The new How About We home page is pretty slick. I love how mouse movements toggle you smoothly between HAW for singles and HAW for couples. This must look great on iPads. Please excuse the lame attempt at an animated GIF.
HowAboutWe Home Page For Singles And Couples
By
· 2 Comments
Dating Industry Advisory Services
Are you a dating site startup looking to make a splash or an established player in the marketplace looking for answers? Online Dating Insider Advisory Services focus on product development, revenue generation, site traffic, site reviews and *much* more. Contact us to learn more.
Are you a dating site startup looking to make a splash or an established player in the marketplace looking for answers? Online Dating Insider Advisory Services focus on product development, revenue generation, site traffic, site reviews and *much* more. Contact us to learn more.
Couples Apps Search For Users & A Purpose
By
· 3 Comments
For the last several months I have been looking at the couples app market. I’ve downloaded scores of apps and have “relationships” with a number of friends in order to evaluate the services. It quickly became apparent that there are two sorts of apps for couples, mini-Facebooks and therapy apps.
The min-Facebook apps (think Path with flirting) offer little more than photo sharing and maybe silly little drawing features and goofy bling that partners can share with each other. These are the apps that make you question just how screwed up we are as a society. Lot’s of cringe-inducing games and questions with little or no scientific background.
Then you have the apps focused on keeping relationships happy and healthy. The majority of these also have little or no real science behind them, although this appears to be changing as people start to see the market potential. A couple really stand out, which I’ll dig into in a future post.
Actually there is a third market segment, couples apps like HowAboutWe, but those are selling expensive dates, which in a way could be considered relationship maintenance, but again, it’s just dating deals.
Today I received an email from Tokii, a service for couples that shares quotes, games and some communication questions. I thought the service was raw but had potential, and then I saw this. Check out this screenshot from the email. A bit of a shock, to say the least. My testing partner emailed me and said “No chance in hell” when I tried to get her to play these games with me. Oh well, at least I tried, all in the name of research.
I’m still waiting for a rock-solid couples app that isn’t goofy, downright stupid or based on generic information or science. It’s gotta have a measurable track record as well. Does such an app exist?
Zoosk Owns Casual Dating,Tops $40 Million Revenue In 1Q 2013
By
· 2 Comments
Zoosk announced record revenues of $40 million in the first quarter of 2013. $40 million!!! Looks like Zoosk could have a $200 million dollar year. Available in 25 languages and serving more than 70 countries, the company has raised more than $40 million in equity from Bessemer Venture Partners, ATA Ventures and Canaan Partners. Via Biz Journals.
Also in the first quarter of 2013, Zoosk’s website experienced a 116 percent increase in monthly total unique visitors compared to the same period last year. For its mobile products, the number of monthly active users increased more than 200 percent year-over-year. Zoosk attributes this growth to its distinctive approach to matchmaking and a strategic focus on mobile. Via Marketwired.
Great numbers and congrats to Zoosk on throwing up big numbers. $200 million a year puts them in eHarmony territory, and the two sites couldn’t be different in terms of user demographics. Zoosk is definitely one of the kings of casual dating. I wonder what Badoo is doing these days? Last year all the talk was about them hitting $150 million. POF could have been doing this kind of revenue as well, right? And don’t forget Twoo, they could make a big run now that they are owned by Meetic.
POF Cleans Up Its Act
By
· 4 Comments
When I logged into POF today I saw two interesting messages.
TL;DR (too long, didn’t read): POF is blocking hookups based on age difference and message wording, resulting in immediate bans, Intimate Encounters going away, 17% of the time we can pick the exact person you will end up dating, 70% of POF use is via a mobile phone.
Markus says, “Unfortunately about 2% of men started to use POF as more of a hookup site mostly due the the casual nature of cell phone use.”
Only 2%? On the website that % has to be much larger. In the last few years, almost every single person I’ve talked to mentions POF feeling quite hookup-y. Glad to see POF taking proactive steps to clean up the site. Will this sanitized version of POF result in growth or decline in members?
First this from the home page:
POF Has More Dates, More Relationships, More Visits Than Any Other Online Dating Site.My name is Markus and I created POF. Now with the help of a team of PhDs weve created the worlds most advanced matching system. If you are in contact with 100 different singles, 50% of the time your future partner is in the top 10, and 17% of the time we can pick the exact person you will end up dating. Signup to the worlds most advanced dating site today and meet the one you deserve!
