Online Dating Industry Consulting & Commentary
From the monthly archives:
I’ve continued to unsubscribe from about 20 different dating sites, focusing on the leaders in the date-warehouse and niche sites, free and paid. That’s 4, which is about all I can handle at the moment.
Yahoo wasn’t doing anything for me, cya later, for the time being.
FastCupid continues to deliver the goods, primary site I check [...]
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I’m looking for a list of the dating services affected by the passing of the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act. How are these sites officially categorized? If a site is global, is it affected, or is it limited to sites the specifically cater to individuals looking to import mates from outside the US? Do regulators [...]
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At the end of January, according to PubSub, this blog was ranked 11,723. I didn’t post most of the week of iDate, and my rank fell to a low of 94,000. Then, for some reason, it started climbing again. Perhaps it was because it went down sporadically for a few days. It wasn’t because I [...]
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Matchmaker, the original online dating site, has been purchased by Date.com. Astute followers of the online dating market know of Matchmaker’s storied history, from it’s BBS origins in the early 1980 to the February 2005 sale of Lycos, parent of Matchmaker, to Daum, at which time Matchmaker was put on the block for $2 Million. [...]
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From Rich Gosse, founder of the International Association of Dating Websites:
It is my sad duty to inform you that the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) was enacted by Congress and signed into law. It will go into effect on April 1, 2006. This law will be disastrous to those dating services that specialize [...]
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The Online Publishers Association newsletter talks about security and advertising on Myspace:
For $580 million, News Corp. bought the hottest of the social networking sites, MySpace, with its 55 million members and #5 spot in online traffic. But it also has its hands full. USA Today reports that investigators around the country are examining crimes that [...]
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A friend IM’d me last night and asked what was up with this, which appears to be a class action lawsuit against SpringStreet Networks. The NY State Court system documents pertaining to the lawsuit reveal:
All natural persons who paid money to subscribe to a personals website owned or operated in whole or in part by [...]
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SiliconBeat writes about Geovector, which puts a compass sensor in your cell phone, letting you point at places to retrieve information, read reviews, initiate calls and more. This is incredible stuff, although it’s available only in Japan for the time being.
While you can’t just yet point your phone at someone to see their profile, it’s [...]
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Meetic has acquired LEXA.nl, one of the largest dating sites in the Netherlands, for $13.6 million.
Meetic founder Marc Simoncini:
LEXA was acquired by purchasing assets including 30,000 subscribers at the end of December 2005 – compared with 224,618 subscribers… the deal boosts our subscriber based by 13%. Sales came to $4.7 million in 2005, with marketing [...]
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One House in one state, still a long way to go. It is expected that a few states will pass the law, regardless of how difficult it will be to enforce. At this point, what does it matter if it passes in all 50 states? Does anyone besides dating site operators really care or show [...]
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