THE DAILY TELEGRAPH - May 20 - EasyDate is looking to expand internationally, raise funds and launch a new site that will allow singles to browse all the available online dating toos. "It'll be a bit like a comparison site", said Bill Dobbie, chairman and founder of EasyDate. "Canoodle is one of our R&D experiments. Users would key in their requirements and all dating sites would be searched to help find that ideal companion. EasyDate was formed in 2005 when Dobbie teamed up with software writer Max Plyakov and has been growing steadily ever since. "Unlike our competition such as Match.com and DatingDirect, we operate a portfolio of sites and we are a niche operator", says Dobbie. "EasyDate can launch both new niche sites itself or, as a white-label site provider, with a partner." Alongside the niche and comparison site approach comes global growth. EasyDate's international expansion began last year. "We are now in all the English-speaking countries and beginning to look at Spanish-speaking and others such as Sweden, Netherlands and Thailand". He plans to launch in Brazil this year. EasyDate sees 155,000 a month income from its Australian site. FULL ARTICLE @ TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
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The challenge for a dating comparison site (as with any business) is to provide the public with what they want & need, not with what the dating industry think they might want. With AllTheDates.com, we have been experimenting with this “aggregation” concept for a couple of years now, always with the user in mind, and have learned three key things:
Members expect their profiles to remain private
People join a dating site expecting it to be a private environment. They generally don’t want their details to appear on other – aggregator - sites and rightly see that as a breach of their privacy. OK, you can point them to your Ts & Cs, but it doesn’t build trust with the dating site they’ve joined or the industry as a whole.
So the idea of presenting people with thousands of profiles like you would houses, insurance products or cheap flights just won’t fly (pardon the pun) in our view. Aside from which, our research so far has shown that people don’t choose a dating sites like they do a flight. More work is needed to understand how people choose a site, what’s important to them in that decision-making process, and then giving them the service that helps them. Long lists of photos won’t cut it.
A comparison site should be open and independent
The dating industry has exploded in recent years, and there are literally hundreds of dating sites out there. People are confused about which dating site they should join, and many view the industry with distrust. They can and will see through services which are not totally independent, and they have the right to an impartial, independent view on which dating sites are potentially best for them. A comparison site with a vested interest is not a true comparison site, and won’t build trust and – therefore – long-term success within the marketplace.
It should compare more than just profiles
Who owns the site in question? What is its policy around customer services? How does it deal with scammers? What is its returns policy? What were other people’s experiences while they were members? What are its core values, and does the senior management buy into those values? How is your personal data stored, and what is the company’s policy on sharing that data?
These (and many more) are all valid questions that the potential member has a right to understand, compare and contrast, to ensure that they choose the best dating site for them. Unbiassed answers to them should be incorporated into the comparison site.
If the dating comparison site gets these 3 points right, they will succeed. And along the way, they will help build one thing that the industry has struggled with since its inception - trust.
We don’t claim (by any means) to have all these issues sorted out, but these are the goals we have in mind, and we continue to work towards them.
Tim Taylor
AllTheDates.com
Posted by: Tim Taylor | May 26, 2010 at 08:22 AM