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Zoosk Team Gets Mud On Their Faces
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GuySpy: Facebook Is Tad Homophobic
QUEERTY - Sep 28 - GuySpy, the location-based gay dating app, has run into problems with Facebook’s Community Standards, which allegedly prohibit pornography and explicit nudity. But it seems that those standards don’t apply for everyone. Facebook has a strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and imposes limitations on the display of nudity. GuySpy posted this pic to its page only to see it taken down within hours by Facebook. GuySpy found that their pic was nothing compared to the page “Hot boy sexy ladies of Dhaka”. This site has been up for five months. Perhaps, facebook is just a tad homophobic and sexist to boot! Exploiting the female body is just fine, but showing a beautiful man almost completely nude is a disgrace.
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OKCupid CEO Shares The Social Media Strategy
BUSINESS INSIDER - Sep 27 - OkCupid has become incredibly popular in recent years. The tipping point was in 2009, when a strong social media strategy helped it gain traction, says CEO and Co-Founder Sam Yagan. One of the best ways to grow a business is to expand the possible user base. OkCupid tries to reach a broad audience with its blog by choosing interesting topics and great graphs that provide information as well as entertainment. OkCupid only has 18,083 Twitter followers and 12,860 Facebook page likes, which is nothing compared to how many people comment on its blog. Social media is just one piece of the puzzle. “There’s a rule of thumb in marketing that you have to have seven ad impressions before someone actually takes an action," says Yagan. "It’s reading an article on Facebook; it’s hearing the story on the news; it’s hearing from one of your friends who’s using OkCupid."
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HowAboutWe Provides Hand-Picked Date Ideas For Couples
TECH CRUNCH - Sep 27 - Helping couples to stay connected and in love is what HowAboutWe is all about. Each month, couples receive a DateBook with one-of-a-kind dates specifically curated for its users. For October, the company provides different dates, from a hike in Harriman State Park with pickup in New York to a private 3-course brunch at Kin Shop with Top Chef Harold Dieterle. After having subscribed for $80 a month, couples can fo on free dates, such as a Korean food cooking class. HowAboutWe has raised $18.5M so far. The service is currently available in New York City, with plans to expand in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC and more in 2013.
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Dating Site Charges $100,000 For Membership
PR WEB - Sep 27 - SecretDiamondClub.com claims to effectively weeds out all those fake millionaires crowding the cheap ‘millionaire’ dating sites. Whereas existing millionaire dating sites charge $20-$30 a month, allowing any man to pose as a millionaire, Secret Diamond Club charges $10-100K. "If you don’t have $10K to $100K to sign-up, you’d better go to one of those sugar daddy sites where you can pretend to be worth zillions", says CEO and founder Gus Terkelsen.
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Cupid Launches LoveAgain, 50+ Dating Site In US
THE NEXT WEB - Sep 27 - Cupid is expanding its portfolio in the US with the launch of mature dating site LoveAgain along with a matching Facebook app. LoveAgain is the US version of Cupid’s existing UK site for the over 40s, MatureDatingUK. Cupid has a close eye on the American territories of course and acquisition is not off the agenda as the firm expands. "If we find the right priced acquisition in the US we could accelerate our growth", says CEO Bill Dobbie.
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Coffee Meets Bagel Lands $600K From Lightbank, Match.com Co-Founder
TECH CRUNCH - Sep 26 - Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating site that provides one match per day, every day at noon. The startup is now announcing $600K funding, led by Lightbank and including Match.com co-founder Peng T. Ong. It will be used to help Coffee Meets Bagel expand to San Francisco, where the startup recently moved its offices. The site is growing 50% month-over-month, setting up ~100K introductions which have resulted in 6K actual direct connections. 70% of users actively checking the service for matches every day. Coffee Meets Bagel is free, but it also uses a freemium model based around virtual credits to unlock the identity of mutual friends users share on Facebook.
by Darrell Etherington
See full article at Tech Crunch
See all posts on CoffeeMeetsBagel
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
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Match.com Partners With ITV For Dating Show Girlfri3nds
THE DRUM - Sep 25 - match.com will be the partner for new ITV2 show Girlfri3nds, which follows three women as they search for love. The deal includes broadcast and online sponsorship of the show by match.com, as well as digital and social media activity. Hosted by Emma Willis, the show will begin with an audition with a hundred men from all over the country ‘pitching’ themselves to the three women. During each episode match.com’s resident relationship expert, Kate Taylor, will be tweeting dating advice.
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Asia Pacific iDate Is Nov 8-9, 2012 In Sydney
WEBWIRE - iDate Down Under is taking place in Australia In November 8-9,
2012. The top CEOs and affiliates in the online dating, mobile dating
and matchmaking business from the Asia/Pacific Region are expected in
attendance.
