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18 – 34 Years Old
HotorNot – 50% between 18 – 34 years old, 35% older than 34. HotorNot was doing around $2.5M a year on virtual goods.
12 – 17 Years Old
Gaia Online – 60% between 12 – 17 years old. Gaia has reported that it makes $12M a year in virtual goods.
The full article was originally published at Viximo Blog, but is no longer available.
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BUSINESS WIRE -- July 22 -- iovation, provider of the world’s first
device reputation service for preventing online fraud and abuse, has
provided over two billion reputation checks for its customers. These
checks have resulted in the identification of over 140M unique device
reputations, a growth of ~500% from one year ago. iovation uses device
fingerprinting to identify unique devices and establish device
reputations that are based on each device’s history of fraud or abuse. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WIRE
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
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BE2 BLOG -- July 21 -- be2 Singapore was launched in 2008 and has grown to 42k members. Due to the continued success of be2 in Singapore, be2 has launched its service in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The full article was originally published at be2 blog, but is no longer available.
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ABC4NEWS -- July 20 -- About 20% of couples meet online. The other more traditional ways include meeting through friends, at school and at work. Dr. Gonzaga is a senior research scientist at eHarmony whose life career is to study the success of online dating. He goes as far as to say he thinks online dating users will have a lower divorce rate in the future than those who meet through other means. Dr. Gonzaga says eHarmony manages to set up 236 marriages a day simply because the survey matches ‘like with like.’ Contrary to the popular adage, the love doctor says, “opposites ‘do’ attract…but then, they attack.”
The full article was originally published at ABC4News, but is no longer available.
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The full article was originally published at The Wip, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Those that are single and never married, tend to prefer to communicate with those that are similar and never married. This is true in the USA, and more true in India.
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GUARDIAN.CO.UK -- June 28 -- Ten years ago, Henry Badenhorst and his partner Gary Frish helped a friend find a date online. They put him on Excite, a search engine, which had a dating section. But it took two weeks for him to get a response. The idea for Gaydar was born. "Gaydar started as something we did on the side," says Badenhorst. "I placed some ads in Boyz, which drew in a few people, and slowly it grew. The 1st year we had several thousand, the 2nd year was 75k and then suddenly, in the third year, in 2001-02, there were ~220k." 5 million people around the world subscribe, spending on average more than an hour on the site with each visit, and pay £5/month subscription, with the rest of the company's revenue coming from advertising. By 2004 the website had a new sibling: GaydarRadio which now has 1.6m listeners. Badenhorst met fellow South African Gary Frisch in 1991. "I always make jokes that he was the one-night stand that never went away." On Feb 10th, 2007, Frisch did finally go away. He jumped off the 8th-floor balcony of his Battersea home. Badenhorst says he wants to cut down his hours, and admits that now, with Frisch gone, his passion isn't what it was. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK
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NY TIMES -- July 17 -- Professor Helen Fisher, of Chemistry.com, studied the neural chemistry of people in love. She zeroes in on six specific chemicals, which are linked to certain traits. Those with a preponderance of dopamine and norepinephrine she named “explorers,” those with serotonin are “builders,” those with testosterone are “directors” and those with estrogen and oxytocin are “negotiators.” The 56-question test that Fisher has developed for Chemistry.com helps identify who is a builder, an explorer and so on. She has also studied 28,000 people and found that those who are explorers tend to pick explorers, builders tend to choose builders, while directors and negotiators often select each other. James Houran, a relationship psychologist who has developed “compatibility matching tools” for Plentyoffish.com, a free dating site, said his work indicated that people who met someone through the site were more satisfied in their relationships than those who met in other ways. GenePartner scientists developed a formula that successfully determined genetic compatibility. After receiving the DNA results users can hunt for their genetic soul mate on Genepartner.com. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES
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WASHINGTON POST -- July 19 -- By 2007, the over-50 set had become the fastest-growing group of subscribers for online dating companies, and double-digit growth has continued since, according to industry watchers. Pepper Schwartz, an adviser to Perfectmatch.com, cheers the trend. If a person in their 60s or 70s lost a spouse 20 years ago, "the chances of pairing again were small, because the avenues to meet new people were limited mostly to churches, senior centers and friends of friends. Today single seniors can go online and be opened up to thousands of options." FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
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OPW INTERVIEW -- July 20 -- Stephen Stokols is the CEO and Founder of WooMe.com, a next generation dating site that offers webcam based speeddating online. Since starting he’s provided 15 million live introductions, has 2 million users and ~10,000 new users sign up each day. WooMe has 4 million visitors / month and 3000 new videos are rendered on WooMe.tv each day. - Mark Brooks
What is the founding story?
WooMe was started about 2 years ago. The idea came from my sister. She and her friends had been out speed dating and they came back home and were talking about how fun speed dating was and how cool it would be if it was online. So that is where the initial idea came into play.
I had been working with a lot of voice and video technologies in the telecom arena and had been looking for a killer application that would leverage in browser voice and video the way YouTube has leveraged in browser video streaming and the two came together. At that point we started working and less than 2 years later we exploded and we’re here today.
Can you walk us through the user experience? What happens when you join WooMe?
A user hits the site and can either browser profiles, watch real live video of others, or start meeting people live. To partake in live introductions, There are tens of thousands of user generated speed dating sessions starting every minute. Users can either create their own session around any interest they want or they can browse existing sessions.
Once the session starts, they will talk to 3 people one-on-one via voice and video for a minute each. At the end of the session they can say who they want to add as a friend and who they don’t. If both parties want to add each other as a friend then it’s a match and they can then message and/or talk with no time limits.