My inbox contained this:
My name is Markus and I created POF/Plentyoffish. When I created POF, I wanted it to be all about finding relationships with the right person. For the first 7 years this worked really well, I got the site to 10 million users without any employees people and POF was generating a ton of relationships. Around 3 years ago, everyone started using the website via mobile phones. Today about 70% of POF use is via a mobile phone and unfortunately about 2% of men started to use POF as more of a hookup site mostly due the the casual nature of cell phone use.
In sticking with my vision that POF is all about Relationships, I’m going to make a bunch of changes to ensure it stays a relationship-focused site.
1. Any first contact between users that contains sexual references will not be sent. Anyone who tries to get around this rule will be deleted without warning. This rule has actually been in effect since last month and it’s made the site so much better.
2. You can only contact people +/- 14 years of your age. There is no reason for a 50 year old man to contact a 18 year old women. The majority of messages sent outside those age ranges are all about hookups. Anyone who tries to get around this rule will get deleted.
3. Intimate Encounters will go away in the next few months. There are 3.3 Million people who use the site every day, of those there are only 6,041 single women looking for Intimate Encounters. Of those 6,041 women, the ones with hot pictures are mostly men pretending to be women. Intimate Encounters on POF can be summed up as a bunch of horny men talking to a bunch of horny men pretending to be women.
In short the vast majority of people will not be impacted. This is because the vast majority of people are not going around spamming women saying “let’s have sex tonight”. I can’t change POF alone, I need your help to get the word out there that POF is all about relationships!
Markus
Getting the general public to shift their perception of POF before they sign up is going to be expensive (millions of dollars) and take a while. I’m sure the new and hip eHarmony is spending a lot as well on their new Malibu layout and site design (which I still need to post about).
POF Landing Pages, NYT Takeover
By
· 5 Comments
I cannot view a single article on today’s New York Time’s without seeing this six-year-old POF ad. Talk about a takeover.
Check out the landing page, very un-POF in terms of style. Looks nice. Two things jumped out at me. First, they claim that 30% of everyone on the web has a dating profile. I cannot believe that number, where did that come from?
Second, look at the signup form. They go against the usual behavior of asking for 1-3 fields and then asking for more on the next page. Love to know what the conversion rate for this is.
Dating Ad Mega-Redirects Lead To Trust Fail
By
· 5 Comments
Today I saw a Facebook ad for a dating site called It’s Just Karma. As a Redditor, I had to check it out. The click led to a generic landing page with no dating site branding. Lot’s of lead-generation companies do this, they take the click and redirect it to their customers, often based on the results of a few questions asked on the page. In this case, the second click led me to a site called Just Smoking Singles, with a photo of a woman with a big fat stogie talking to a guy. No questions were asked of me at any time.
I was expecting some sort of new-age site with a woman doing yoga or meditating. Instead, I end of on a site dedicated to smokers. Now that is actually an interesting and enormous niche, but oh the betrayal.
I looked at the Terms and Conditions page and I find:
“The Site and the Service are operated by White Label Dating Incorporated, a corporation organized under the laws of the State of Delaware, whose registered office is 425 Boylston Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02116. Communications relating to the Site or Service should be sent to…”
I used to live near Boyleston street in Boston. Hey WLD, when did you get an office in Boston?
These redirects are a pack of lies. Why would anyone sign up for a site they didn’t click a link for? (Maybe a lot and this is why they do this?). Regardless, this commonplace trickery drives me crazy. The disconnect between trust and advertising and revenue, it’s quite ugly in the dating industry and is never going to stop for the tier 2 and tier 3 players as long as the tier 1 companies continue to dominate.
Analyst Commentary On Spark Networks
By
· 10 Comments
Over the weekend I wrote Investor Thinks Spark Networks Is The Next Netflix.
An analyst at Insider Monkey had to say this about the original post.
So, I believe there are obvious secular tailwinds benefiting online dating companies. Yet, Tilson’s argument for Spark Networks falls flat based on one of his basic premises.
