Friday 6-6 Links

by David Evans on June 6, 2008 · 4 comments

in Legal, Marketing, Traffic

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LoveHappens isn’t happening anymore.


How could a site with a million visitors just shut down? Could it be because the service was terrible from the start and they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it?

Now thats targeted advertising. Contextual ads triggered by images on the page. Why are dating site ads so poorly targeted?

Spark Networks redesigns. A reader chimes in:

Spark Networks has changed profile screens to a tabbed layout. All the info that was in one screen is now distributed across four tabs, requiring the user to click three times to view what previously required no clicks. And oddly, clicking among the tabs also forces the pictures to navigate in lock step, so the clicking the second tab, Lifestyle, changes the picture to the second picture (or blank if there is no second picture).

I submitted some negative feedback to Jdate regarding this and they an incredibly stupid response…. ” Thank you very much for your email about our new profile changes. We have re-designed our profiles by moving to a tabbed format in order to keep our site technically current and competetive with other companies in our field.”

I noticed this at the bottom of JDate pages. “Spark Networks Limited does not conduct background checks on the members or subscribers of this website.” Looks like Spark has decided to add the disclaimer to all sites and all pages instead of worrying about which state a visitor is coming from.

I feel so much safer now! Herb Vest must be very happy. Speaking of True.com, traffic is down 62% over this time last year while PlentyOfFish is up the same amount.

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

AdrianaNo Gravatar 06.09.08 at 8:44 am
Yep. I saw that.. Love happens announced they were ending their service on May 30th which they did. They also gave suggestions after they ended on free & paid dating sites that users could go to instead.

They probably weren’t making that much money considering their subscription consisted of a $20 due which after awhile you didn’t have to pay anymore.

american singles tabbed profiles are kinda dumb but kinda smart at the same time. It lessens the amount that someone has to scroll so I can kinda see the need for this. Instead of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling to get to the end of the page.

Dating HeadshotsNo Gravatar 06.10.08 at 1:03 pm
Wow, a lot of people have jumped ship from True.com in the last year and it looks like they’ve all been going to PlentyOfFish. Does this have to do with the interface, the experience, popularity trends or something else?
David EvansNo Gravatar 06.10.08 at 1:57 pm
Perhaps you meant lack of interface, lol. There are more real people on PoF than True, at least in my personal experience.

I think True is more popular than PoF but it’s popular for negative reasons.

Don’t forget to add Mate1 and SinglesNet to your compete.com analysis, fascinating to see the traffic trends for this particular group of sites.

mauricevNo Gravatar 06.11.08 at 12:39 am
Scrolling? Perhaps your monitor just isn’t that big. But they could workaround users in this situation simply by putting more information across the page horizontally, especially now that monitors are getting wider.

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