iDate Day Two Agenda Notes

It’s that time of year again. iDate, the only online dating industry conference in the US, hosts it’s annual Miami Beach event Wednesday 1/27 – Friday 1/29. If you want to connect while I’m in town, let me know and we can set up a time to meet.

Day two of the iDate agenda is below. Day One Agenda Notes.

Dear Internetdatingconference, your missing children PSA is crashing a lot of browsers, remove or fix, thanks.

Thursday January 28: Ron Worthy from People Media gives the keynote. Make sure to listen to the man who sold his company to IAC (Match) for $80 million. See the mile-wide smile on his face. During his talk, make a promise to yourself, your team, and your company that you will grow your dating site to be so amazing that you can buy Match in a few years. Feel the inspiration, feed off of it, make plans for global domination. who knows, the person sitting next to you might be the missing piece of the puzzle you’ve been looking for.

Next, Mark Brooks give the 2009 online dating industry year in review. Mark has been working with iDate since it’s inception and is capable of presenting a thorough high-level overview of the industry. Hopefully Mark will fuel the tinderbox of innovation and not just regurgitate stats.

My take: Except for a handful companies, dating revenue was relatively flat in 2009, there were a few big acquisitions and there are still 60 million people in the US who haven’t tried online dating because dating sites refuse to innovate, instead depending on credit-card billing trickery and lowest-common denominator advertising. Online dating remains a fragmented marketplace, with a few big players and an competitive landscape that will continue to contract as smaller players continue to hit the wall. Furthermore, the matchmaking process is still as opaque as obsidian, nobody knows how or why people are matched and the dating process hasn’t changed in years except for some guided communication efforts at eHarmony and Chemistry and the novel Herway approach where women call the shots. Profiles are becoming more dynamic and companies finally realizing that the 300 million profiles on Facebook and millions on Twitter and other social services are a fairly substantial source of visitors.

Duane Dahl at Perfectmatch is going to share their success with smart media partnerships. I talk to people about marketing their dating sites every day. PerfectMatch nailed this years ago and it’s mind-boggling that nobody has been able to follow suit. Listen and learn.

Dating Factory (private label dating vendor) demo goes up against duane, which is unfortunate. All of the private label providers should be on a panel hashing out a year’s worth of confusion, questions and comments. Dating Factory is speaking again about dating business models on Friday. Why two presentations? Agenda problems abound at iDate, a re-occuring theme to anyone who’s been around a few years.

I had lunch with Manhunt co-founder Jonathan Crutchley a few weeks ago. Jonathan will talk about the gay dating market. His is a great story.

Bill Broadbent from Instinct Marketing will talk about online dating revenue models with some dating coaches. In 2010 online dating sites are going to sell more of their high-end leads to offline matchmakers as dating sites continue to evolve into various permutations of the web-rings circa 1999. Coaches fit in there somewhere. I’m working on a VIP dating concierge service, can’t wait to tell you about it and invite you to participate.

SkaDate (advertiser here) is speaking about online dating software with Pilot Group (Not the private equity firm It is is led by former AOL president Robert Pittman.)

I’m surprised Boonex (advertiser here) is not attending. and what about the 5-10 small dating software companies out there? Most tell me they don’t need to attend. I call BS on that. The reality is that most cannot stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. The rest are too busy slandering each other on this blog on a post I made back in 2006 and elsewhere across the web. Not a lot of love here. Most dating software is around a C+ and the private label vendors have a ways to go until they are truly accepted.

White Label Dating is going to make a big push into the U.S. in 2010, but they are’t exhibiting at iDate. At least WLD is aware of their Achilles heel and is potentially doing something about it. Less adult, more transparency, better terms and stop slamming the competition. Look at Dating Factory and The Dating Lab as well.

To get an idea of why I give software and private label dating solutions so much grief, go take a look at the private label software providers like ONEsite. I’ve sent a number of clients their way because they are real pros, worth every penny and don’t screw around, at all. Sam Moorcroft said a few months ago that he’s yet to see a big dating site built on dating platform software. I have to concur with Sam’s observation. If you pay $500 for software you’re going to have a $500 site. Actually you’ll have a $15,000 site, because after developers, infrastructure and design, that’s what it’s going to cost. This is fine for the majority of small dating startups that don’t want to give away 1/2 of their revenue to private label vendors and gives them a lot more flexibility to grow and evolve the site.

Teligence will talk about 1-900 numbers. Anyone who pays for phone or pay-to-play webcam sex online is wasting their money. Today’s free or low-cost online amateur cybersex options, complete with full-frame video and duplex audio, trump generic phone and expensive cam sex, with caveats, of course. That said, the social networking aspects of chat lines may be of interest to some sites and worth exploring.

FlashComs will talk about online chat. Remember the Userplane brouhaha over the summer at iDate LA? I like these systems and the people building them out but the fact is that chat on dating sites is generally a bad idea unless it’s an adult site, in which case it’s mostly bots talking to each on the scammy sites or one poor woman being barraged by any number of ill-behaved men on others. There are always exceptions and I’m happy to hear about well-run dating site chat rooms.

Let’s move on to mobile dating business models. Brendan O’Kane from Messmo is speaking. This is a session that shouldn’t be missed. I spent time with Brendan a few months ago. Enormously likable guy who is super-smart and connected when it comes to all things mobile. His service offering fits in nicely with the rest of the mobile marketplace as well. The initial overlap I thought I initially perceived between Messmo, Trilibis and other mobile vendors like Jajah proved unfounded. Each company fits together in the mobile ecosystem like pieces of a puzzle. I don’t see Trilibis on the docket, but they have some new initiatives and people coming on board that I think people will be hearing about soon enough.

John LaRosa will talk about the offline dating market. John is the guy who wrote the dating industry study that I sell here (at a discount!). Speaking of research. If you are a subscription site or a free site looking into the Freemium model, you should pick up a copy of the Subscription & Membership Site Benchmark Report. Copies have been selling like hotcakes.

Global Collect will demo their payment systems. So will a bunch of other companies. No vindicia, that’s too bad. Great company building an incredibly strong service that puts more money in dating site bank accounts.

Thursday night features the iDate Industry Awards. Three hours is two hours too long, they should have done this right at the show. It will be interesting to see who wins the various categories.

Tomorrow: Day three agenda notes.

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