OPW - Feb 7 - Marc Lesnick and Mark Brooks discussed what happened at iDate 2011 in Miami. Close to 400 people attended the conference. The conference brought a lot of new people and a lot of good ideas too.
We are seeing large corporation such as Royal Caribbean wanting to work with the dating industry. That’s a great business development initiative for the industry as a whole. They should be advertising on dating sites and should have more advertisers in general kicking down our doors.
"One of the take aways I had from this conference, from the final panel, was when someone proposed that we have some kind of a gold seal, gold standard for the industry. There are certain role players in the dating industry and it would be nice to stand above the crowd by having that differentiation and that distinguishing factor', said Mark Brooks.
On the final panel when Marc Lesnick asked the speakers if the internet dating industry overall was going to do better next year, everybody agreed except of Markus Frind from PlentyOfFish.com and Sam Yagan from OKCupid. They said paid dating site are going to have to lower their prices in order to compete with free sites.
Definitely a split panel on that point. But ultimately people are paying more. The revenues are up from the companies we have visibility on and the number of people visiting internet dating companies has set a new record this month. According to ComsCore, 27M people visited dating sites in December 2010. Mark McMaster from Google said the search volume for dating keywords in general is up 20% YOY.
Comments