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What Members Want from Online Dating
WLD - July 28 - Online dating platform provider WhiteLabelDating.com releases member survey results. The results provide a snapshot of today’s dating market and what members would like to get out of the experience. Here are some highlights:
79% of members are looking for a serious relationship
37% consider profile description as the most important factor when deciding whether they should contact someone
52% of people prefer messages over winks
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Facebook Trademark Should Be Canceled, Shagbook Says
LAW 360 - July 28 - Shagbook fired back Monday against an attempt by Facebook to block the online dating site from trademarking its name, claiming that Facebook's own mark is invalid and should be canceled. Shagbook argued that "facebook" is a generic term, and said any U.S. registrations for the Facebook mark should be ruled invalid. "The term was in common use in the English language well before [Facebook] began using the term in connection with its services. The similarity of the Shagbook mark creates a false impression that there is some sort of affiliation between Shagbook and Facebook, Facebook argued.
by Jacqueline Bell
See full article at Law 360
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How Dating Evolved Through the Years
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK - July 28 - Dating Agencies have been around longer than most people would probably imagine. We’d need to go all the way back to the 16th century. The first agency was run by Parish Vicars, who would put together lists of candidates who they believed were compatible for marriage. People were matched with others, in the same class as themselves. In 1825, a London-based agency opened its doors to business. It was used as a last resort for men, who were looking for a good wife. The ‘first wave’ of what we recognise as a modern dating agency came post-World War II in form of ‘dating clubs’. People would join, have their photograph taken, and give information about themselves and the type of partner they were looking to meet. The club would then be pro-active in matching them to a suitable partner, based on the information. It wasn’t until the late 1960s, when personal ads became part of the growing culture in the UK.
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Attitudes about Dating Changing in This Dour Economy
CONTRA COSTA TIMES - July 27 - With 14.1M workers unemployed in June, men and women are adjusting their ideas on what makes a great date. For many people, unemployment would no longer be a deal-breaker. April Braswell, a dating expert, says that although singles are generally looking for financial stability, they will be more forgiving of someone who has just lost her job -- as long as she shows motivation to get a new one. When the economy crashed in 2008, Match.com had its best quarter. New couples are also more willing to accept a date paying with a coupon from a daily deal site than they were in years past. Paul Falzone of eLove, a matchmaking service since 1974, says singles don't have to impress one another by ordering the most expensive cocktail or having the best seats for the stadium concert.
by Laura Casey
See full article at Mercury News
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Meetic First Half 2011 Results
PRESS RELEASE - July 27 - Revenue for the first half of 2011 totalled Eur92.4M, up +1.1% compared to the same period of 2010. The total amount of money invested in advertising over the Q2 was thus Eur21.7M, compared to Eur36.5M the previous quarter. The client acquisition cost was thus Eur86.35 versus Eur72.10 over the same period of 2010. Subscriber numbers: a total of 844,435 subscribers at 30th June 2011, versus 872,047 subscribers at 31st March 2011. This decrease in the number of subscribers is due to the reduction in marketing spendings over the Q2 2011.
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IAC Increases Revenue 23% on Web-Search, Dating Sites
BLOOMBERG - July 27 - IAC/InterActiveCorp., the operator of Match.com, reported a 23% increase in Q2 revenue from Web search products and growth in online dating subscribers. Sales increased to $485.4M from $394.2M a year earlier. Match.com said in May that it would make a tender offer for the 73% of Meetic SA that it did not already own. The offer valued the French dating service at $493M.
by Brett Pulley
The full article was originally published at Bloomberg, but is no longer available.
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Matching and Sorting in Online Dating
INTERNET DATING SCIENCE - July 26 - Kathryn Lord has summarized Matching and Sorting in Online Dating Study in plain English for Internet Dating Science. Users want the best possible matches for the least time and money invested. The authors suggest that in traditional mating, the search costs (the search and the risk of rejection) are considerable, but that online dating is designed to minimize the costs (numbers of singles concentrated in one place, rejection risk minimal because of anonymity and ease of contact, and the only cost being the dating site’s fee and the effort of writing of a witty email). Based on this information, you should:
- Recognize that a realistic customer will more likely be a satisfied customer.
- Persistently educate your customers about searching, "favoriting," and making first contacts.
- Make sure that your customers understand that a high non-response rate to first email contacts is normal and to be expected.
- Suggest that customers systematically widen their search criteria until they have consistent positive returns to their first emails.
- In particular, encourage women to make first contacts.
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How OKCupid Helps Users Find Their Perfect Match
READ WRITE WEB - July 25 - OKCupid is well known for its data analysis. On average, says OKCupid's CTO Tom Quisel, active users have answered ~3K questions; they've hidden the profiles of several thousand users they aren't interested in; they've voted for ~4K profiles. All that data is in addition to users' personal demographic data and preferences, as well as their site usage information (how often they log in, how often they respond to messages and so on). All that data makes a simple search for a list of potential matches quite complex. In fact, says Quisel, it can take 13 billion seeks in order to load one page of results.
by Audrey Watters
The full article was originally published at ReadWriteWeb, but is no longer available.
