MIXERGY - Sep 25 - Ross Williams is the founder and CEO of Global Personals, the company behind WhiteLabelDating.com.
Q: How many active members do you have now?
A: ~4M that are spread to the UK, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and growing to the U. S. at the moment.
Q: Could you give me an example of one company that launched using your service?
A: We work with media publishers and entrepreneurs. So, on the media side we do the dating site for “FHM Magazine,” “Maxim,” “Men’s Health,” “Cosmopolitan,” and others. On the entrepreneurs side is PlentyMoreFish.com for example.
Q: Do you feel comfortable revealing your revenues?
A: We’re doing about 20M pounds revenue/year.
Q: What percentage do you own?
A: 70%.
Q: One of the reasons that companies work with you is because it’s hard to get the first few users. You did that, though. How were you able to do it in the early days?
A: We were quite lucky with our timing.
Q: Where did you get the idea to do this?
A: You see it in other industries. So, sometimes I will describe it very much as making the Tesco corn flakes or the Wal-Mart flakes. It’s just taking an existing model and applying it to a different industry.
Q: What was your connection to the dating industry at all?
A: I think being single and using other dating sites helps.
Q: What were you doing just before this?
A: I set up my first business Rawnet, which is a digital media agency, in 1997. Then in 2002 I took on my first employee. In 2003 I set up Global Personals. This is a digital agency. They do web design. So, we put them to use to build WhiteLabelDating.
Q: What’s your split with the dating site that uses you guys?
A: We typically work on a 50-50 basis.
Q: What did you start off offering the very first company that was partnering up with you, back before you had any leverage?
A: We worked on a 50-50 basis then. We just had a simple membership fee. At the time it was a fixed fee of 15 pounds a month. Now we can charge someone 5 to 40 pounds a month. It’s about perceived value, and a lot of that comes through the brands. So, some brands will charge higher than others. Over time, about two-three years ago, we added credits.
Q: How many active members did you have before you started soliciting WhiteLabel clients?
A: ~250K members.
Q: Were you profitable by then?
A: The consumer paid from day one. So, although we had to go to the critical mass, there was the point where people started paying.
Q: What did you do specifically that helped you increase conversions, for example?
A: We experimented with certain things like astrology. We felt the women would enjoy it. So, if we got the women on board, we thought the guys would follow. We started sending people an email when someone looked at their profile which now is fairly commonplace, but it wasn’t then. We started sending them an email if someone winked at them, added them as a favorite, any excuse to send them an email because that gets them onto our site. And it’s only when they’re on the site that we can monetize it.
Q: Mark Brooks told a story in his interview about how fraud actually helps a little in this industry and how it helped you guys. It reduced your revenue for a while when you filed fraud and how it came back up.
A: We made the decision in November or December to eliminate scammers from our database. Scammers could send hundreds of messages as an attractive girl. You then have hundreds of guys to read their message and correspond with them. The dating industry makes money from it in the short term. In the long-term, however, if you get messages from scammers you’re not going to come back. You probably might not complain. You’ll just let your membership lapse and never return. That’s when we decided to eliminate scammers.
Q: And when you did, you lost a little bit of revenue.
A: Lost a lot, so what? All of our pay sites have recovered, and now people are converting at a high rate because they know the profiles are genuine and they’re staying for longer because on that they’re corresponding with real people. Revenue to me is the last thing I look at at the end of the day. When I wake up in the morning, my Key Performance Indicator, my business has net change. So, how many more or less paying customers do we have today than we had yesterday? As long as it’s positive and we get more paying customers, then everything else will fall in.
FULL ARTICLE @ MIXERGY
« August 2010 | Main | October 2010 »
Ross Williams Interview On Mixergy.com
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Online Dating Industry Study A La PlentyofFish
THE PARADIGM SHIFT - Sep 30 - Here is a 50+ page report ComsCore did on the industry. Plentyoffish produces more dates per user than any other site, and people say Plentyoffish has the best matching system in the industry. POF has the highest proportion of active users, but eHarmony and Match have higher overall aided awareness levels.
The full article was originally published at The Paradigm Shift, but is no longer available.