This isn’t an entirely new concept because there are a couple of companies that have been doing this for a while. There is a company called Webdate that has been around and offering webcam-based dating online. Then Match.com tried it in 2004. What do you think that you’ve got right with WooMe that has helped it grow and what perhaps they didn’t get right?
The technology evolved over the last few years to the point where you can offer high quality video communication without a download. So when companies like Match tried this years ago, it required a client download making for a very clunky user experience. We have also broadened the concept to include casual introductions around all topics while letting users post their meetings on WooMe.tv as well. Also, we were fortunate enough to come out and launch in Techcrunch40 and get a bit of PR around the launch, generate some noise and build a critical mass.
This concept really does not work unless you have a couple of thousand users online at the same time. It is kind of like a bar. If you walk into a bar and it’s empty, you leave.
How are you different from SpeedDate?
SpeedDate came out with a different type of product. They’ve gone down the Facebook direction, so at this point they’re solely a Facebook app company and focused on a very narrow set of functionality.
What are your plans for mobile dating? Do you think you’ll ever include location based services?
Hopefully that’s where things will go. Video cameras are less ubiquitous in the mobile world so we’ll have to down play the video element and play up chat and voice. We’ll allow people to message each other and be able to talk live via the mobile app and from there you raise a good point around location based service. Getting mass on the location services is the key to its success. If you have zero people within 5 miles it is not nearly as interesting as having 300 people within 5 miles of you.
Are there any particular user behaviors that really surprised you?
We learned that males are far more comfortable than females when it comes to webcam. 95% of males on our site have cameras; whereas maybe 55 or 60% of females have cameras.
How do you police the community? Is it simply user flagging?
It is a huge challenge. The bigger we get the more policing is required. In the early days we did it manually with a couple of people who were on the site. We recently had to put in some automated tools. It is a huge issue trying to keep the site clean, especially when you introduce cams; just the word cam attracts a certain subset of people that we don’t want on the site.
People on the site can block users and if somebody gets blocked twice, that persons will be suspended. Also, if we see somebody scamming people with a bunch of friend requests or we see porn photos, for example, we automatically ban those users.
Do you have any plans of licensing out the technology to other dating sites or other sites at all?
Yeah, we have an API called “WooMe Anywhere” where you can leverage our technology on an external platform. We are now in the implementation phase with a couple of sites globally that will use it. So on a profile, there will be a button that says “meet me now” and if you hit that button you can have a 1 to 3 minute live introduction with that user. That is something we’ll do more aggressively with the domestic dating sites and other partners in the near future.
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PRESS RELEASE -- July 17 -- Pre-date agreements have become more commonplace in recent years. While not legally binding documents, these agreements do put in writing the expectations people have of the other person going into the date, during the date and in the aftermath. Paul A. Falzone, CEO of The Right One and Together Dating said: "A pre-date contract acts like a checklist for yourself to make sure you’re in a good place to begin a relationship.” Things in the agreement include: punctuality, attire, terms of discussion, physical contact, alcoholic intake, paying the bill, honest post date feedback. FULL ARTICLE @ PR LOG
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TECHNOLOGY REVIEW -- July 17 -- A study published last month in the
journal Cyberpsychology and Behavior, shows that having more search
results leads to a less careful partner choice. A study from Michael
Norton, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School found that
the average date-seeker typically spends nearly 12 hours a week
searching online and emailing for a payoff of less than two hours of
offline dating. Norton says that date seekers "evaluate each person
only superficially, never investing the time and energy to explore
whether a match might work." FULL ARTICLE @ TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
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BUSINESS WIRE -- July 16 -- BabesandBillionaires.com, formerly an exclusive, invitation-only club that privately matched beautiful women with wealthy men, has opened their dating site to the public. Colleen Shannon, Playboy Magazine’s 50th Anniversary Playmate will be making media and public appearances around the country promoting BabesandBillionaires.com. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WIRE
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MARKETWIRE -- July 16 -- A dating site wishing to offer its members the ability to talk, SMS and leave voice messages for prospective partners, while keeping their personal details private, can do it by connecting into JAJAH's Platform for Dating. The JAJAH Platform for Dating has been implemented by a number of dating sites, including Match.com and eHarmony.
The full article was originally published at Earth Times, but is no longer available.
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WASHINGTON POST -- July 15 -- Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian phenom of the 2008 presidential campaign, is the inspiration behind a new online dating site called Ron Paul Singles. "We put the LOVE in Revolution," the Web site proclaims. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
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VIXIMO -- July 14 -- The Virtual Goods industry is growing extremely quickly. Some estimate the size of the industry to reach $5.5 billion globally this year. Virtual goods are sold in four primary arenas; Social Networks, Online Dating Sites, Games and Virtual Worlds. To understand virtual goods we need to understand what drives this value system:
- Virtual goods help users stand out from the crowd - Paying for avatar clothing, hair styles, and other accessories is natural to ensure you establish a visual identity that represents you. Users who distinguish themselves more on dating sites are getting more dates.
- Virtual goods help users express themselves - MySpace allows users to customize their profile pages to express their personal style and interests. This feature is so popular it is widely regarded as one of a few reasons why MySpace was so successful in gaining traction.
- Virtual Goods help users to gain an advantage - Users can purchase a “featured spot” in search results to increase exposure to the site’s audience and thus increase their chances of being noticed by a potential mate.
The full article was originally published at Viximo Blog, but is no longer available.
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