Online Personals Watch: News on the Online Dating Industry and Business

WhiteLabelDating.com Partners Conference Summary

OPW - Oct 22 - WhiteLabelDating.com had their partner conference this Friday and Saturday for 80+ Gold and Silver partners. Last night was their black-tie awards ceremony.  We’ll run the awards list on Online Personals Watch next week. Here’s my notes from the partner conference today, which is just finishing up now.

WhiteLabelDating.com (WLD) is now 90% partner brands and 10% own-brands such as Dating Agency and Singles365.com. The own-brands are used as learning and proving grounds for best-practices which are shared with partners at seminars and advisories and via partner managers.

WLD now has 6500 partner sites with 7 million members, with 3 million new members added in the last year. Revenue stands at GBP 23.5 million over the prior 12 months – up 43%. 20% of business is non-UK now. Countries served are UK, Ireland, Australia, S.Africa, USA, Canada and New Zealand. There’s 100 employees in Windsor. 30 of which are developers, up from 20 last year.

The run rate for revenues is 30 million GBP now which makes WLD the largest dedicated white label platform in the world. The biggest media partners are Bauer Media, Trinity Media, GMG Radio

Members are paying more now. This is largely due to dramatic improvements in the product, the introduction of true niching, and strong email marketing. WLD sends 9 million emails a day now which is more than eBay Europe

WLD is launching in the USA next year and have spent $2 million on a business with a portfolio of 600 geographically focused domains such as LAdating.com and PhoenixDating.com. The USA business will be rolled out and launched region by region next year and there’s an seeding marketing budget of 1 million GBP reserved.

There’s also a big push on mobile. WLD’s mobile dating platform launches before Christmas. Ross Williams, the CEO, said ‘mobile will be a 1/3 of our business in the future.’ New users from mobile sources are typically half the cost of new users from desktops.

WLD targets 45% revenue growth in the ensuing year, with 30% of revenues coming from non-UK markets, up from 20%.

See all posts on WhiteLabelDating.com

LikeBright: Safer Dating for Women

TECH FLASH - Oct 21 - Founders Nick Soman, Sonya Lai and Ron Lai say they want to make dating simple, social and safe for women, by letting them vouch for -- and ask questions about -- guys on Facebook. "Women don’t like the lack of trust and transparency on existing dating sites, and that they prefer to meet people through friends", said the founders. "We’re building a dating layer on Facebook to help women meet people through the people they trust."

by Aislyn Greene
The full article was originally published at Tech Flash, but is no longer available.

Brandon Wade Talks About 'Sugar Daddy' Dating

BUSINESS INSIDER - Oct 20 - According to Brandon Wade, CEO and founder of SeekingArrangement.com, all relationships are monetary exchanges in some respect. His website, a matchmaking service for "Sugar Daddies," makes those exchanges a little more transparent. Unlike most dating websites, where men outnumber women, the Sugar Babies on SeekingArrangement outnumber Sugar Daddies 10 to 1. The average age of a Sugar Baby is 25 and the average age of a Sugar Daddy is 36. There are also a handful of Sugar Mommies and Male Babies on the site, which just hit 1M members.

by Meredith Galante
See full article at Business Insider

See all posts on SeekingArrangement

Rise of the Single Surfers

DAILY MAIL - Oct 20 - Only 1 in 6 Brits prefer to meet in bars and at parties and 1 in 12 want to meet at night clubs. 3 in 5 Brits are dating or have dated someone they met online and staggering 84% would meet someone in the real world they have chatted virtually.

by Maysa Rawi
See full article at Daily Mail

Edu-daters Bring Love-seekers Back to the Bar

THE STAR - Oct 21 - A new dating school launches next week with an introductory workshop called Happy Dates by matchmaker and dating coach Stacie Ikka and psychologist Dr. Andrew Shaul, who specializes in couples counselling. The pair refers to themselves by “edu-daters.” The intro session, which will be free and will accommodate 50 participants will consist of interactive trust exercises and some role playing. Every participant will be offered the 100-question test, and can get results (in a private session later on) for a special $50 deal. Their 100-question scientific survey aims to help diagnose areas that need improvement such as low self-esteem and poor communications skills. The regular price will be $199 thereafter for an analysis of one’s dating abilities. The plan is to set up a series of workshops geared to specific dating issues. That kind of couture treatment would cost about $1,500 for 10 sessions of hand-holding.

by Leanne Delap
See full article at The Star

Shaadi.com Turns 15

INDIA INFOLINE - Oct 20 - Shaadi.com completes 15 years of successful matchmaking. Over the fifteen year journey, Shaadi.com started with online business at its core and extended services to various platforms such as Mobile (through Shaadi.com Blackberry app), Television (through a show called Vivah) & on DTH (through Dish TV). In the offline space, Shaadi.com launched Shaadi Centres which has a network of 100+ centers across 87 Indian cities today.

See full article at India Infoline

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Cupid to Join Facebook's Revolutionary New Mobile Ecosystem

PR NEWSWIRE - Oct 20 - Cupid.com will be the very first online dating community to be available through the all-new HTML5-based version of Facebook. Facebook has icreated a social ecosystem, which users can download directly onto their iPhones and iPad devices and then use to select and run whichever apps they choose, directly from inside Facebook.