Tilson argues that JDate is an established business that offers consistent cash flow; meanwhile, Christian Mingle offers great growth. Yet Tilson vastly exaggerates Christian Mingle’s potential.
Specifically, he states that Christian Mingle is aimed at a community over 30 times greater than JDate’s. Based on this calculation, Tilson appears to be using US census data for the number of Jews and Christians living in the United States.
It is absurd to believe that Christian Mingle could capture the Christian dating community the way JDate has captured the Jewish one.
The Jewish community is a minority in the US, while Christians are the overwhelming majority (about 2% compared to 76%). An American, then, going on any given dating website (Match, Chemistry, etc.) is likely to find a large number of possible Christian matches. Thus, there is no real incentive for a Christian to opt for Christian Mingle over any other dating website.
Instead, Christian Mingle is likely to attract those Christians who are deeply religious — those who would see Christian beliefs as the most desirable trait in a potential mate. It’s hard to gauge how many Americans fit this description, but if one uses the number of Evangelical Christians, it’s a much smaller figure than the one Tilson’s banking on (about 20% of Americans are affiliated with Evangelical churches).
I bet Sam Moorcroft at ChristianCafe.com would beg to differ. Any other Christian dating sites want to chime in on this?
Update: Did someone in the Investor Relations department at Spark Networks eat their Wheaties? Spark Networks initiated with an Outperform at William Blair, Canaccord Genuity Initiates Spark Networks at Buy. $10 range cited. Spark shares closed Monday up 56 cents, or more than 7 percent, to $8.50 on the New York Stock Exchange. That’s the highest close for Spark Networks’ stock since the company went public in 2006.
Affiliate Summit Tickets $99 Until May 18th
By
· Leave a Comment
Affiliate Summit East tickets increase in price in a few days. Starting May 18th, 2013, the prices for Affiliate Summit will go from starting at $99 to $249.
Affiliate Summit, the premier affiliate marketing conference, was founded by Missy Ward and Shawn Collins in 2003 for the purpose of providing educational sessions on the latest industry issues and fostering a productive networking environment for affiliate marketers.
Affiliate Summit East 2013 is taking place August 18-20, 2013 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA.This three day conference includes an exhibit hall with affiliates, merchants, vendors, and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts.
Investor Thinks Spark Networks Is The Next Netflix
By
· 1 Comment
So an investor is talking about how Netflix has quadrupled it’s stock price in the last seven Months. It’s a great story, watching Netflix on my tv through my Roku box is a fantastic experience.
Then things get weird. Investor Whitney Tilson:
If Netflix is the next Amazon, who will be the next Netflix?
It could be Spark Networks (NYSE: LOV), which owns and operates JDate and Christian Mingle.
“I said, ‘This is my next Netflix,’” said Tilson, recalling his speech at the Eighth Annual Spring Value Investing Congress. “It’s an Internet-based company with a lot of upside optionality that is sacrificing current profits and taking all of the profits from an existing cash cow business and [pouring] it into a growth opportunity.”
In that sense, Tilson said that it is “very much like Netflix.”
“But this is a much, much smaller company,” he said. “It only has about a $170 million market cap. Basically it’s two websites — they’re almost identical websites targeting two different markets. JDate targets Jewish singles who are looking to meet other Jewish singles. That business has been around for well over a decade and has had a 90 percent or higher contribution margin for the last 11 years running, but it hasn’t grown. It is the very definition of a beautiful cash cow. JDate is worth [Spark's] entire market cap.”
Then he says that Facebook could purchase Spark Networks. As if that wasn’t improbable enough, he goes on to say that IAC (owner of Match.com), Yahoo and Google are potential acquirers.
IAC, well sure, but if you look at past IAC dating site deals, Spark Networks’ financials don’t appear similar to those of companies that IAC has acquired. Go look at the financials for the full picture.
But Yahoo and Google? Yahoo outsourced it’s dating to Match years ago and Google is in the midst of a big refocus, shuttering a number of well-liked services like Google Reader.
Interesting to see long-time shareholder Great Hill Investments sell off 2.8 million shares (or 3.5M depending on what you read) of Spark Networks stock this week. Great Hill purchased 6 million shares back in 2006.
Via Whitney Tilson: Facebook, IAC Takeover Target Could Be the Next Netflix.
Recent Comments