Dating Site Marketing on Viral Video Sites

by David Evans on August 9, 2006 · 4 comments

in Audio Video, Legal

Online Dating Insider delivers cutting-edge insight and commentary on all aspects of the online dating industry. Topics include industry news, site reviews, emerging trends, analysis of dating site features, discussion about safety safety, finance and other issues important to the online dating market. Don't miss our Startups directory, useful to anyone running dating or social networking sites. Subscribe to the RSS feed (you can subscribe via email as well). Your comments and suggestions for stories are welcomed.
We offer consulting services to dating sites and social networks as well.

Today I decided to search for videos tagged as “dating” on YouTube. After quickly tiring of Dating Advice on Threesomes and Dating Boot Camp I finally came across some talent, in this case Vince Vaughn, who “wants to make some bad decisions.”

Continuing my troll through YouTube, I began to notice how people were inserting mentions of dating sites in their comments. Behold, the future of dating site affiliate marketing is the comment sections on viral video sites.

This is like annoying BuzzMarketing and people who have to mention brands just a little to often for comfort. Sure, comments will be worthless in a few years, but comment spam is today’s great new marketing idea. Fire up Commission Junction, let’s go make some money.

Webdate and americasdreamdate.com, seem to be spamming the most on YouTube. Webdate has what looks like legit videos but I found many comments like these:

That’s a funny video you got there! You made good points on how to get good dates! But I think you should also try webdate dot com! It really worked for me. I met my partner there and we’ve been living together ever since. Check out webdate dot com and see for yourself!

“This video sucks! I seen much better videos on webdatedotcom. Guys there were much yummier and cute.”

“DUDE THIS VIDEO IS AWSOME. I FOUND MORE OF THESE VIDEOS ON WEBDATE.COM. CHECK IT OUT”

“hahaha, that was freakin funny, I don’t know what to say though, hey she looks like my girl from webdatedotcom

I found this one on a clip of The Office where Michael is thinking of a username and comes up with “littlekidlover“:

“yeah that’s what you had in mind huh?? I wonder which site he was going to, was it webdatedotcom??

Clever, almost.

Americasdreamdates is doing marketing on viral video sites, but I assumed that would be through the actual creation of videos, not comment spam. Here is their YouTube profile.

“hey clinton - upload your video to americasdreamdate.com - it’s a lot better and a lot more fun.”

I even found a video for Online Personals Watch, it’s a video of a kid, strange.

Match’s UK commercials are on there as well. Courtesy of jamesduggan. The ads promise a free six month subscription if you don’t find someone special during the first six months. I wonder if James works for Match PR?

Perhaps it’s time for dating sites to take some of their search engine advertising money and put it into a few viral videos. Certainly more engaging and fun to watch than regular dating site ads and who knows what the outcome may be.

Technorati Tags: ,

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

markusNo Gravatar 08.10.06 at 9:55 am
Check out the lavalife ones
ToddNo Gravatar 03.31.07 at 2:30 am
I’d say there are huge possibilities in using viral video marketing in the dating arena. Just the thought of the explosiveness of the videos that would work well in the market makes me want to get into it myself :-)

But you would have to be careful not to spam, comments, etc are not the way, making the videos will be the way to explode. I’m sure someone will be seen as the dating site that started on youtube soon.

bmw e36 partsNo Gravatar 10.04.07 at 12:38 am
consider match.com to0..
soulmate kingNo Gravatar 11.16.07 at 7:48 am
Those sites are usually marketing any which way possible. i saw ebonydateonline dot com on mole cartons in my area. Have you seen this hottie, try ebonydateonline.com, we already found them. lol ..but can u blame them

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Previous post: Wednesday Stories

Next post: What’s Happening At JDate