See full article at PR Newswire

See all posts on Cupid

7th iDateStartup.com Event in New York City

PRESS RELEASE - Oct 20 - The 7th iDate Startup event will take place in October 24th in New York City. There is no fee to attend the event and pre-registration is required at http://www.idatestartup.com. iDateStartup is a series of free local events for new dating industry startup companies and dating affiliates.

See full article at Webwire

Twofordrinks.com: Matchmaking Service for Busy Professionals

MARKET PRESS RELEASE - Oct 20 - Twofordrinks.com is a new personal matchmaking services for busy professionals. Twofordrinks.com will scout, interview, recruit as well as analyze each possible candidate from their network. In addition they offer a full range of personal improvement services as well.

The full article was originally published at Market Press Release, but is no longer available.

Global Personals - Fastest Growing Company in South East UK

PRESS RELEASE - Oct 19 - Global Personals has become the South East regional winner in the 2011 Deloitte Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in the UK. Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over five years and the company grew 1371% during this period.

Smooch.com: 10% of People Might Not Go on a Date if There Is No Alcohol

PRESS RELEASE - Oct 19 - Free online dating website Smooch.com has found that some daters would be less likely to go on a first date if they were not able to drink alcohol. In an online survey, it asked its members what the importance of a confidence boosting alcoholic drink was to the modern date and it revealed that for some people, having alcohol was too significant.

The full article was originally published at PRFire, but is no longer available.

See all posts on Smooch

Payment Processor Analyses Updated

OPW - Oct 19 - Our payment processors spreadsheet includes 19 processors, pre-paid card companies and 3rd party processors, analysed across 37 points of analysis, no less.

Our chart of mobile payment processors includes 6 major providers and we've analysed them across 38 points of analysis.  

You can download both of these for free.  

Optimal Payments and PaySafeCard have sponsored this initiative. Please consider doing business with these fine providers. We highly recommend them. (They serve our clients, and they've said nice things about them as well.)

These analyses are considerable resources for you, available entirely free.  

Download them here:

• Competitive Comparison Chart
• Competitive Comparison Chart Mobile Billing

(Full Disclosure: Optimal Payments and PaySafeCard are current clients, and iTelebill is a former client of Courtland Brooks)

eHarmony to Make Marketing More UK-focused

MARKETING WEEK - Oct 18 - UK country manager Ottokar Rosenberger says eHarmony will focus on what makes UK singles “really tick” and communicate the brand in a “truly local way”. eHarmony has switched creative agencies in the UK from US-based Donat/Wald + Haque to Karmarama, Marketing Week Engage Awards’ agency of the year winner, to develop UK-specific campaigns.

by Lara O'Reilly
See full article at Marketing Week

See all posts on eHarmony

Cupid Research: Different Messages Between Users Increase Revenue per Profile

PR NEWSWIRE - Oct 19 - Cupid has been collecting user behaviour statistics and now has decided to share some of its learnings from the data collected. Cupid found that the growth of the received ordinary emails (members send these to one another) shows a decrease in the number of payments and revenue from male profiles without a photo. Yet at the same time the average payment increases. This is closely related to the fact that customers who start spending more time on the site spend money on more advantageous packages. Admin messages work better to attract new users to the site. The more Admin messages sent, the greater the number of payments and revenue.

See full article at PR Newswire

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Service Spotlight: Interview with John Maitland, CEO of PhotoVerified

OPW - Oct 18 - Internet dating users don’t like showing up at dates to find they’re meeting someone they don’t recognize. The industry can do better to help users not have these nasty surprises. John’s helping with that cause. - Mark Brooks

You verify photos, how do you do that?
We have a patent pending system to combat the problem that it is easy to create fake personas online. PhotoVerified makes sure that photos are recent and authenticated by your system. Unlike other processes who have tried a similar thing ours involves a human element. Technical [solutions] help with filtering but every photo is looked at by one of our verifiers.

Where are your people based? You must have a low cost base in order to have real people. Are they offshore?
Our main base is currently in Toronto but we are looking at offshore data centers.

How do you make sure that the photos are really of the people who are on the service?
When you sign up our system generates a unique code for you to display in the photo you are going to send to us. We ask people to write their code down on a piece of paper using a black marker then we ask them to crumple up the paper and flatten it back out again.  It is a lot harder to Photoshop a code into a crumpled piece of paper. This photo then goes to our verification system. Verifier doesn’t know the code. All they are seeing is a photo of a person and a code. They type in the code or reject outright for reasons such as person covering face. Assuming everything is good, verifier types in code and clicks accept.  If code is incorrect and the system doesn’t recognize it then it escalates to another verifier. The first person could have just made a typo. Second verifier doesn’t know someone already saw this photo so if the next verifier types in correct code then its fine. If the code is bad again then it’s escalated to a manager who can see more info, possibly it’s just sloppy hand writing.

I love the crumpled up paper part, is that the part that’s patented?  What part of the process have you locked down?
We don’t have a patent issued yet, it’s still pending but it is part of the patent as well as other technical details that allow us to filter out signs of potential manipulation. Other thing is that we use a timer so it limits the ability to manipulate.

What’s your service cost?
Less than if you were trying to do this in house.