THE NEXT WEB - Mar 1 - Hacker swipes 27M passwords from Mate1.com. A hacker on 'Hell', a dark web hacking forum, claims to have gained access to the passwords, which he says he later sold. The asking price was 20 bitcoin ($8,7K). It appears Mate1.com hosted the password files in plaintext without any hashing.
15 posts categorized "Mate1"
Mate1.com Has Been Hacked
| |
The Small Business Interview: What's Next For Online Dating?
MINYANVILLE - Feb 7 - When Mate1.com started up in 2003, social platforms were mostly chat rooms. Liz Wasserman, founder and CEO of Mate1.com, saw potential in this raw, new form of communication. Mate1.com now boasts ~40M subscribers (mainly in the US), and continues to grow and mature.
Q: Tell us about your business and what you do.
A: Liz Wasserman: Mate1.com is an online dating site. We’ve been around for 8 years. My brother Charles and I are the co-owners. I’m currently working on our new product, a brand new dating site with a different target audience that will be launching sometime this year.
Q: How has the company changed during the course of its lifespan?
LW: We’ve grown from eight people to over 40 now. We’ve had to provide a constantly adaptable service, making sure the user is kept engaged and nudged along with messaging and lots of feedback. Users now have the expectation that they’ll have the service in real time and will be able to use mobile technology, including location-based technology, and native apps.
Q: What's next?
LW: We’re launching iOS and Android apps this quarter.
Q: Where do you get your best ideas?
LW: A lot of them come in conversations with other business owners.
Q: What virtues do you admire in a business leader?
LW: Adaptability, persuasiveness, doggedness—setting your sights on a goal, going at it and not giving up.
Q: Do you put business first or life first?
LW: I would like to think that I put my life first, although that’s not always the case.
Q: What's your chief characteristic as a leader?
LW: I am analytical and skeptical.
Q: Your idea of small business CEO happiness?
LW: Apart from success, which is the raison d’etre of the CEO, my happiness is a function of the people in my company.
Q: If you weren’t running your own business, what would you be doing?
LW: I’d be writing and I’d be interviewing people. It was really my first love, journalism.
by Kathleen Culliton
The full article was originally published at Minyanville, but is no longer available.
| |
Mate1 Video Contest Searches For The Most Awkward Date
PRESS RELEASE - Nov 15 - One in five dates ends in awkwardness. And so the Mate1.com Check Please! contest was born, offering awkward dating victims a way to share their suffering with the world for a chance at $5,000 in prizes. How to Enter the Mate1.com Check Please! Contest
Step 1: Film a 1-2 minute video describing your most awkward dating experience
Step 2: Upload it to YouTube
Step 3: Register for the contest at checkpleasecontest.com/about/how-to-enter!
Step 4: Get your friends and family to watch the video and spread it through your social channels. The Final 10 most viewed and mentioned videos will make it to the finals where Pauly Shore, star of Encino Man, Bio Dome and Son in Law, will be the judge of whose date was the most awkward.
FULL ARTICLE @ OPEN PR
| |
Mate1 Sued For Sex Discrimination
OPW -- Mar 25 -- A class action lawsuit
has been
filed against Mate1 for providing its services to women for free but
charging men. The suit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
| |
Mate1.com Partners With iovation To Fight Fraud
PRESS RELEASE -- Mar 24 -- Mate1.com has partnered with iovation to help its customers fight online fraud and abuse. Using iovation ReputationManager(TM), subscribers can track the history of fraud and abuse associated with each unique computer or hand-held device used to access their website. Before iovation, the primary way in which Mate1 made connections between millions of customer accounts was by looking at email addresses, names, photographs, or physical addresses, which is extremely time consuming.
The full article was originally published at Portland Business Journal, but is no longer available.
| |
10 Things Online Dating Services Won't Say
SMART MONEY -- Feb 9 --
1. Keep your hopes high and your expectations low.
2. We've yet to meet two people who aren't a potential match. "No one knows if (personality profiling datin services) actually work," says author Robert Epstein. If you really want individualized matchmaking then consider a personal matchmaker.
