YOUR TANGO - Sep 18 - One of the latest dating sites to hit search engines is BetterDate, created by ThirdAge, a site that solely caters to singles ages 50+. The site is free.
by Laura Franco
See full article at Your Tango
« August 2011 | Main | October 2011 »
New Dating Site Caters to Singles 50+
| |
ChristianCafe.com on Focus on the Family
OPW - Sep 19 - eHarmony no longer associates with Focus on The Family, but it was the springboard for their start. ChristianCafe.com, meanwhile, loves Focus on the Family. Husband and wife team Sam and Polly Moorcroft are the co-founder (Sam) and CEO (Polly) of ChristianCafe.com and were featured on Focus on The Family's single ministry show, Boundless, to discuss the history of internet dating and Christian dating. Listen here.
| |
Next iDate Startup Event in London on Sep 22nd
WEBWIRE - Sep 16 - The 4th iDate Startup will take place on September 22, 2011 in London from 7:30 PM to 10:30 PM at Punch Bowl London. The event is for CEOs, dating affiliates and dating industry startups. In a relaxed setting entrepreneurs and affiliates in the dating space to make new contacts, network with colleagues and business leaders. The iDate Dating Industry Conference and Courtland Brooks are sponsors of the party.
| |
iDate INSIDE Series: Episode #2 - Zoosk
OPW - Sep 17 - iDate INSIDE are a series of videos covering the inner operations of internet dating companies. The video shows the offices and the culture. Here is the 2nd episode, a sneak peek into the Zoosk's office.
Zoosk currently has 98 employees and 15M members worldwide. Of the 70 countries Zoosk is active in, 25 are doing really well. Top 5 are US, UK, Canada, France and Denmark.
See all posts on Zoosk
| |
SNAP Interactive: 600% Stock Increase
THE NEXT WEB - Sep 16 - In 2005, Cliff and Darrell founded SNAP Interactive, initially raising $200K privately from friends and family. The next year, SNAP went public in 2006 and they launched IamFreeTonight.com in November. In May 2007, Facebook opened its platform to independent developers and the two brothers decided to create the MeetNewPeople Facebook app, which drove traffic to IamFreeTonight.com. In a matter of weeks, they started seeing several thousand sign-ups per day. They decided to shut down IamFreeTonight.com in 2007 and transition the business entirely to building on Facebook. They launched AreYouInterested.com on Facebook on August 14, 2007. Today, AreYouInterested.com is one of the largest dating apps with 47M users. Overall, SNAP Interactive says it has nearly 50M installs and 1M daily visits across its properties. Its stock has gone up more than 600% in the past 12 months.
by Courtney Boyd Myers
See full article at The Next Web
Mark Brooks: Jiayuan, Cupid, Match (under IAC), and Spark Networks (JDate) are other public iDating companies. We summarize their results periodically, and you can see the pdf summaries on the left bar of OPW. We've also just added a stock ticker. Cupid and Snap are showing promising results.
| |
Jiayuan.com: Were They Fit to List at All?
WSJ - Sep 15 - Western regulators are grappling with a growing list of frauds at Chinese companies listed overseas. Jiayuan.com is by all accounts an entirely above-board Chinese company. Because foreign investment is technically forbidden in the Internet services sector, Jiayuan.com created a "variable-interest entity," or VIE—a common feature of many Chinese listings. Under this structure, the operating part of the company and the overseas listed part are two completely separate entities. The Chinese-owned part signs a series of contracts with the listed entity to transfer revenues in a way that allows the books of the two companies to be consolidated under U.S. accounting rules. It's a risky structure since the foreign shareholders don't actually own the Chinese company. A rule issued in 2006 requires Chinese residents to register with the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) before setting up offshore companies. Jiayuan's founders failed to do this when they created the offshore entities used in the VIE structure. Jiayuan says it has now completed the required registrations, but the question remains: Why was the IPO brought to market before this potentially fatal problem was resolved?
by Paul Gillis
See full article at WSJ
| |
CEO Interview: Sam Moorcroft, CEO of ChristianCafé.com
OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 15 - Sam was inspired by Matchmaker.com and started ChristianCafe.com in 1999. He’s also tinkering in the Brazil market. Here’s his founding story... - Mark Brooks
One of the things that made your site quite unique for the longest time was that you had a ‘cuppa joe’ on the homepage instead of having a picture of a happy couple. For a few years you ran a picture of a cup of coffee which I thought was really unusual. Why the cup of coffee?
