OPW - Jun 17 - The 2010 Internet Dating Conference in Los Angeles kicked off with an open panel discussion led by Mark Brooks. Marc Porcelli from Epic Advertising, Brad Boyd from SetforMarriage.com, Dan Winchester from FreeDating.co.uk, and Bill Cloutier from Cupid.com were the panel participants. Mark Brooks' opening question was: SetforMarriage is new to the online dating industry, where should they put their money first? According to Marc Porcelli, new sites should start with search engines, such as Google, and other large traffic sources like Facebook. He added that it is important to have the landing page optimized prior to driving traffic. Dan Winchester agreed that Google was the first place to start, along with building organic SEO and listings. Bill Cloutier suggested an alternate approach for SetforMarriage: target the Christian search engines for traffic and approach other Christian sites and work out traffic trading deals. Bill believes the Google space is too competitive for a startup to make any headway without significant expense.
Marc Lesnick, iDate organizer, asked the panel if business was growing or declining and where the emerging markets are. Dan Winchester and Marc Porcelli believe South Africa and Australia are the fastest growing markets. The overall consensus of the pane was that business continues to grow as a whole, however, the industry needs to be more innovative to really drive impressive growth in the market.