3. Everyone's lying about something. Some users lie about their age to show up in more search results but most lies in the online dating universe are pretty small, says Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State.
4. We don't have as many members as it seems. Experts say that at best, subscriber services convert ~ 10 and 15% of browsers into members. That means 90% or more of the profiles at a subscriber site could belong to unreachable browsers. On free sites like Plentyoffish.com or OKCupid.com every profile belongs to an active member.
5. Fall in love too quickly and you could end up with an empty wallet. "The romance scam is the most prevalent on dating sites, and the hardest to stop", says Brian Erickson, director of operations at Mate1.com.
6. Our guarantees are only guaranteed to keep you here. Match.com and Yahoo Personals offer "guarantees" and six-month "promises". If you don't find the one during your six-month subscription, you'll get more time to keep trying. Dating sites do this because it's an easy, low-cost way to keep traffic up—and a great marketing tool, says David Evans, an industry consultant.
7. Don't expect quick results. "You can't just throw up a profile and expect to go on a date," says Mark Brooks, an industry consultant for online dating services. The world of online dating has its own rhythms and rituals, which often take some time. Keep that first date light. "You're going to know by the second sip of your latte if there's something there," says Trish McDermott, VP Love at Engage.com.
8. Once you log in, you're pretty much on your own. Some people could simply use more help than others, says Mark Brooks, but good luck getting it from the dating service you're using. "Online dating sites' biggest flaw is they don't offer service of any kind," he says. Rather, most of them function more like a giant virtual bar or nightclub.
9. You might not need all these extras—but we do. "Besides the overall dampening of consumer spending, the Internet dating market has simply become saturated", says Brooks. That means online dating services have had to start getting creative.
10. Good luck trying to break up with us.
FULL ARTICLE @ SMART MONEY
See all posts on Plentyoffish See all posts on Match.com
See all posts on OKCupid See all posts on Yahoo Personals
See all posts on Mate1 See all posts on Engage
| |
Liz Wasserman, Mate1.com - CEO Interview
OPW INTERVIEW -- Nov 5 -- I talked with Mate1.com's CEO, Liz Wasserman on the subject of scamming. - Mark Brooks
What kind of scamming activity have you encountered at Mate1?
We've encountered a wide range of scamming activity. It's evolved over time partly, I think, because people in this industry have been pretty quick to adapt. Scams fall by the wayside as people adapt to them.
In the early days, almost all of it emanated from African countries that don't have laws against wire fraud. From what I could tell, the scammers basically set up call centers full of people who created thousands of fake dating profiles. They would pretend to be very attractive women in the U.S. who were "temporarily" in some African country and needed to get home. They would try to extort money via Western Union. We saw a lot of those, even from Eastern Europe for a while. We actually have a whole catalog of these schemes that we made available on the site (link: http://www.mate1.com/fraud/fraud_warning) because we wanted to tell our members what to look out for.
And then there are the ones you can't really prepare for because they're idiosyncratic. People who are looking for love can be some of the most vulnerable people out there. Anyone who has an attractive picture and can talk their way into someone's heart, basically can very often convince them to send some money. And those often tend to be minor scams, but we do catch them more often than not simply by having undercover customer service agents trolling the site all day long.
We've also used various technologies, like matching up IP's with locations to make sure people aren't misrepresenting where they are, but for the most part it's a matter of constant communication with our customer service department to find out what the latest thing is and to quickly adapt to it.
Have you found the number of scamming incidents increasing?
I think early on we developed a reputation as being tough on scams because it used to be one of our major preoccupations. It ate up a huge amount of our resources. And as we adapted and put in more technological mechanisms to prevent it, scammers who are in-the-know went elsewhere.
Have you found any ways to catch them pre-signup?
There are ways and a lot of them revolve around IP detection – knowing where the person is half the battle. There are certain areas that these people tend to congregate. We have a couple of mechanisms in place to try to shuffle out those people who are clearly suspicious. Luckily, scammers don't tend to be extraordinarily brilliant technologically, so we're able to outsmart them.