We were thinking; where would people meet for the first time offline when they had connected online? The most likely place would be a café; it’s unassuming, it’s cheap, they can do it at lunchtime or early afternoon, no commitment, no money involved. It’s a public place so it’s safe. We wanted to capture that whole feeling so we used a coffee cup logo which is actually from a real coffee shop. All the photos you used to see on the site were real people.
Have you tried stock photography vs real people?
Yeah, we are in the process of doing it right now. You’ve got to find a couple that does it from a marketing point of view but doesn’t lack authenticity. We now have a happy couple on homepage, have had for the longest time. We want to rotate different happy couples, real and stock, and gauge which works best.
What are you going to put on your homepage? You mentioned a very personal photograph.
We were thinking about using a picture of my wife and me because our story is very linked to online dating, it’s what we do for a living.
Let’s go back in time. What’s your founding story?
A job came up in Toronto with my brother so I moved there, started a new job but after 6 months I got laid off. So I found myself in a brand new city, only knew 3 people, single and unemployed. I started going online and I discovered personals. I was interested but I thought that the people were weird. To my surprise the women I met were normal. I became addicted. A friend was always complaining that the sites could do a better job and that I should put my money where my mouth is. I approached my brother and he helped finance it. We launched in early 1999. I knew that it had to be niche; I couldn’t compete with Match.com. It took off in the Christian market; within 6-12 months we broke even and from then it has been phenomenally successful.
What dating sites inspired you?
Matchmaker.com, currently owned by Date.com. Their whole philosophy was based on niche markets. Unlike other sites, they allowed full access as if you were a paid subscriber for the duration of your free trial. We still do this.
We have 100,000 actual active members in the last 4/5 months because beyond that we archive people automatically. Other sites say they’ve got 2 million members because they count people who joined in 1999 for a free trial. You should count monthly logins because that is the true representation of how many people are using your site.
You have an interest in Brazil. Tell us more. What sites have you launched in Brazil and how are they going?
My wife is originally Brazilian although she’s been in Canada since 1998. About 5 years ago we decided to open a site in Brazil; my wife speaks Portuguese and knows the culture. But the Brazilian taxation system is medieval and there is so much red tape that we didn’t want to continue. We set it up outside Brazil but Brazilian credit cards can only be used in Brazil.
This is slowly changing as the economy grows. In 4-5 years time Brazil will be #5 in the world for GDP so there is definitely potential. We decided to keep a bank account there and people could pay by printing out a form, going into a bank and doing a transfer. But this is was a big hassle for people and we miss out on impulse buyers. A year ago we decided to operate a free model. We are using Google advertisements but they don’t make us a lot of money.
| |
IAC’s Match.com Buys 20% Stake in Zhenai
TECH CRUNCH - Sep 14 - Match.com has acquired a 20% interest in Zhenai, a provider of “online matchmaking services” in China, for an undisclosed sum. Launched in 2005 by CEO Dr. Song Li, Zhenai provides integrated Internet and telephone matchmaking services to Chinese singles looking for long-term relationships. Zhenai is said to boast a user base of ~30M registered members.