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VisionSync™ Introduces Virtual Dating To Facebook
PR WEB - Sep 29 - VisionSync has customized and integrated the 3D Omnidate technology to create the VirtualConnect Cafe Facebook app. Members can invite other users who are online, or schedule a virtual date or chat session for a later date. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB
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AshleyMadison Launches In UK
TNT MAGAZINE - Sep 30 - AshleyMadison is launching in the UK and its CEO is hoping to have 200,000 Londoners cheating on their partners by Christmas. Ashley Madison founder, Noel Biderman, claims that the affairs site is just being honest about something that is an unavoidable part of married life. “If 30 per cent of people who use mainstream dating sites are already in relationships, if they're having affairs at work which jeopardise their jobs or lead to unfair promotions, if they're visiting escorts and breaking the law, aren't we be better off cannibalising those destructive behaviours?”, said Biderman.
The full article was originally published at TNT Magazine, but is no longer available.
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A Closer Look At The Turkish Online Dating Market
PR LOG - Sep 28 - Turkey's large youth population provides opportunities for dating niches to enter the market. For many years the first major player siberalem.com, established in 2000, enjoyed a monopoly. In 2004, Ersan Özer, a local internet entrepreneur, exited his popular site itiraf.com. Having realized a major opportunity in online dating services, he decided to invest. Ersan came up with the city-based local dating model. Partnering with local EBay affiliate gittigidiyor.com founders, they started acquiring city domains from global registrants. In late 2005, city-based Dating network was launched in top 3 cities under ‘Magnet’ name: istanbul.net, ankara.net and izmir.net. The system enabled users to find dating partners in their districts and neighborhoods. Magnet currently leads the market with an estimated 1M active users and over 5M subscribers. FULL ARTICLE @ PR LOG
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iovation Reaching 4 Billion Device Reputation Checks
IOVATION BLOG - Sep 28 - iovation continues to see significant growth in the total number of device reputation checks performed for online businesses, along with the number of unique devices managed in the Device Reputation Authority (DRA) database. With only three months remaining, iovation has already increased the annual growth rate for processed transactions by 67% over 2009. With more than 3.9 billion cumulative device reputation checks processed for e-commerce, financial, travel, gaming and online communities today, we expect to break 4 billion early in Q4.
Mark Brooks: iovation serves numerous idating companies and helps them work together to beat scammers, spammers, and those that would be abusive towards our communities and members. (Full Disclosure: iovation is a long term client of Courtland Brooks)
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EasyDate To Offer Events Bookings
PRESS RELEASE - Sep 28 - EasyDate has extended its white label dating site offering to include events bookings, which means that their white label partners running sites on the platform will also be able to offer their members tickets to singles events in their nearest town or city. The events will not only be speed dating, but will also include wine tasting, party nights and a whole variety of interesting activities.
Mark Brooks: Watch out for Fastlife.com speed dating events running on their platform, along with EasyDate's own Speeddater parties.
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bConcerned Is Monitoring Your Return From A Date
PRESS RELEASE - Sep 27 - bConcerned.com is a new free dating safety tool that confirms safe return home from a date. After registering and completing the profile, users add an alert contact, and schedules a date and return time. The member has eight hours after their scheduled return time to logon and confirm their safe return home. If the member fails to confirm their safe return, bConcerned.com will notify their alert contact.
Mark Brooks: Just in time for the post mortem. Most crimes happen within 3 hours of the date. Daters should have a friend call them halfway through the date to check up on them.
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Ross Williams, CEO Of WhiteLabelDating.com And Global Personals, Hitting £20 Million Annual Revenue
OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 27 - It’s been a couple of years…The last interview was in 2007 and at the end of that interview I asked you what you hoped to achieve with WhiteLabelDating and you said that you wanted to be the top white label dating company. So at this stage let’s pick up where we left off. Are you the top white label dating company at this stage?
We are, yes. A lot has changed since then. Global Personals’ business has grown and white label dating is responsible for the vast majority of our business. I think we’re generally considered the number 1 white label dating company worldwide.
What is your split between Europe and the US
The majority of our revenue still comes from Europe and predominantly the UK. So our core territories at present are the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and the US in that order. We’ve got big plans for the US but it can easily be a graveyard for companies that don’t approach it in the right way. So we need to make sure all of our CRM is localized, the customer experience is localized and everything fits in. It is important that we recognize that and treat the US as a collection of different regions, and by regions I mean cities each with their own attributes rather than do what many people do which is a one size fits all solution. We won’t be doing that.
You have service in the US right now from my understanding, so are these improvements that you’re working on?
Yes we can absolutely service the USA. I don’t want to give away too much about what we have in the pipeline other than to say we realize we need to improve that experience and make it really a better niche offering. We expect to be able to announce more about that later this year.
There are two sides to your business. You have the WhiteLabelDating side and then you have the Global Personals side of the business. How do you differentiate the two different sides of the business?
