -- Mar 28 -- A look at more than 1.4 million singles on Oodle.com showed that 60% of singles do not reveal whether they have or want children and 55% do not specify if they smoke.  For fear that they will appear less desirable! However, data from a recent survey on Engage.com proves this theory wrong. In fact, 88% of those surveyed said they were open to the idea of dating people with children and 63% would consider dating smokers. Mom was right…"honesty is the best policy." Oodle also found Chicago, Boston, and Miami are the best bets for Catholic singles while Miami, New York and L.A. are best for finding Jewish mates. If you don't drink or smoke, the best place to find a mate is Salt Lake City. More than half the over 40 online dating population has been married before.

Mark Brooks: Oodle aggregates profiles from the likes of Engage.com, PlentyofFish and others. Sites can pay to have their profiles featured in order to get more click throughs. Lycos tried something similar a couple of years back but the program failed because it required sites to send a flat file, and pay on a cost per reg basis...and Lycos just didn't send enough leads to be that worthwhile in the end.

Shaadi SEAL

SHAADI.COM -- Mar 28 -- Shaadi offers members the option of verifying their own identities. "SEAL is short for Screened, Examined & Attested Label. If your profile has a Shaadi SEAL, it means that Shaadi has screened your profile and also obtained documentary proof of: Name, Photo, Age, Residential Address, Telephone Number, Email Address, Marital Status if Divorced/Annulled. View sample Shaadi SEAL profile. It's FREE! Send us documents supporting key data elements in your profile. You can upload scanned copies of the documents or post them. We will examine the data and attest them against the documents. If all your data are found in order, you will be the proud owner of a Shaadi SEAL." This is about as simple as it gets. It's probably not too difficult to forge documents, but then again, it's better than nothing. The cost for providing this service is minimal. ConfirmID.com is FriendFinder's effort to do the same.  Unfortunately, even though it was bundled with the Gold membership, very few people opt to send in their documents.

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

Online Dating Video

OPW -- Mar 28 -- For a little comic relief, try watching Virginia Vitzhum's cute "I Love You, Let's Meet" video accompaniment to her book, I love You, Let's Meet: Adventures in Online Dating. 

Gay Dating Site Rankings

MEDIA LIFE -- Mar 27 -- U.S. sites include Gay.com, Gaydar and Manhunt. Gay.com has British, French, Italian and Latin American operations, while ManHunt recently rolled out across Europe. Gaydar began in London and is now worldwide. Gay sites continue to see strong growth in their U.S. audiences, 18% YOY for February 2007 (Hitwise). The real opportunities are overseas. Domestically, visitors to gay sites spend nearly twice as much time per visit, 21 minutes, versus 11 minutes spent on all web sites (Hitwise). Traffic to gay sites is 82% male. The largest age group is 35-44s, 29% of visits, slightly older than the general internet population.  Out In America claims 7 million uniques a month. Gay.com, part of PlanetOut, claims 5 million uniques. 9% of visitors to the gay and lesbian category were at MySpace before they went to a gay and lesbian site, according to Hitwise.

Gay site traffic - Share of Visits - w/e 3/17/07
1. Adam4Adam - 17.90%
2. ManHunt.net - 16.78%
3. Gay.com - 16.43%
4. Gay.com Personals - 9.51%
5. Out Personals - 8.60%
6. Downelink.com - 5.75%
7. Guys4men - 2.81%
8. World Gay Men - 1.56%
9. Dlist.com - 1.35%
10. BoysGo.com - 1.30%

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

Mark Brooks: Patrick Perrine, CEO of MyPartnerPerfect, is doing some interesting work in the field of gay matchmaking and gay personality profiling.

Compete.com February Rankings

OPW -- Mar 26 -- Since November 2006, Match.com moved up from 4th place to take first spot in February 2007 with 19.6 million user logins, pushing Y! Personals, Singlesnet, eHarmony and PlentyofFish down one spot. BlackPeopleMeet and Manhunt.net enter the top 10 at #7 and #9 respectively. 

Compete.com also provided OPW with data for the average visits per month for February 2007. 

1. Manhunt.com - 13.37
2. PlentyofFish - 10.46
3. BlackPeopleMeet - 7.94
4. Gay.com - 7.15
5. Cupid.com - 6.88

Check Date's Background Online

WASHINGTON POST -- Mar 25 -- Kimberly Hall was twice betrayed by men she met dating online. Both turned out to be married. So she started doing background checks on her dates using Intelius.com. Singles now draw on a growing arsenal of security and research tools - from services that verify identity and background to companies that provide temporary phone numbers as a barrier to stalkers. Few dating sites conduct their own background checks on members and only one seeks to verify marital status. 31% of American adults say they know someone who has used a dating Web site, and nearly 60% of Internet users said they think a lot of online daters lie about their marital status, (Pew Internet & American Life Project study, 2006). At True.com 2% of applicants are rejected because they are convicted felons. 3% flunk because they are married. Trufina verifies age, identity and address. Jangl offers free temporary phone numbers for eBay customers and dating singles. Tossable Digits offers a similar service. Intelius provides name, address, age, marital record and criminal background check.

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

Mark Brooks: HonestyOnline.com also offers background checks, tailored to the needs of online dating sites.   Jangl and Vumber.com provide two way anonymous calling services.

Catching Up With Latinos Online

MEDIA POST -- Mar 26 -- Latinos are one of the fastest-growing demographics online. Sites like QuePasa.com and MiGente.com remain popular. Enter new sites like Barrio305.com and Voy TV. See article summary @ FrequentFlirters.com - for dating affiliates and marketers.

Onlinebootycall.com Orders Boat Load of Condoms

PR NEWSWIRE -- Mar 26 -- The boat will be docking at Lake Havasu, AZ, where 12,000 OBC-branded condoms will be distributed free to college students during Spring break, March 28 through April 1, 2007. "This is one boat whose cargo, we hope, won't leak," said Moses Brown, founder of onlinebootycall.com.

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

Mark Brooks: Moses knows his niche. I've not seen OBC P.R. get picked up in the press, but it makes for a fun read, and it gets the members talking. The best kind of P.R. works in tandem with word-of-mouth marketing and advertising. The recent Match.com advertising is a good example. Their black and white TV ads of real Match.com members gets people talking, is different enough to be newsworthy, and is good advertising. 

No-risk Photo Retouching

PRESS RELEASE -- Mar 26 -- Urirresistible offers watermarked, professionally photo-edited photographs, sized and cropped for dating sites. Satisfied daters pay $15 and the watermark is removed.