I hear the Russians are particularly adept.
We do catch quite a few in Russia and surrounding countries. Then there are some women in Russia who are borderline. You don't know if they're a scammer or just in a really bad situation and you have to be careful to distinguish between the two.
But, yes, they're highly intelligent and highly desperate so you have to watch out for Eastern Europe, for sure. I know there are sites that have blacklists which we do refer to from time to time. I don't know, though, if they're still as good as they used to be. They used to keep fairly up-to-date lists of these personas. There was one called Russianwomenblacklist.com. I think having central repositories that could be intranet shared by people in the industry would be really useful. You just wouldn't want to share it with the scammers.
Any other thoughts on how the industry might be able to work together?
I think people are pretty forthcoming with information in this business. Whenever you meet people at industry events, people like to talk and I think that's a great thing. Anything we in the industry can do to devote and share resources would, in the end, actually be money-saving for all of us. I think it would be great if we could all collaborate and help each other create the best anti-scam systems possible. I would certainly participate in such a thing.
| |
Nielsen Internet Dating Rankings Update
OPW -- Sep 16 -- We have updated Nielsen Online U.S.A. internet dating rankings. Yahoo! Personals, Match.com and Singlesnet maintained their 1st, 3rd and 4th position respectively. TRUE ousts MSN Dating from it's 5th position. PlentyofFish jumped from #9 to #7. AOL Personals went down to #8 from #7. Mate1 and MSN Dating slide off the top 10.
| |
Mate1 CEO, Liz Wasserman - Interview
OPW INTERVIEW -- Sep 22, 2007 -- Mate1 is doing well. It's a casual dating site where women can join free. X-rated photos aren't allowed, but revealing photos are encouraged. Here's my interview with Liz Wasserman. - Mark Brooks
What is Mate1’s founding story?
It’s a family business. My father and I started it in 2003. The dominant sites then were very clean, corporate sites, like Matchmaker and Match, and sex dating sites, like AdultFriendFinder. We felt there was room for something in between. Something that wasn’t geared towards moral debates or fetishes and one-night stands. Rather, something that allowed users the freedom to express themselves and talk about sex in their profiles. A site that would let members use more slightly-revealing photos of themselves, if they felt like it. A more libertarian approach to the whole thing, but without anything X-rated.
So, we decided to start Mate1 with that in mind. We built it in 2003 and ramped up through 2004 to what we thought was a success.
How is the site different from other Internet dating sites?
It is an Internet dating site and in some ways it’s very similar to other ones of our size. But we do still occupy that middle ground between adult and conservative sites and I think others have even followed us in that regard.
A lot of our members are looking for shorter-term relationships, more casual ones. And people who are looking for that don’t feel intimidated by our site. We don’t ask a lot of deep, probing questions. Our questionnaire focuses much more on sparkly things, like your interest in music and food. The things that get conversations going rather than the things that go deep at the heart of moral and relationship-oriented questions. I think we really appeal to people in the way that social networks do – as a basis for networking with people who have similar interests as you.
How do you allow members to communicate on the site?
Right now, it’s still pretty simple. There’s email and chat. With email, you click on a link and fill out a form to email another user. The chat is more of a one-on-one, instant messenger feature where people chat privately with other users they find interesting (we’ve opted against group chats ). And if someone asks to chat with you, you have the opportunity to say yes or no.
Those are the primary ways that people communicate on the web. There have been some phone experiments, but nothing we made live. We did build a one-on-one, double-blind phone system a while back that we weren’t sure the public was ready for, but it’s something we’re still planning.
I think now is the time for a phone feature, partly because there are older people getting online. Kids, even on their phones, mostly send text messages. People in their 20’s and even 30’s are not big direct phone users in the way that perhaps people in their 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s are. I just heard that the average age of a person on a U.K. dating site is 45, which I thought was pretty amazing. I think that is a generation that is much more comfortable on the phone and more irritated by instant messaging. For some of those people, we could really have a lot of success with phone products that allow people to protect their anonymity. That’s something we’re planning, hopefully, for this year.
