CANOE.CA - Sep 25 - According to a Leger Marketing survey conducted on behalf of QMI Agency, one quarter of Canadians participate in online dating, including 36% of Canadians between 18 and 34. Kate Bilenki, director of love at PlentyOfFish, the free dating site with ~33M registered users worldwide, said the site’s membership has increased 40% over the last two years. Bilenki said POF is responsible for ~1M relationships per year, and 300K of those result in marriage.
by Sheena Goodyear The full article was originally published at Canoe.ca, but is no longer available.
THE BRANDEISHOOT - Sep 23 - In Nov '10, siblings Brad and Danielle Weisberg launched a dating site aimed at Jewish mothers: TheJMom.com. This site allows Jewish mothers to create dating profiles for their children, search through dating profiles created by other Jewish mothers. The Weisbergs got the idea for TheJMom after their mother, Barbara, became frustrated with their single statuses.
Mark Brooks: I just came across another Jewish dating site today, that is run by the folks who run Date.com and Matchmaker.com. Jewcier.com. They're driving about 40,000 users a month to it right now.
THE SCOTSMAN - Sep 23 - Bill Dobbie is CEO of Cupid.com, a dating site with ~12M users and 460K paying subscribers, up from 324K in Dec '10. Dobbie has never used a dating site himself. "These things just didn't exist," he laughs – thinking back to the time when he met his wife, Leonie. The company changed its name from easyDate last year, following a tense legal wrangle with easyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou. Cupid's network of sites caters for all tastes – from datingforparents.com to maturedating.com and girlsdatefree.com. benaughty.com caters mainly for a more…transient…customer.
by Jane Bradley The full article was originally published at Scotsman, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Cupid shares are doing well. Jiayuan, FriendFinder and Spark Networks shares, are not. We hope this changes. It affects the valuations of your idating companies.
OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 22 - WhiteLabelDating is celebrating it's 8th year anniversary. Here's our interview with the CEO/co-founder Ross Williams. (FD: WLD is a client of Courtland Brooks) - Mark Brooks
The Futures Company came out with a white paper titled; ‘Is happiness your business?” There are 21,000 books on Amazon on “happiness”. Does this relate to your business? We have members of the sites that we want to make happy. We’ve also got partners that run the sites. A lot of them have given up their full time job to run their dating site which means they can work where and when they want. In online dating we hope we sell the dream of happiness, we sell the promise. If I asked a single man what would you pay to meet the woman of his dreams he would say ‘anything’. We aim for happiness for consumers, partners and our staff.
I understand recently you had a run rate of about £30 million in revenue a year? What proportion of that is from your partners/white labels? Around 85-90%. It’s where we focus most of our time.
How many partners do you have at this stage? It grows each day. There’s 1,000’s in the system. A couple of hundred partners generate decent revenue for us. It’s a long term business. We have partners who are generating tens of thousands of pounds in revenue a month, who weren’t doing anything last year.
You’ve grown considerably. Is it true that the bigger you get the more difficult it is to introduce innovations? It is. You don’t want to innovate at the expense of existing business. We have over 6,000 sites on our book now and we have to test/check they all work well. We are about to see some exciting developments at our partner conference in October. We spend £1.5 million a year on development. Two thirds of this goes on new features.
You're 8 years old now, right? We turned 8 last week. In the first 4 years we grew from £0 - £3 million a year, and from 2007 to 2011 we grew to £30 million a year. Exponential growth.
Would you have guessed you would be at this stage 8 years ago, was that your goal? Yes, we were very confident. We didn’t really come out {with our numbers} until about 4 years ago but that was our intention. You don’t want to shout too loud until you are in a position to manage the growth you’ve got. We’ve gone from UK-only to International.
In what year will you generate £100 million? I would think by 2013 or 2014 but there are lots of things that could happen before then. There are great opportunities in mobile, social and international.
Match.com is at about £280 million revenue. We matched Match.com in the UK about 9 months ago. We are a lot larger than them in the UK.
What would be your top 3 pieces of advice that you would give to someone new to the industry, to be successful with WhiteLabelDating? Marketing, marketing, marketing. You just can’t start a dating site without brand marketing.
OPW - Sep 22 - Jiayuan.com, China's largest online dating site, has launched its English version - IsThisFate.com. Is ThisFate.com is aimed at expats living in China, overseas Chinese looking to reconnect, and anyone interested in Chinese romance.