by Robin Wauters
See full article at Tech Crunch
See all posts on Zhenai
See all posts on Match.com
Read OPW interviews with Dr Song Li, CEO of Zhenai: June 2007, June 2008
| |
Interview with Jay Weintraub, CEO of LeadsCon & Daily Deal Summit
OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 14 - Jay Weintraub runs the Daily Deal Summit, which happens next week. I wondered what he thought about FriendFinder's acquisition of the international daily deals service, JigoCity.com. - Mark Brooks
| |
iDating Loves Daily Deals, Daily Deal Summit Is Next Week
OPW - Sep 14 - I'm seeing a multitude of dating sites take a fancy to Daily Deals services. It makes sense. Spark Networks and FriendFinder, to name two.If you want to get your head around the Daily Deals industry, you should definitely attend the Daily Deal Summit next week, Thu 22nd and Fri 23rd September in San Francisco. I talked to the conference organizer Jay Weintraub yesterday at length. He has his head screwed on, and is an Advertising.com and Oversee.net alumni. He's pulled together a great agenda with speakers from Yipit, The Washington Post, TIPPR and Daily Candy. If you're thinking about running your own offers, you should look at Yipit, TIPPR, Second Street, Adility, Group Commerce... Or even better, go to his conference and you'll meet most of them, be able to pick their brains directly, and raise your ARPU so you can raise your ad volumes. Good luck, let me know how it goes, and email me at mark@courtlandbrooks.com if you're going so I can connect you with others from the idating industry that are going. Jay was nice enough to sport OPW readers a $150 break on the conference entry.
| |
SpeedDate Launches New Dating App for iPhone
PR NEWSWIRE - Sep 14 - SpeedDate's new iPhone app, "SpeedDate: Real Dates in Real-Time," eliminates the waiting in dating by allowing singles to date anywhere, anytime. With location-based search, SpeedDaters can find nearby singles.
| |
Zhenai.com Becomes World's Largest Matchmaking Website with Membership Exceeding 20 Million
PR NEWSWIRE - Sep 1 - Zhenai.com, China's largest matchmaking site, announced that the number of its registered members reached 20M. With ~40K new members each day, Zhenai exceeded the membership registered on Match.com in the US (Match.com claims 15M members). Jiayuan, a Chinese dating website that closely trails Zhenai.com in the number of registered members, announced on its official website that its total registered members bypassed 17M. iResearch Consulting predicted that the number of Chinese online daters will reach 140M by 2010. Presently these two websites account for one third of the total registered members in mainland China.
The full article was originally published at PR Newswire, but is no longer available.
Read OPW interviews with Dr Song Li, CEO of Zhenai: June 2007, June 2008
| |
Soul2Match Matches Singles with Similar Faces
MASHABLE - Sep 14 - Online dating startup Soul2Match promises to match singles based solely on their headshot. The site's founders cite several studies that show what we’re all really looking for in our ideal mate is ourselves. Soul2Match is an extremely simple dating site. Instead of filling out long questionnaires, users take a photo of themselves and post it to the site or the iPhone app. The site uses facial recognition software to analyze features in the photo and the photos of other users, and spits out a “compatibility score.” There’s an option to message people who are highly compatible with you.
| |
The Business of Breaking Up
HUFFINGTON POST - Sep 14 - According to a Facebook survey conducted by AreYouInterested.com 25% of people found out their relationship was over when they noticed a change in their significant other's relationship status. 21% of people admitted they would break up with someone by changing their status to "single" on Facebook. The Breakup Notifier helps users track their crushes' changing Facebook relationship status. People log into the app through Facebook, choose the friends for whom they want to get relationship status updates, then just wait for e-mail alerts with the joyous news of a break-up. IDUMP4U.com sells courage and honesty to those who may have trouble severing ties when romance goes south. Users send information about the people they want to break up with and the problems in the relationship to Laborman -- then he makes the call and does all the dirty work.
| |
be2 Merges with c-date
OPW - Sep 13 - Exclusive at OPW. We just heard be2 has merged with c-date.com. A most unusual unison. c-date (circa 2008) does not allow photographs, and is focused on the casual and cheaters market. The company was started by a former FriendScout Director and a multitude of FriendScout employees followed. be2 was founded in April 2005 by sociologist Dr Robert Wuttke, and quickly expanded to over 30 countries. The site is focused on longer term relationships. be2 traffic slipped back in recent times. Probably in part due to a fall in reorders from people who were a tad unhappy at having to send a fax to cancel their membership.
Important Correction and Update: Dr Wuttke corrected me..."Since the beginning of this year, I am not only founder/CEO of be2, but also CEO of C-Date. be2 and C-Date continue to be two separate companies, however now managed by one team. That be2’s traffic slipped back is also not correct. be2 grows at a rate of more than 30% year on year. Also our customers do not have to send a fax to cancel their membership, but are free to cancel with a convenient prefilled PDF document sent through Email, fax or letter."
| |