How would you define Mate1? Tell me more about your branding choice.
It’s an online dating site that allows users to talk about intimate things, as opposed to adult dating sites that are all about a sexual relationship. Intimate doesn’t mean sexual. We have a lot of very devout Christians on our site who are looking for marriage and a lot of single parents looking to meet other single parents. We have all kinds of people at different stages of their lives who are irritated with or not interested in sites that censor their profiles. People who want to be able to answer questions about sex. We have a multiple choice questionnaire where you can indicate what your sexual preferences are. Nothing too extreme, but basic questions about what you like and don’t like. So we offer people a safe, online way to meet and be intimate and interact in such a way as to decide whether to go to the stage of actually meeting in person.
What is the average age on Mate1?
The last time we did a check, it was 30 but that was quite a while ago. Since then, we’ve actually been targeting primarily older people, so I would say our average age is now higher than that. We have ad campaigns that target people over the age of 25 and others that target people over the age of 40. We’re interested in figuring out where our best demographic is. Social networking has really caught on so strongly with the 20 and 30 something’s that there’s a divide that’s starting in the industry. Maybe that is what’s accounting for the increasing average age or maybe it’s because people in later stages of their lives are starting to take dating more seriously and have more of an interest in meeting people outside of their immediate social circle.
Have you considered entering Europe or Asia?
Yes, and I’m very angry at us for not doing it yet. It’s something that we need to do, particularly Europe. Asia is more of a challenge, culturally and linguistically, for us. It’s going to be a much bigger undertaking. But, if I were to examine our staff here at Mate1, we probably have every major European language covered. We’re planning to tackle Europe and we’ve actually created a strategy for it.
What are your goals for Mate1 for 2007 through 2008?
Internationalization would be one of them. Another is more diversification of the communication mediums on the site. We want to add video chat. We think it is really catching on and is going to be big, if it isn’t already. People who have web cams use them. It’s a great way to verify the identity of the person you’re communicating with.
The other one is phone, which I’ve already talked about. We’re still trying to decide how exactly to do that. We haven’t come to any firm conclusions, but we want to give people the opportunity to communicate anonymously by phone before they exchange numbers.
Aside from that, we’re just going to improve the way we communicate with our members and get them more active on the site. We’re going to work on matchmaking applications and marketing to our members to make sure they understand the features available to them, the kinds of subscriptions plans available. We’re going to focus more on our actual members rather than acquiring new ones, in a sense.
| |
TRUE Spices Things up With Truespice.com
OPW -- TRUE has succumb is offering a piece of spice with brand extension TRUESpice.com. They've been throwing 25k uniqes at it per day since the beginning of April. Lavalife is broadly known as a casual dating product. Mate1 offers 'intimate dating.' SexSearch leads the way as the most full on sexy of the sex dating sites. I wonder how far TRUE is willing to go with their sexy ads? - Mark Brooks
COMMENT: Meir, CEO of Date.com, enlightened me that TRUESpice.com is actually an Azoogleads splash page.
| |
The Accidental 'Friend' Finder
BUSINESS 2.0 MAGAZINE -- Mar 30 -- Andrew Conru, a mechanical engineering Stanford PhD, started the first online dating site, WebPersonals, in the early '90s, sold it in 1995, [started again in 1996] and now owns 27 sites under Various Inc. which control twice as much online dating traffic as Match.com. AdultFriendFinder accounts for 60% of the revenue. Conru's privately held, 450-person company brings in well over $200 million in annual revenue, and averaged 40% annual growth for the past nine years. With more than 35 million visitors in 2006 and 75,000 new users registering each day, AFF ranks among the 100 most popular sites in the U.S.A. It's become so mainstream that a joke about it appeared in the Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore romantic comedy, Because I Said So. "In Hugh Hefner's day, it was 'It's OK to look at sexuality,'" Conru says. "Now it's OK to be sexual." The average AFF user pays $20 a month; others shell out as much as $50. "The more niche you get, the more value per member," Conru explains. To expand without investment capital, Conru invented a massive affiliate program, in effect outsourcing his marketing to the public. Various now has more than 500,000 affiliates. This year his goal is to buy six businesses. So far he's done well with the three purchases he's made (Gradfinder.com, Bondage.com, and FastCupid.com). FULL ARTICLE @ CNN
Mark Brooks: Here's the Quantcast numbers for the top adult dating sites...