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Online Dating Is Eroding Humanity
GUARDIAN.CO.UK - July 25 - The internet is changing the way society communicates, processes information and knowledge, and configures its relationship towards authority. Today, internet dating has become more or less accepted as a way of forming relationships.There has been little thought or comment on why matchmaking websites might be a bad thing per se. Online matchmaking is premised on the notion of making rational choices. Furthermore, the way dating websites calculate matches distorts the very core of interpersonal relations. Online seekers of partners and friends rely on computer calculations of a set of hard questions. There is little room (if any) for subtlety, deviance, or exploration.
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Clean Up Your Industry!
OPW - July 26 - I just received this email....
"You guys need to band together and get rid of sites that are just scams full of scammers and con men and women the likes of Flirt, Rudester cupid and all affiliated sites they give the good ones a bad name people don't pay money to have to put up with that &^%$#$^ its a disgrace and only make legitimate sites look bad please get on them and check it out it is truly criminal nothing works on these sites and they basically take peoples money and give them nothing in return the sites are full of scammers and cam girls harrasing and trying to rob people constantly on and off the site and I believe it is organized by those who run the sites its just way too obvious.
Thanks Neil"
What should we do? Your comments please...
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Re: Looking for Someone
THE NEW YORKER - July 26 - A letter in response to Nick Paumgarten’s article from Anne Holland, Publisher of Subscription Site Insider’s Dating Site Benchmark Report.
Nick Paumgarten, in his piece on Internet dating, mentions the two business models that make up the online dating industry: free sites that generate ad revenue and subscription sites that offer fee-based services. But a fascinating fact is that the paid-content sites are thriving more than their free counterparts. Most of the industry’s $1.4 billion in yearly revenues comes from subscription fees, even though most of the highest-traffic sites are free. A new study shows that 88% per cent of the free sites are considering launching paid offerings.
The full article was originally published at The New Yorker, but is no longer available.
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Post-Divorce Dating Club Launches Nationally
PR WEB - July 25 - The Post-Divorce Dating Club (PDDC) launched today for divorced, separated or people who have been in a long term committed relationship. PDDC combines both online dating with offline Miixzee's, seminars, coaching, matchmaking, and post-divorce resources and services to help build a comprehensive support network around individuals looking to move past their divorce. The PDDC was founded by Lee Block, a divorced mom of two, after she discovered the difficulty divorcees encountered when seeking out quality dating partners.
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Match.com Launches New Campaign
CREAM - July 24 - Check out Match.com new TV ad. Two Match.com subscribers were picked to sell themselves live on air to the British public.
The full article was originally published at Cream, but is no longer available.
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What It's Like Running a Public Company That Relies on Facebook
Q: Why did you decide to put your company on Facebook?
A: It was a very challenging decision. Iamfreetonight.com was getting significant traction. But in May 2007, Facebook launched their platform, we spent a couple of days building a basic application that got several thousand users in a few hours of work. We transitioned the business entirely to Facebook and shut down Iamfreetonight on the spot in 2007.
Q: In 2007, you're already a public company. Why so early?
A: A company called Udate had just been sold as a public company for a significant amount of money. So we thought that the market opportunity was there. We’ve never actually raised any VC funding, which is pretty unique for the industry.
Q: Why not?
A: I wanted to make sure we didn’t go the VC route because we thought we had ideas that could really disrupt the industry, and I wanted to maintain a very long-term view. A lot of our competitors that have raised venture capital money are long gone, mostly because of that.
Q: What have you learned through the years from relying on Facebook for all of your business?
A: Well, I’ve learned that timing is very important.
Q: How is your relationship with Facebook? Do have any concerns about depending on their platform?
A: You always have some concern in the back of your mind, being dependent on the platform, but for us it’s been nothing but a home run. We have ~50M installs.
Q: What do you think of Google+ ?
A: We’re always looking at new and exciting opportunities.
Q: Have you heard anything about Facebook doing their own HTML5 mobile app market?
A: No. Only what we’ve all read on the web.
Q: Is that something that would appeal to you?
A: That would be very interesting because if anything, it would provide easy discovery of application.
Q: Have you noticed any big differences between Apple's mobile app market and the Facebook's app market?
A: Yeah, what we’ve noticed on mobile is people are most interested in interacting with friends or new people who are nearby and online. So what that means is having the critical mass of users who are online in a specific area is very important.
Q: What's the best method for acquiring new users on Facebook?
A: We have a pretty sophisticated system in-house that will put all our users into various categories based on their age range, their sexuality, their location, even their religion or ethnicities, and we know how much it costs to acquire a certain user. And we can build out a model on how much they’re worth to us.
by Jay Yarow
See full article at Business Insider
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