In the past, they had introduced the silly member spotlight, which seems to pick randomly select individuals display at the top of the search. I say it’s random because it picks matches I’ve already clicked “no” to. You’d think it wouldn’t be hard to program it to look for these and skip them. Now they’ve enlarged it to take 1/4 of the page! I wonder if their programmers are far-sighted.

The profile thumbnails, which were a fine size, are now twice as large. There is no new information, so why did they do that? Oh, I forgot, it’s those far-sighted programmers.

The click system was a useful way to show which profiles I’ve visited. Now I can’t see which profiles I clicked on because it’s the same color as everything else. So the programmers are colorblind too.

And lest I forget a while ago, they changed the profile layout, so instead of displaying everything on one page, it requires four pages, which means I have manually navigate all of them. Is it a profile or a book?

BTW, I couldn’t complain about all this in the contact form because it’s limited to 500 characters. Do their customer service reps have a problem with reading comprehension?

They divide it into 4 catagories, Jewish which is jDate, General which is American Singles, Niche which is primarily BlackSingles.com & ChristianMingle.com (and also the other smaller MingleMatch properties), Offline & Other Business is Hurry Date, their cruises, parties, etc.

If you read their financials and spend time on their sites it’s obvious that they’ve hit a wall. In the past few years they grew jDate by raising prices. Now that they can no longer raise the subscription price any more they are trying to get a few dollars more from each customer by implementing features like highlighted profiles. I don’t think this strategy is going to work; jDate which is their cash-cow has peaked.

IMHO if the company is going to be a leader in online dating it must have a presence in the mainstream market, however, they’ve abandoned American Singles and let more nimble companies like Singlesnet take the position that they once held atop this segment. Instead they’ve focused on niche sites like BlackSingles and ChristianMingle, and Speed Dating which probably consumes a ton of energy for little returns.

Not sure if you were referring to Tribester.com above, but hope so.

We’re bootstrapped, and not hooked up with AOL, so I hope it’s not true that “it’s going to take several years and an enormous amount of marketing spend to get even 1/3 of JDate’s business.” I had trouble enough paying for my “Berry Topper” from Jamba Juice today.

Our events company, LetMyPeopleGo.com, has sponsored the biggest Jewish Singles event in the country 14 years in a row (4,200+ people in NYC) on the biggest Jewish night of the year. We competed with JDate many of those years and outdrew them significantly each time (by thousands of people). In fact, my understanding is that one year they bought a company based in LA (“Schmoozapalooza”) for the purpose of competing with us in NYC and, when that didn’t work, they asked to work with us, instead of competing with us, subsequently.

I realize that you may think that that doesn’t necessarily translate to online dating. But I think we are going to (soon) launch a compelling product and I believe that there are other means to catalyze it besides buying high-quality traffic.

Even apart from the bus ads and the like, I think the problem with JLove is that if you plan to compete with a site as dominant as JDate, and as ingrained in the public consciousness and popular culture as JDate, you have to offer both a significantly more compelling product and a compelling reason for people to switch allegiances.

Again, I just don’t think that buying a tremendous amount of traffic is the only way to launch and sustain a site like this. We”ll see, though. It should be interesting (it’s already fun).

I think JDate could use some serious competition, because we know that competition breeds innovation, right? Right.

We have launched a new site redesign and structured a partnership with AOL Personals to power their Jewish dating portal. We are growing at a rapid clip and look to offer our 3 pronged value proposition to the Jewish community:
1. Focus & Relevance: Jewish community
2. Scale & Choice: One of the largest Jewish dating communities online and growing rapidly
3. Value: we provide a solid user experience for the price they pay for a premium subscription