TORONTO SUN - Apr 29 - Between 2007 and 2012 the online dating industry more than doubled its revenue, going from $900M to $1.9 billion annually, and had a jump in visitors from 20M to 40M a year. But it's not just dating sites matching mates; it's social media too. A British survey found 72% of respondents used both dating sites and social networks to search for love, while 19% used social media sites alone.
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A Relationshopping Spree
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Mixr, Inc Is Now The Company Behind SpeedDate.com
OPW - Apr 26 - SpeedDate is announcing its name change to Mixr, Inc. SpeedDate will continue to operate as one of their branded product. Mixr is currently developing new products that focus on virtual environments where people can meet for a variety of social scenarios from dating, friendship, shared interests and beyond.
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Three Niche Dating Sites For Targeted Romance
CNN - Apr 26 - Single Fit People, a free dating site, allows folks who like to work out to find other folks who like to work out to. The site even organizes events where singles can mingle and run around. Tastebuds.fm is a free dating site that help you avoid anyone out there who "likes everything but rap and country". The site allows you to easily port over your musical interests from Facebook or Last.fm so as to weed out anyone not familiar with that most important holiday in the world, Record Store Day. A little site called Tawkify aims to act as your guide through the morass of online social interactions. For about $15 a pop, Tawkify matches up potential soulmates based on their Klout scores (a service that measures your social influence online) as well as other factors.
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39% Of Americans Spend More Time Socializing Online Than Face-to-Face
MARKETWIRE - Apr 25 - 39% of Americans spend more time socializing online compared to face-to-face, more than in the U.K. (36%) and Germany (35%), according to a study by Badoo. Aside from feelings of loneliness, the survey revealed that people could embellish the truth when sharing online, perhaps to appear more interesting to others, or to "control" their online persona. 25% of American respondents admit they have exaggerated or lied about who they've met or what they've done on their social networks, with a staggering 39% having shared bad news, such as a death or divorce.
The full article was originally published at MarketWatch, but is no longer available.
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Facebook Takes Down Manhunt's Fan Page
INSTINCT MAGAZINE - Apr 26 - According to the popular gay dating site Manhunt.net, its Facebook page was taken down without notice on April 4. This isn't the first time a gay related Facebook presence has been suspiciously moderated. A month ago Facebook mods came under fire for taking down an innocuous picture of two men kissing in protest of homophobia. Though Manhunt's content may have been a little more charged, did it warrant being banned without notice?
by Jonathan Higbee
The full article was originally published at Instinct Magazine, but is no longer available.
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ChristianDating.com Domain For Sale For $500K
PR WEB - Apr 25 - ChristianDating.com is available for $500,000 or through offers at http://www.superniche.com. ChristianDating.com has massive search engine potential and can be utilized to capture highly qualified leads that are more likely to convert to memberships, giving your existing company or start-up a unique competitive advantage over other niche Christian dating sites. According to the Google Keyword Tool, the “Christian Dating” keywords get almost 35% of the same U.S. search volume as “Dating.”
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Students Join Sugar Daddy Dating Sites
DAILYMAIL.CO.UK - Apr 24 - Female students are flocking to 'sugar daddy' dating sites to meet rich older boyfriends as they struggle with debts which will average £53K for those starting degrees this year. SeekingArrangement.com has released figures showing the 20 British universities with the highest number of students joining the controversial site. Top is Nottingham University with 61 sign-ups, followed by the University of Kent (57) and London School of Economics (51). Cambridge University came fourth with 46 students signing up to the dating website. The SeekingArrangement.com site is clearly more than happy with the influx of student signups. New members who are also students are upgraded by the site to a premium account, and they are given a 'college sugar babe' stamp on their profile. Members with these stamps get three times more responses than regular female members of the site. 35 % of the site's 50K UK members are students.
by Deborah Andrews
See full article at DailyMail.co.uk
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Mark Brooks To Provide The State Of The Mobile Dating Industry At iDate
WEBWIRE - Apr 24 - Mark Brooks, publisher of Online Personals Watch and CEO of Courtland Brooks, will provide an annual address to the dating industry on the state and size of the mobile dating market at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills on June 20-22, 2012.
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Is There A Science To Compatability?
PSYCHOLOGIES MAGAZINE - Apr 24 - The problem with online dating is that it’s easy to overlook potential ideal mates. The top-notch scientists hired by dating agencies insist that you have a far greater chance of meeting The One this way. ‘It’s online introducing,’ says Helen Fisher, anthropologist and chief scientific adviser at match.com. ‘You’ve got to get out there and get to know someone.’ Professor Robin Dunbar, a psychologist at Oxford University suggests that much of the interesting research on what makes people click has been based on friends rather than romantic partners. ‘Social psychologists have identified six key elements for compatibility in friendships,’ he says. ‘These are: speaking the same language and a similar background; education level; moral/political outlook; hobbies/interests; and a shared sense of humour.’ When it comes to fireworks between men and women, however, it is difficult to predict how far these basic rules of compatibility apply. Sometimes opposites attract, but we know they can just as easily repel. Most experts agree that the more you know yourself, the better. Everyone is the right and wrong person, there is no totally right person.