Global Personals is our limited company. People have known us as WhiteLabelDating up to this point because that has been a massive part of our business. So WhiteLabelDating is part of Global Personals. It represents well in excess of 80% of our revenues.
We are a white label dating business first and foremost. However, since we became the market leader we recognize that we have a responsibility to help grow and shape the market. That is why we have our own branded sites for the consumers such as Singles365.com and DatingAgency.com, which allows us to help direct and shape the market, which benefits us but absolutely benefits our partners.
When I visited you in Windsor not too long ago you mentioned that you had been ‘fighting the good fight’ against abuse and scammers recently and that it had been quite a battle. Tell us more about that.
We made a decision last year to really focus on the quality of our customer experience. To do that we needed to manually moderate every profile, every photo, every wink, icebreaker, diary entry and video. Everything that goes through our system is checked by hand from people in our offices in Windsor. We don’t outsource anything. It is time consuming and it’s expensive but it does mean we can give the best customer experience.
Since we launched our new moderation platform in February of this year, we were hit in the short term. We found that scammers were responsible for quite a bit of revenue for dating site operators because if a scammer emails your member, that member is going to pay to upgrade. So if you reduce the scammers your conversion rate is going to be affected. However, we’ve ended this year in July and August with all of our metrics performing better than they have ever done in our 7 year history.
In an article recently you said there are some unethical practices in the internet dating world that need stamping out. Tell us more, what are they?
I think everyone recognizes that you can go for short term easy money in online dating. It might get you some revenue in the short term; it might be okay for 6 months or maybe a year or two. But if you want to build a successful, long term, valuable business that will be around in the years to come you have to take an ethical approach to business.
OPW reaches many executives in the industry. What would you like to say directly to the rest of the industry?
For the online dating category to grow, we do need to work together. We need to, as an industry, clean up our act and invest in the customer experience. We need to put the customer first rather than our bank balances. You only do that by working together because one bad apple can ruin the industry for lots of other people.
Can you see Global Personals ever IPO’ing?
I don’t think that would be on our horizons to be honest Mark. We are a privately owned company and we’ve grown pretty heavily. We are now at about 80 staff and when you came to our offices you were able to see that we’ve grown rather nicely. We’re enjoying that growth and I wouldn’t rule anything in or out over the next few years. We’ve certainly got a good 3 to 5 year plan with strong growth ahead of us. And we are enjoying ourselves in the process.
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Trudy Gilbert Is The Matchmaker To The Jet Set
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PlentyofFish One Of The World’s Most Valuable Internet Startups
THE NEXT WEB - Sep 25 - Silicon Valley Insider’s SAI Digital published a list of the 100 “most valuable internet startups”, and while most of the usual suspects were on the list (Facebook, Zynga, Wikipedia, Skype, Craigslist, Twitter, Vente-Privee, Yandex, Betfair, and LinkedIn make up the top ten) one Canadian startup made the list: Plenty of Fish at #84. FULL ARTICLE @ THE NEXT WEB
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EasyDate Runs Foul Of Easy Lawyers
FT - Sep 24 - Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of the EasyJet empire, has threatened action against online dating group Easydate in a row over alleged trademark infringement. Easydate, which trades under brands including benaughty.com, and girlsdateforfree.com, has been using the name for the five years since it launched. Sir Stelios, who licenses the “easy” name to businesses including EasyJet, EasyCar and EasyHotel, claimed Easydate was trying to pass itself off as part of the “easy” brand and warned it to change the company name. Easydate said it had consulted lawyers but would seek to resolve the issue out of court. FULL ARTICLE @ FINANCIAL TIMES
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Tech Will Transform Online Dating Market In China
GLOBAL TIMES - Sep 24 - The Western world has almost reached the saturation point for online dating. Chinese online dating is a bit different. The key problem here is technology. Most of the current sites simply do not use the features and technological innovation of Western dating sites. China is seen as scam-central, and so many payments from users get blocked. China still doesn't have the infrastructure to allow secure online UnionPay card payments. Launching an app is even harder. Once some of these technology problems are sorted, particularly if the large dating sites invest in them, then everything will change. This is why technology is the future of online dating in China.
The full article was originally published at Global Times, but is no longer available.
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ToyBoy.com's New Viral Video
OPW - Sep 25 - "Love gets younger everyday" - that's the tagline of ToyBoy.com, a dating site dedicated to helping older women find younger men. ToyBoy.com is a partner of WhiteLabelDating.com and is doing very well with their PR campaign. Here is their latest video.
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