AdultFriendFinder - 9.6m uniques/month
SexSearch - 3.3m uniques/month
Mate1 - 2.5 million uniques/month
I worked for Andrew in 2003 and remember Andrew walking into the marketing office one day and declaring part serious, part in jest, 'who can I fire today.' He was on his third marketing team in two years. Six months later one third had quit and the other third had been canned.
| |
Comscore's Canadian Internet Dating Rankings
OPW -- Sep 28 -- The Canadian internet dating rankings are now in. Both Lavalife and PlentyofFish edge out further against their competition. Canoe ReseauContact and Mate1 move one spot to #3 and #4 as Spark reduces it's traffic and relegates to the #5 spot. NETCLUB.FR and Yahoo Personals move up one spot in a similar fashion. LoveHappens reduces it's traffic and relegates itself down from #6 to #9. Match grows a little stronger and moves up into 10th spot.
| |
November 2005 Site Rankings
Dec 27 -- The November rankings are live (see left bar). Nielsen has tidied social networks Myspace, Facebook, hi5 and Friendster out of their online dating rankings, leaving Yahoo Personals (1), Match (2) and TRUE (3) with the November 2005 top spots.
Not much change with the Alexa rankings. Plentyoffish and Friendfinder bump Date.com down two spots to #6. For the social networking rankings Facebook bumps Friendster out of the top 3. Myspace now leads the social networking category, followed by Hi5 and Facebook.
TRUE trumps American Singles on the Hitwise top 15 rankings for November and takes the #5 spot. Singlesnet moves up one spot to #7 and wrestles Plentyoffish and adult oriented Mate1 down one place. MSN leans on it's online dating and moves up five full places to take the #10 position. Niche site Blackpeoplemeet impressively moves up a spot to #11 and Perfect Match gets squeezed out to #12. Youngsters online dating site, Hotornot, moves up a spot to #13. - Mark Brooks
| |
Friends with Benefits. Buddies. Booty calls. Is this what dating has become?
THE SEATTLE TIMES -- Dec 11 -- Today's dating scene is about as easy to pigeonhole as the color of paint. Sure, there are plenty of traditionalists out there, but there are many others who don't date so much as hang out or hook up. Some rely on what I'll politely call "bed buddies" to get them through the lonely times. Dating has changed dramatically. Fifty years ago, a single woman would sooner hide out in a darkened apartment than let her neighbors know she didn't have a Saturday night steady. These days, she'll post her picture on AdultFriendFinder or Lavalife's "Intimate Encounters" section to find a no-strings sex partner for the night. "If somebody has no intention of looking for someone special in their life and just wants sex for fun and pleasure, isn't it better that they tell you up front?" says Pepper Schwartz, University of Washington sociology professor and author of "Finding Your Perfect Match." (and PerfectMatch.com spokesperson). "The honesty may be a little difficult to take, but it might hurt less in the long run."
The full article was originally published at Seattle Times, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: This is a groundbreaking article. I rarely see the subject of casual dating sites broached in the press. Some interesting social trends are empowering the press to start picking this subject area up. Adultfriendfinder, Sexsearch and Mate1 are the top adult dating sites.
| |
May Online Personals Rankings
OPW -- June 8 -- The new Hitwise rankings are out. Webdate has moved up yet another spot and is now in the top 5. Perfect Match and Black Planet have moved up one spot each, displacing True.com. Hotornot and Mate1 have pushed up one spot displacing MSN Match and Cupid, respectively. - Mark Brooks
| |