Speakers include:
- Oasis Interactive
- Red Hot Pie
- Flitter
- Dating Factory
- PinkSofa
- Unoduo
- ...and others.
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How To Land An Angel Investor
HUFFINGTON POST - Sep 24 - The Small Business
Association estimates there are ~250K angel investors in the USA. Angel
investors are drawn to Chicago's tech renaissance of app developers,
game developers, a large Drupal community, product developers for mobile
devices and much more. Most -- but not all -- startups are losing
money.
- Insist it's a $1 Billion Company
- Pretend You Don't Need Funding
- Miracle Marketing: Tell investors your marketing plan is to eventually create a video that will go viral
- Have an Unoriginal Idea in Need of Talent
- Pitch a dating site that sounds like 20 other dating site pitches in the last month
- Throw Away Success
- Take Credit for the Angel Tax Credit
How to Close an Investment
- Barrier to Entry: If you have a provisional patent, if you've developed proprietary information, if you have a sustainable competitive advantage, if you have previous industry experience, mention it right away
- Skin in the Game: If you've invested your own money, mention it. Explain how far your investment took you and why you need more funding to take your business to the next level
- Show Off: If you have a developed product, demonstrate it
- Have a Business Plan: No one expects you to have all the answers, but if you know the right questions, you're head and shoulders above other pitches
- Value Your Company: Explain how much of an investment you think you need and how much of the ownership of the company you're willing to give up.
by Janet Tavakoli
See full article at Huffington Post
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
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Interview With Sean Wood, Communications Director & Art Seredyuk, Head Of Mobile At Cupid plc
OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 25 - Cupid has done well in Europe and is now setting its sites on the USA. That should bode well for its stock. I think Cupid is the best brand in the industry. Noone else has 2,000 years of branding to back them up! I sought out someone to talk about the baby and mobile dating. Sean Wood and Art Seredyuk took my interview. - Mark Brooks
How is Cupid mobile doing for you?
Very well. We started working with mobile as early as 2007. We were able to react quickly as trends emerge. In February 2011 we saw 200,000 registration on BeNaughty coming through the web and 30,000 via mobile. In March 2012, we saw half a million registrations on mobile and half a million on web.
So is this 50/50 across the board or is it particular locations? Are you seeing more mobile users in the UK versus the USA?
No, in USA, the mobile usage is now overtaking web. Not so in the UK, yet.
Interesting. What's the profile of a mobile user versus an online user? Is there any difference?
Not really. It's worth pointing out that we have a multi-platform approach.
And how are they monetizing? We know Facebook isn't making too much money from mobile. How about Cupid?
We are. For our registration, we have only one simple subscription to get access to all our products. We make money from communication only.
What platforms are you on at this stage?
We've got native applications for the two major mobile platforms. We've got an application for iPhone, Android and iPad. Also an application for mobile in HTML5 for smart phones. So a customer can decide, depending on their preference, what application or site to use. The market now is about a 50/50 split. We even have websites for older phones because they are still on the market.
Why did you decide to go with native applications rather than just use HTML5?
Market researchers say that there's no elimination of a single platform at the moment. So we're not trying to gamble and put all of our eggs in one basket. We have the development teams to support both platforms.
Have you chosen to use location-based services in the applications?
Yes, absolutely. Location-based services are a likable part of a dating service. No matter what you're using, application or an HTML5 site, you can do a 1 click search and an automatic system will get your geographical location and will match you with singles. It filters out based on your search criteria and it will show your results on your map of which singles are accessible around you.
How would you say your mobile app is differentiated from your competitors?
It's not only about mobile apps. It's more about strategy. For example, we provide our customers with a truly multi-platform solution.
What features are you most proud of?
So from internal features, I can highlight our tracking and reporting system. Which is a system that allows us to track almost everything, see conversions for every device. It helps us understand which works best for us, helps us with real time optimization. Speaking about customers features, it's obviously location-based search.
Did you build the mobile applications in house or did you elect to use any external sources?
Actually, we built all of our applications and mobile sites in house. We have a very skilled team with access to all of those development tools. This also means that we can react fairly quickly to trends.
You mentioned that you are most proud of the conversions tracking and the metrics that you're able to pull from the apps. What channels have you preferred for marketing? Where do you find people?
We use almost all available channels. For example, we actively work with CPC, CPI and CPA networks. We have our own internal affiliate program. We secured some good direct deals.
