Online Dating Insider

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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 Tools & Services directory, useful to anyone running dating [...]

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Engage, which is making a name for itself by allowing members to play matchmaker, has raised an additional $5 million in a round led by Advanced Technology Ventures and seed investors Revolution Ventures. The Founders Fund and Josh Kopleman also participated. The company was originally seed funded by Pay-Pal co-founders to the tune of $1 [...]

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GigaOM has details on activity-based matchmaker MatchActivity. I’ve worked with a few similar site in the past and remain somewhat skeptical about how the current crop of services are going to grow large enough to sustain customer acquisition costs. I use Upcoming.org, a Yahoo property for all of this. Millions of events, huge traffic drivers [...]

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Mark Brooks has published a number of dating and social networking executive interviews. His latest is with Mooble, yet another social networking site.

Quick thoughts:

Home pages full of half-naked women will get you a lot of spike traffic. Show me the revenue.
Mooble hope to make money by doing advertising differently, by making it more like content. [...]

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A new trend is emerging where free dating sites add the phrase Skype on their home page and call themselves the next generation of online dating. Let me say it here once and for all. Starting a new dating or social networking site with a core differentiator solely based on Skype or any other VOIP [...]

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Today’s Joy Of Tech cartoon has Steve Jobs heckling the audience, complaining that they sit around all day obsessing about Apple and to go get a life. The punch line is that an audience member thinks that reading between the lines of Jobs’ speech that Apple is going to start a dating service.

Chances of [...]

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A recent commenter said that all the world needs is a single dating site. On this blog, you should back that assertion up. Why only one service?

“People that complain about Match obviously don’t understand how to use it properly” is an uninformed opinion. You are putting the responsibility for the user experience on the user, [...]

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A scan of recent business press would indicate that MSM (mainstream media) is interested in hearing not about why revenue is down but more importantly, what a few small startups are doing to change the face of online dating.
During a recent interview with Red Herring, I was encouraged to talk about companies other than the [...]

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Meetic has launched a new dating site based on psychological compatibility.

Snipped from the translated press release:

In the heart of ULTEEM, an exclusive questionnaire founded on the latest sociological and psychological discoveries on couples defines the personality, values and outlooks of each of its members to help them meet people who most share their affinities and [...]

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