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iovation Finds 60% Increase In European Fraud Online
PRESS RELEASE - Apr 25 - iovation, the Device Reputation Authority protecting online businesses from fraud and abuse, announced that the rate of fraudulent online transactions it stopped in Europe is 60% greater today than a year ago. The rate of fraudulent transactions originating from Europe jumped from 1.3% from January to March 2011 to 2.1% from January to March 2012 and showed upward movement every quarter in between. The top three European countries for online fraud over the last year were Romania, Lithuania and Croatia according to iovation. From April 2011 to April 2012, iovation stopped 15M fraudulent online transactions in Europe.
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Online Dating & Matchmaking Symposium, New York, June 14th
OPW - Apr 23 - Murdock Capital Partners is hosting Wall Street's first Symposium for the Dating and Matchmaking industry. The Symposium will be a one-day event scheduled for June 14th and hosted at the 3 West Club, a private club venue. It is scheduled to begin at 9:00am with a continental breakfast and a series of presentations by the senior management of established companies that have an important presence in the industry. While lunch is served, a guest speaker will discuss the current state of the industry and the issues that define the trajectory of the industry. A cocktail reception for presenters, attendees, and guests will begin at 5:00 pm. The cost per presenting company is $10,500 all inclusive.
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Brian Bowman, theComplete.me CEO, To Keynote On Social Discovery At iDate LA
WEBWIRE - Apr 23 - Brian Bowman will provide the keynote address at the 9th annual iDate West Coast Mobile Dating Conference. The event takes place on June 20-22, 2012 at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. Bowman is the CEO/Founder of theComplete.me, the Internet’s first social dating network. He is the former VP of Product Match.com, VP of Community Yahoo!, and CMO Reply.com.
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Arranged Marriage For Hindus In 21st Century America
HUFFINGTON POST - Apr 23 - Kamna Mittal and her husband moved to the Bay Area soon after they were married in India in 2000. In addition to being in a new country, the couple were new to each other. Their marriage had been arranged. Now a mother of two, Mittal counts herself lucky that it worked out, but 12 years later, she wants to help Indian-American singles in the Bay Area meet directly. Within Indian culture (which is predominantly Hindu), marriage is as much about families coming together as it is about couples coming together. A family also might hire a marriage broker to help the process along. These days, matrimony websites can serve the same broker role as the "aunties." Bharatmatrimony.com has more than 20M profiles worldwide. The website's CEO, Murugavel Janakiraman, said 10% of clients are immigrants to the U.S. or American-born Indians. Indian immigrants tend to look for the same religion, caste and region, Mittal said. American-born Indians might want somebody who is Indian, preferably raised in America, too. 90% of Hindus in America marry within the faith, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
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Hate Dining Solo? Site Offers A Solution
CNN - Apr 23 - A new website called Invite For a Bite serves as a sort of meeting place where women who hate supping solo can post invites and make plans to dine together. Cressida Howard came up with the idea for "the site I wanted to join but couldn't find." "I was listening to a BBC radio program that involved an interview with women who traveled alone for business or pleasure. They were all strong women who had no problem traveling alone, but the one thing they all got very animated about was how they hated eating alone," Howard said. Less than two months old, Invite For a Bite has already seen invites for get-togethers in places from New York City to Addis Ababa. For one, in some countries it is frowned upon for women to be out on their own, says Howard. And it can even be dangerous. Not that meeting strangers from a strange city in a strange place via the Invite For a Bite website doesn't bring up its own issues. Which is why Howard has devoted an entire page on the site to safety tips. Another issue addressed on the Invite For a Bite site is why it is for women only. "As soon as you introduce the idea of men and women meeting for meals, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish it from a dating site," says Howard. "No matter how many times you explained that it wasn't, common sense dictates that it would be treated as such by some people.
by Jill Becker
See full article at CNN
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Cheek’d Is Online Dating In Reverse
TECH CRUNCH - Apr 22 - At Cheek'd website users fill out a profile and order a deck of cards, which say things like “act natural, we can get awkward later”. The cards also have a short ID code on them, with a URL for the Cheek’d website. When a suitor receives the card, the idea is that they’re so filled with curiosity that they enter the code on Cheek’d and are taken to user's profile page. Members pay $9.95 for a monthly subscription to keep their profile live. They have to pay extra for the cards which come in various sizes with corresponding pricing.
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Lisa Ronis: A New York City Matchmaker
BUSINESS INSIDER - Apr 21 - Lisa Ronis has been in the professional matchmaking business since 2000. Since then, she has built a lucrative business around helping elite professionals, both male and female, willing to spend thousands of dollars in their search for love. At any one time, Ronis has as many as 100 clients, from both New York and beyond, who all pay $15K a year for her services. Ronis herself has not remarried since getting divorced at the age of 27. To critics who question how a matchmaker could be single, she maintains that she is still “very much a relationship person” and that her own extensive dating experience is a big plus for her business. Ronis herself dabbled in reality television, hosting a reality dating show titled “Manhattan Matchmaker” that aired in 2006 in Canada. According to Lisa Clampitt, a New York City-based matchmaker and founder of the Matchmaking Institute, the industry has grown from ~1,200 matchmakers nationwide in 2006 to 1,800 today. Yet few of these professionals are willing to work with older women, says Clampitt, so Ronis has little competition in that market.
by Melanie Hicken
The full article was originally published at Business Insider, but is no longer available.