IOVATION BLOG - Sep 21 - For online retailers whose business models rely on Internet transactions to generate revenue, fraud losses that range anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars a year can have a significant impact on their overall business profits. In iovation's case study, “Online Retailer Uses New Fraud Detection Systems To Cut Fraud Loss Rates,” Forrester Research principal analyst, Andras Cser, shares how the online merchant was able to reduce fraud loss by $1.8M after deploying iovation’s ReputationManager 360 along with our partner’s case management system.
by Max Anhoury The full article was originally published at iovation blog, but is no longer available.
PRESS RELEASE - Sep 21 - The year 2011 has quickly become the year of mobile dating. Julie Spira has announced the Cyber Dating Expert Top 10 Mobile Dating Apps for 2011.
1. eHarmony 2. Match Mobile 3. Are You Interested? 4. Skout 5. Plenty of Fish 6. OkCupid 7. Zoosk 8. SpeedDate 9. Grindr 10. Jazzed
According to Comscore, ~14M people worldwide access dating sites through mobile app. A recent Flurry report showed that mobile usage has now surpassed web usage for dating. Mobile app usage rose from 3.7 minutes in June of 2010 to 8.4 minutes in June of 2011.
The full article was originally published at 1888PressRelease, but is no longer available.
BUSINESS NEWS DAILY - Sep 20 - New research shows that daily deals companies are more popular than ever among consumers. Small businesses that have used Groupon's daily deals to gain visibility and boost business say the accolades are well deserved. First-mover advantage has matured into long-term loyalty on the part of merchants and consumers alike. For HowAboutWe, an online dating service whose draw for members is that the service focuses at first more on the date itself than on their date's dossier, using Groupon has been both a profit center and a marketing vehicle. A typical HowAboutWe Groupon deal offers a three-month membership for $18, 67% off the normal price of $54. HowAboutWe tried its first Groupon in January in Brooklyn. It netted 433 new members. Subsequent offers have brought in 142 new members in Boston, 257 in New York City, 155 in Washington and 175 in San Francisco.
TECH WIRE - Sep 19 - Match.com and Yahoo! Canada, announced a partnership enabling Match.com to power Yahoo! Canada Dating and Yahoo! Quebec Rencontres. The sites are immediately available in English at http://yahoo.match.ca/ and in French at http://yahoo.ca.match.com. Match.com has been the online dating service on Yahoo! in the US since May 2010.
The full article was originally published at TechFinance, but is no longer available.
EHARMONY - Sep 20 - eHarmony apps on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Android launched in late Q3 2010 and since then ~1M members have downloaded the apps to date. Currently ~500k eHarmony profiles are viewed on mobile applications each day. Keeping it Real, Warm and Elegant is eHarmony’s Newest Design Challenge. When they thought about “warm” experiences outside of software, one experience jumped to mind – Starbucks. Starbucks has created an incredibly warm and inviting environment. The idea of being real or authentic is at the core of all eHarmony's creative and brand imagery. (Real success couples). With their final design goal, they set about making this application feel like a very personalized, simple experience versus a run-of-the-mill-dating search and browse experience. (parchment paper, bamboo, handwritten notes and script fonts).
THE GLOBE AND MAIL - Sep 20 - People are more likely to reveal they are overweight than divulge their political stripes on online dating sites, according to a new American study. Sifting through 2,944 randomly sampled online dating profiles, only 14% of users stated their “political interests." Older daters as well as those with higher levels of income and education were more likely to divulge their political leanings. So were men, with women 8% less likely to report a political bent.
by Zosia Bielski The full article was originally published at Globe and Mail, but is no longer available.
MARKETWIRE - Sep 20 - SNAP Interactive, a social app developer with~50M installs across its properties, is announcing several significant mobile-related developments including the launch of a mobile Web version of its flagship AreYouInterested.com social dating app.
The full article was originally published at Marketwire, but is no longer available.
NY DAILY NEWS - Sep 19 - Soul2Match is a new iPhone app that claims to match up singles based on facial recognition. The concept behind the dating site is simple: People are attracted to themselves. Users snap photos of themselves and run a search for singles who share their facial features. Earlier this year, FindYourFaceMate.com launched a prototype that operated on much the same idea of soul-mate sameness.