So we know with online conversions that typically 10% of registrants convert to paying members and they stick around for 3 months. A typical new member registrant costs about six bucks or so. How does that compare to a mobile channel? What do you think the industry standard number should be for the mobile channels, in terms of conversions and the time people stick around.
Here at Cupid, I can tell that there is a big difference between the mobile channels and web. At the moment, we probably see 25 to 30% lower price for mobile registrations. But I think the industry will change because of a lot of demand for mobile traffic and in the next six months, we'll have the same metrics for mobile as we do for web traffic.
Is the mobile platform available to partners for white labeling?
Our web white label platform will have the HTML5 element with it so our partners will have mobile optimized sites. They simply, as default, won't get an iPad app, or an iPhone app, or an Android app. However we certainly could build one for partners quite easily.
So here's my second question that follows on from it. So, yes, you can do white labels. And the question that you would ask me is how much money I'd spend on promoting it. I would say I'm going to spend $200,000 in the next month on trafficking just for mobile. Where would you recommend that I spend the money?
If you don't know what types of traffic is best for you, you might have to go to CPA networks so you can get your metrics on your installations or your registrations. You can also go to some mobile agencies which are a lot of the market at the moment. They can provide you some help with CPA and CPI networks.
So specifically, who would you say I should not use? What channels or specific source do you think are the worst?
For every source, and every network, you can find some verticals that won't perform well for you. It's all about A/B testing.
In terms of mobile payments, what are the options that you are allowing users to use?
We tried to add all of the web and mobile payments. Obviously, we have a credit card payment. We have a mobile specific SMS payment, we use mobile PayPal. We use a specific mobile system, Payforit. We keep an eye on all innovations in mobile payments so when something new is available on the market, we can add it to our sites and our applications.
You also have the Cupid apps available for download on iPhone. So Apple's taking their 30% cut. How do you feel about that?
We don’t like it, but we have to deal with it. We prefer to use Android, because we can use our own in house payment system.
Who else do you think is doing a good job in mobile dating?
I don’t' think anybody is doing anything particularly impressive in commercial terms. We would like to see what Facebook does with mobile and when they get their mobile advertising platform running.
If you were Facebook what would you change on the Facebook mobile app?
I don't know, because the problem is not that they don't have a good mobile application. Almost 50% of the users are using Facebook on their mobile. The problem is that they are not monetizing well on mobile. The mobile advertising is the real announcement. So we'll wait.
Are you offering advertising through Cupid?
Yeah, we sell some apps for our non-paid members for additional monetization.
Are you focused on app downloads or are you showing other ads?
Most of our ads are cross-promotion of our other brands.
What do you think Cupid mobile is going to look like in a couple of years' time? What's your vision moving forward?
Regarding our worldwide presence, in mobile we've got a very, very high presence in countries with high mobile penetration like US, UK, France. So our plans is to maintain our high positions, retain our places. Our Android application tops the lifestyle category in the Android marketplace. We are going to retain those positions and get better positions with market growth in European countries and Latin American countries.
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Dating Factory To Speak At The iDate Moscow
PRESS RELEASE - Sep 24 - Dating Factory, the white label dating provider, will present at the Eastern-European Online Dating Conference taking place on October 25-26, 2012 in Moscow, Russia. Lisa Moskotova, the COO in Dating Factory will speak about dating software trends, new developments and market demands in Russia and Eastern Europe.
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FilipinoCupid.com: Two Female Members For Every Male Member
PR NEWSWIRE - Sep 24 - ~2M Filipina women now actively using FilipinoCupid.com. The female/male ratio is 2:1. FilipinoCupid.com asserts its services are designed for serious-minded men and women looking for a committed relationship – not just a casual fling. FilipinoCupid.com is part of the Cupid Media online dating network, made up of ~30 niche dating sites and attracting ~30M members internationally.
The full article was originally published at Herald Online, but is no longer available.
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How Smartphones Are The New Wingman
CNN - Sep 23 - Online dating used to be largely a deskbound activity. But in recent years, mobile apps like Blendr have employed constant Internet access and location-based services to turn the smartphone into a wingman of sorts. Today's mobile location apps connect singles based on the proximity. Grindr has been a global success, with 1.1M daily active users in 192 countries. OkCupid also made its own location-aware app last year called OkCupid Local. Match.com and eHarmony have also gone mobile, but their apps are still more like window shopping. Location data isn't required to make the smartphone useful for meeting people. Smartphone owners can use Bump, a mobile app that lets you exchange contact information easily by bumping two phones together. Bump was an early hit in the iPhone app store and has been downloaded ~100M times.
by Heather Kelly
See full article at CNN
See all posts on Blendr See all posts on Match.com
See all posts on Grindr See all posts on eHarmony
See all posts on OkCupid
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