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SeekingArrangement.com Hosting European Launch Party In London
PR WEB - Apr 20 - SeekingArrangement.com, a dating site for sugar daddies and sugar babies, is going International. The website is hosting Sugar Rush: The European Launch Party at The Gore Hotel in London on May 20, 2012. The company plans to support all European languages by the end of this year to cater to sugar daddies and sugar babies in Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Netherland, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia. Tickets for the event are £40 for ladies and £80 for men.
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Interview With Alex Furmansky, President And Founder Of Sparkology
OPW INTERVIEW - Apr 20 - Sparkology is an exclusive dating site for the upper crust. You have to have an Ivy league degree to get in. I interviewed Alex Furmansky to get the skinny on his new site. - Mark Brooks
What's your founding story? What sparked Sparkology?
A few years ago I had so many female friends in their mid-20's to early 30's. They were having so much trouble finding a man using traditional dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony. They got over 30 messages a day from the wrong guys and ended up just ignoring them. I tried to experience this from a man's perspective. I spent the time to write a woman a long message only to find that my message ended up in the same inbox as the 29 other messages.
As a guy, your first interaction is proving that you're not a creep. This burden of proof is difficult.
So you're kind of on the matchmaking end of the market, I presume?
There are mass market dating sites, accessible and free for all and then there are the matchmakers that charge crazy amounts, but they're curative. I see us as a tech platform that allows us to do both. We're curative, we're exclusive. But at the same time we're scalable and self-directed.
What geographics are you going after first?
Since our market is educated young professionals, the most natural market is New York. After that it's the other large metro areas in the States, that includes San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Boston, D.C.
Growing a dating site is a very costly affair. Are you looking for money now? How do you fuel the growth?
Last April we raised a pretty substantial friends and family round so capital is not an issue. Now that we are ready to scale even bigger, we've started to raise a seed round now.
If I were single, would I make the cut to get onto your service?
Most of our members are invited by existing members. If you're not invited by a member, then you can go to our homepage and apply. You supply your LinkedIn or Facebook URL and that's how we screen you. Everyone is a young professional. We do place a slightly higher standard on our men. All of our men are verified graduates of top universities.
So you're manually reviewing accounts then?
To verify your alumni status, there are two ways to do it. You can give us your lifelong alumni email forwarding address. We issue you a confirmation email to that address. Or our staff will call you and have a personal conversation with you to welcome you to the site and ask you questions about your college experience and verify that you went to that school.
We have a feature called Date Feedback that helps keep people honest. So after a date, you can leave feedback for your date that our concierges see. So far we've had 2 guys who have been false in their profiles and we've had no problem kicking them out within 24 hours.
What did they lie about?
About age and occupation.
How about the women? Women lie more often about their age.
So far we've had no complaints from guys and no negative feedback. In fact, I thought that this feedback would be used to flag the bad apples, but it's actually being used to share success stories.
I was very surprised about your price-point. It seems extremely low and fair. It's under the average of the industry. You're charging $10/month for women and $2-3 per initial communication for guys.
That's correct. I'm not here to usurp people, I'm here to deliver a fair service. The reason we require credit cards is to make sure the person is serious and committed. It stops the fake profiles. For me that's the core reason for charging people. Making guys pay to start a conversation is sort of a tax on spam. It's no longer cost effective to send out 30 messages a day. It's better to pick those two, three, four women that you like.
How are you finding new members to reach critical mass?
We have this thing called a Race to 1000 in every city. It employs some gamification where it gets everybody on board to create critical mass in order to start interacting. That's how you seed a city. As far as gaining new members, the beauty about our site is that it is exclusive and high touch. We do men-only events and women-only events. It is seen as more of a community that you are proud to be part of and talk about. We give cool rewards for people who refer their friends. We'll send bottles of wine or t-shirts.
Match.com has their Daily 5. Most dating sites send emails with matches. Are you going to be doing that?
I like that every email that you get from Sparkology, you view as a gift and you want to open it. So I think that barraging people with emails everyday is against our mantra.
How are you measuring success?
There are two elements of success. One is the business success, but I think the better sense of success is how happy the people are on the site. You can gauge that very easily with the number of messages on the site and how the message sending correlates with the output of the algorithm.
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Check Him Out Gives Women 100% Control
WEBWIRE - Apr 18 - Check Him Out empowers women to “make the first move” and makes finding a man as easy as shopping for the latest fashions. Men must fill out their profiles and then wait to be added to a woman’s “dating shopping bag” before any contact can be made. Unlike typical dating sites where women are often harassed by unwelcome suitors, Check Him Out shifts away from the “meat market” atmosphere. Check Him Out will officially launch on May 7, but singles who join the website before midnight Pacific Time on May 6 will receive free credits.
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