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Taking the lead in the industry, FriendFinder has announced they have launched blogs for their members.
You can now post your own Weblog, or “blog,” on FriendFinder to let everyone know about your day-to-day life, or you can just post some random thoughts - whatever you want to share. Think of blogs as an easy way to create your own regularly-updated home page on FriendFinder. Tell people more about yourself and your life experiences, in order to speed up the time it takes to make dates with other FriendFinder members!
Friendfinder is an interesting company. They have cornered the adult market and have inroads into a dozen other niches. Recent the have gone after the religious market, much to the consternation of other, more supposedly “pure” religious sites.
Did you know FF offered background checks several years ago?
Looking at Alexa rankings, Adult FF is #25 and Match is #45. I think it’s safe to say that Alexa is no longer a viable traffic measurement tool. Relying on toolbar installs doesn’t cut it anymore.
Online daters are beginning to get comfortable with blogs, mostly through their own personal experience with Blogger.com, TypePad and through social networking sites like Friendster and Tribe.net.
I’m glad to see FriendFinder out front of the blog trend. Dynamic profiles are an important ingredient of the next generation of dating sites.
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Wrong. FriendFinder IS bigger than Match they just never get any press because they are a dark horse.
This is similar to what I call the Corante Effect. As a domain, we are way up there in the stats, but taken individually, each blog would never achieve that sort of ranking. I wonder how each domain is measured? FF has about 15, Match has 30. How are they aggregated, or dis-aggregated?
Pubsub, Technorati, feedburner are the next generation of Alexa ranking and far more reliable as far as I can tell.
It is possible that Alexa’s data is skewed as a result of Match having so many subsites. It’s worth nothing that Alexa doesn’t discrimitate when it displays them (au.match.com is the same as match.com) however, if it’s anything like Google it certainly won’t favour such a setup.
SEO link farm hackers have ruined the transparency of many search engines. Google’s new TrustRank looks to be a promising new method to gauge how authoratative a
resource is.
I see very little value in toolbars past ad blocking which most browsers support. I’ve heard that toolbar vendors make $10,000/day per million installs. No wonder they are so popular.
The big date warehouses have lots of marketing money and ability to drive traffic. This does not necessarily mean they are authoratative. That said, I would argue that Match knows a heck of a lot more about relationships than Yahoo does but Yahoo knows a lot more about their members.
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