The suitors for Sex.com have been put off for now. An auction for the much-sought-after domain name was canceled Wednesday after three creditors filed a petition forcing the owner into bankruptcy. Escom LLC paid a reported $12 million to $14 million for the domain name in 2006, but the company was unable to repay the debt. The lender ordered the foreclosure sale.
Escom acquired the (arguably) most valuable domain in the world and they were unable to earn at least $14 million to pay for the domain during the past four years.
I’m unclear about the statement in the article that Escom was never given a chance to make its money back. What does that mean? What was keeping the new owners from basically printing money on such a lucrative domain?
More at Boston.com.
Tagged as:
domains,
sex.com
I remain non-plussed about the majority of Chatroulette competitors. Then I heard about RandomDorm.
RandomDorm takes the thrilling serendipity of being paired with an anonymous stranger in a video chat room and limits it to college campuses. Participants need a college e-mail address to access the Web service. Alternatively, they can sign in using Facebook as long as the primary e-mail address tied to that account ends with an .edu.
Josh Weinstein, creator of RandomDorm. “We hope to emulate that simplicity and ensure a degree of community and security.”
I talked to Josh a few weeks ago about his other startup, GoodCrush. Unlike other “missed connections” style sites tied into dating sites, GoodCrush is entirely based on real missed connection a la Craigslist.
However, I had to laugh at “Community and security”. Right, they’ll monetize the heck out of this anyway they can, and they raunchier it is the more money they will make. If I were them I’d look at how Woome pairs up conversations, create a leaderboard and watch the ad revenue pour in.
More at the New York Times.
This is interesting, Chatroulette Clone software starting at $99.
Come to think of it, Userplane could have done this years ago. Sometimes it takes a 17-year old Russian kid to change the world, at least for a few months.
Tagged as:
Chatroulette
by David Evans on March 18, 2010 in Research
Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with college students working on a project about online dating. We talked about a lot of different aspects of online dating, from it’s history, to current trends and what’s coming in the future. They want to talk to more singles, can you spare a few minutes to help them out?
We are senior journalism majors working on our capstone project on technology and romantic relationships. We are interested in speaking with anyone has experience using an online dating site–whether that experience was positive or negative. If you think you want to help us out and want to find out more about our project, please email joseniorsem@gmail.com. Thank you!
Smart brights kids, why don’t you help them out and then go treat yourself to an ice cream.
Virtual goods company Viximo has published a report for online publishers entitled “Raising Money For Charity Through Virtual Goods And 4 Keys to Success. The paper details some of Viximo’s recent experience in the space, and four keys to implementing such a campaign successfully.
Topics include:
- Opportunity to Increase Goodwill
- Opportunity to Convert Non-Users to Customers
- Opportunity to Increase Overall Revenues
- Opportunity to Increase Customer Lifetime Value
I mention this because I was surprised that more dating companies didn’t sport Haiti donation buttons on their sites.
Tagged as:
virtual goods
Sprout Up is a free monthly event for forward-thinking Toronto area entrepreneurs to gather and mind-meld. This month’s event features HootSuite’s Ryan Holmes.
I mention this for a few reasons. First, I’ve been talking to Toronto-area dating sites about a special dating event being put together up north and I bet that Sprout Up would be a good place to meet other entrepreneurs and network.
Secondly, Hootsuite has been on my mind lately. I’ve been using it and a few other services as a testbed before I begin to officially recommend to clients. As a matter of fact, someone just told me about yet another social media tracking service that’s charging thousands of dollars a month to publish and track what’s being said about brands online. That’s fine if you have money to burn, but guess what, go sign up for HootSuite or CoTweet and you can get pretty much the same thing for free (for now).
Yesterday I spoke with Kate Brooks, the new Director of marketing communications for Zoosk. After we got off the phone I saw this ad on Facebook. Marketing gimick or could Zoosk actually be banned from Facebook?
5 Dating Apps For People With No Shame: The Girlfriend Keeper app is essentially an automated boyfriend, developed to ensure that you contact your girlfriend as much as you should. You notify it of your relationship’s seriousness, apply a contact frequency and then choose texts, emails or both to be sent to your partner.
