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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Widgetbait Gone Wild talks about using widgets to build links back to dating sites. Matthew Inman did this for his site, JustSayHi, and Google spanked him big time for inappropriate linkbaiting.

Some of you might remember I left SEOmoz last year to join up with JustSayHi with the intention of creating the world’s biggest, baddest free [...]

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Facebook dating applications (1,414 and counting) are starting to get some serious traction. Recently week I spoke with Alex Mehr, who, along with Shayan Ghazizadeh and two developers, launched Zoosk, a popular dating application on Facebook. Zoosk was funded by Amidzad, which also funds Plugplaycenter, a technology startup incubator for over 100 companies in [...]

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For those of you trying to figure out which social networks to roll out your dating applications, notice Facebook is about to pass MySpace in worldwide traffic, at least according to Comscore, which famously is responsible for dropping Google’s market value after under-reporting recent monthly visitor stats.

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Look at the new True.com ads. They don’t even bother showing faces anymore. Is this progress? No. Does this raise the bar for online dating? No. Does this type of marketing even make a dent in the Adult Friend Finder revenue? Probably not. I’m surprised that they didn’t say that [...]

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TNS acquired web analytics firm Compete for $75 Million - $150 Million.

Tracking service Compete has been acquired by TNS (Taylor Nelson Sofres plc) out of London. Initial acquisition price is $75 million with an additional $75 million paid out over 2008-2010 based on meeting certain revenue targets. Compete had raised $43M since 2000.

Congrats [...]

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I finally got around to installing Match.com’s Little black Book Facebook application. I thought it was going to be a welcome respite after doing 7 interviews in a row today.
The opening screen wasn’t very inviting (see blank screenshot), and on the next page, when I invited a bunch of people to the application, I [...]

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According to Comscore, US internet dating sites attracted 22.6 million users in 2007. Only 60 million more people and we’ll achieve complete market saturation. You have your marching orders, let’s make 2008 the year we hit 40 million users.
Via eMarketer.
Traffic

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I am liking the Compete blog’s posts on the online dating market. December’s numbers are of interest, look at the difference between visitors and active members. This is exactly the type of metrics we need to be looking at when evaluating the overall success of dating sites.

Mate1.com and True.com both do a terrific job of [...]

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I looked at the visitor stats for Online Dating Insider and saw that today for the first time there are over 1,000 people reading this blog via email and RSS newsreader. The number goes up and down every day by as much as 100, depending on several factors out of my control, so by the [...]

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