Periodically this blog receives comments pertaining to Date Raters, Don’t Date Him Girl and other reputation exposé and management sites where people can look up usernames on dating sites and find out where someone stands on the crazy/perfection scale. I’ve worked with a number of identity and reputation management startups over the years, and was reminded about what a slippery slope reputation management systems can be. Read the TechCrunch article about Unvarnished.
Niche of the week: Offpeek is for singles who work graveyard and other non-traditional shifts. The founder has been working night shifts since 1993 and found it difficult to keep a good relationship with people who don’t work the same shifts. I love niche sites like this, great idea. Membership is free for women and $1 a month for men.
Dear Zoosk. Your new marketing campaign is great and all, but I’m tired of fielding complaints about you overcharging customers. At least a dozen emails this week already. That’s what happens when this blog ranks highly on google for [insert dating site name] customer service. Someone actually told me that my blog is hardwired into the Paypal payment form Zoosk uses. People click all sorts of things randomly, not sure what’s going on here. A good idea would be for Zoosk to make it easier for people to discuss billing issues. On a separate note, I wonder why Zoosk’s traffic on Facebook dropped 40% in the last month?
Check out this French animated condom ad (NSFW).
Single Gal in the City is dating in Houston this week.
A friend of mine who recently moved to Boston who works for a company who funds Venture Capitalist funds. When a firm like Benchmark announces a $750 million fund, her company is one of the sources of capital. In fact, her company has a ton of money invested in some of the current VC’s positioning to fund location-based services like Foursquare.
She sent me this article What If Women Ran Wall Street? which I want to share with online dating industry executives in particular.
Many of the issues facing the online dating industry are directly related to the fact that it’s an industry run predominantly by men. The majority of dating sites are conceptualized, run, funded and marketed by men. T&A advertising, lackluster customer support, traffic vs. results- these are mostly because men run dating sites.
There are few women running major dating sites. Liz Wasserman at Mate1 is probably the most well-known in the industry. Where is the voice of female dating executives and why are they better represented here, on other dating industry blogs and especially at iDate?
Avatar Reality raises $4.2 million: The Blue Mars platform lets artists, game and application developers create and distribute 3d games and applications on the platform. The platform basically allows anyone with gaming development knowledge build and monetize off their own virtual world. Users can bring on thousands of players to their 3d world and maybe sell them virtual goods or offer other features like mini games within the virtual world.
Google also sees the world through this lens, and today it fully launched what it calls ad “retargeting.” If someone visits a page on an advertiser’s own site or YouTube channel, Google can now show a related follow-up ad to just that person when they visit another site which shows Google ads. Since there are millions of sites in the Google Content Network, chances are Google will see them again. The program has been in beta since March, but it is now being rolled out to all AdWords customers. Via TechCrunch.
Orange, OpenX team up to establish pan-European ad exchange ecosystem. Orange operates Europe’s largest advertising network: the Orange Ad Network is good for a global reach of approximately 343 million unique users per month, spread across no less than 33 countries.
Perhaps reading Adverblog will get dating sites thinking about new ways to market their services.
What Social Media Ad Types Work Best?
Consumers Slow to Embrace the Age of Genomics. What does this mean for chemistry/phermone/DNA dating sites?
Can I just say that Nerve.com, while sporadic in terms of quality and a bit on the juvenile side, has some great dating advice columns and stories. I’ve been reading a lot of great dating blogs lately, but I keep coming back to Nerve because are pretty good at nailing the perfect balance between edgy, frisky and sexy.
I’m putting together a list of general dating category blogs, what are your favorites?