A Spanish reader wrote in about this Zoosk ad currently running in Spain. supposedly the Spanish is “pretty lame” but I cannot testify to this. What was more interesting was hearing:
…it’s one of the first Facebook ads I’ve seen in portrait format. Given that it’s very hard to show a lady’s face (which facebook does rather insist on) and chest (which the advertiser wants) together in landscape, their workaround is just to cut the landscape in half to create portrait! I wonder what that does to their click-thru…
Interesting. I wonder what the A/B testing looks like for Facebook dating ads.
Melissa Braverman, Single Gal in the City, was in Atlanta And Kansas City over the weekend. March 1st, 2010, Melissa embarked on The Great Dating Blitz, an 8-week, 8-city dating tour across the U.S. Visit http://www.singlegalnyc.com for more info or check out her Facebook page.
Pingdom writes about Innovation by acquisition.
What do Flash, Android, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?
The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.
I’ve been helping pair up vendors with dating sites for a long time. Vendors often come to the table with an off-kilter pitch or want too much money for their services, and dating sites aren’t always able to see the value proposition of a third-party service, which is where I come into the picture.
It’s unfortunante that the dating market does not function in a way that companies like IntroAnalytics, HonestyOnline, DatingHeadshots and many of the other companies I’ve worked with are able to be acquired, instead fighting day in and out to partner with dating sites.
by David Evans on March 17, 2010 in Marketing
Ads.pof.com now has more inventory available that will be sold as IAB standard ad sizes. When creating a new campaign, this feature will be available to users who have deposited more than $1000 into their account with ads.pof.com.
35 million impressions per day are available for these ad sizes. These ads will be displayed on Plentyoffish.com Profile Pages (300×250) Online My City pages (160×600) and View Message pages (120×600).
Tagged as:
Marketing
by David Evans on March 16, 2010 in Marketing
Many developers were more than concerned about Facebook phasing out application-based Notifications on March 1st. Companies are instead focusing on creative ways to increase user engagement, including asking for virtual gifts, wall messaging and fan page posts. More at Inside Social Games.
It’s great to see dating sites beginning to take cues from social games, where there is much to be learned about increasing user engagement metrics.
Tagged as:
Marketing,
social games,
viral marketing
Someone just turned me on to the Lady Gaga Telephone video featuring Beyonce. A certain dating site makes an appearance at 4:27. Warning, this is one weird and sexy video.
Great post from Tony Karrer, the initial acting CTO for eHarmony.
Match continues to say that they have 15 million profiles. I wish they would refer to the number of active profiles, which is a much more authentic representation of the size of the database. Or better yet, read the Flash cookie on my hard drive or IP address lookup and say that there are NNN,000 active members in my area. Remember when the number was 20 million a while back? I don’t know offhand how many profiles Meetic and People Media and Singlesnet bring to the table, or even if those are counted in the 15 million.
The Outlook Social Connector for MySpace looks interesting. MySpace for Outlook enables you to view activity updates for friends and colleagues in the People Pane, synchronize your MySpace contact list to your Outlook contacts, and get one-click access to profiles.
Even if the casual online dater belongs to one paid and one free dating sites, keeping track of emails, flirts and canned search results takes a lot of time. Don’t forget who’s viewed/bookmarked you, which I consider incredibly important to keep tabs on. Where is the dating management system for Outlook?
Dating Ad Network interviewed Sam Yagan, co-founder of OKCupid.
We have about 5 million unique visitors to our website every month.
…we analyze all of the interactions that are happening on our site. We aggregate the data, we do some statistical analysis to try to find trends and we publish those trends back out on our blog.
More please!
Steve Klebe of Vindicia on What will it take to make mobile payments mainstream in the US? Redg Snodgrass, who was at Skout, chimes in ad well. Redg is now Director of Digital Distribution, Alcatel-Lucent. He showed me some of the very cool monetization and tracking services aggregation he’s working on, very interesting stuff and potentially a game-changer in the social and mobile application space.
Shufflepeople stats.
According to PeopleMedia, there are a lot of single black people out there (6 out of 10 blacks are single). No
Tagged as:
Uncategorized
