Online Dating Insider » Uncategorized

Sex.com Sells, But No One’s Buying

David Evans — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:36:55 +0000

The suitors for Sex.com have been put off for now. An auction for the much-sought-after domain name was canceled Wednesday after three creditors filed a petition forcing the owner into bankruptcy. Escom LLC paid a reported $12 million to $14 million for the domain name in 2006, but the company was unable to repay the debt. The lender ordered the foreclosure sale.

Escom acquired the (arguably) most valuable domain in the world and they were unable to earn at least $14 million to pay for the domain during the past four years.

I’m unclear about the statement in the article that Escom was never given a chance to make its money back. What does that mean? What was keeping the new owners from basically printing money on such a lucrative domain?

More at Boston.com.

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RandomDorm: Chatroulette for the College Set

David Evans — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:40:24 +0000

I remain non-plussed about the majority of Chatroulette competitors. Then I heard about RandomDorm.

RandomDorm takes the thrilling serendipity of being paired with an anonymous stranger in a video chat room and limits it to college campuses. Participants need a college e-mail address to access the Web service. Alternatively, they can sign in using Facebook as long as the primary e-mail address tied to that account ends with an .edu.

Josh Weinstein, creator of RandomDorm. “We hope to emulate that simplicity and ensure a degree of community and security.”

I talked to Josh a few weeks ago about his other startup, GoodCrush. Unlike other “missed connections” style sites tied into dating sites, GoodCrush is entirely based on real missed connection a la Craigslist.

However, I had to laugh at “Community and security”. Right, they’ll monetize the heck out of this anyway they can, and they raunchier it is the more money they will make. If I were them I’d look at how Woome pairs up conversations, create a leaderboard and watch the ad revenue pour in.

More at the New York Times.

This is interesting, Chatroulette Clone software starting at $99.

Come to think of it, Userplane could have done this years ago. Sometimes it takes a 17-year old Russian kid to change the world, at least for a few months.

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Viximo on Raising Money For Charity Through Virtual Goods

David Evans — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:53:13 +0000

Virtual goods company Viximo has published a report for online publishers entitled “Raising Money For Charity Through Virtual Goods And 4 Keys to Success. The paper details some of Viximo’s recent experience in the space, and four keys to implementing such a campaign successfully.

Topics include:

Opportunity to Increase Goodwill
Opportunity to Convert Non-Users to Customers
Opportunity to Increase Overall Revenues
Opportunity to Increase Customer Lifetime Value

I mention this because I was surprised that more dating companies didn’t sport Haiti donation buttons on their sites.

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Sprout Up Toronto – HootSuite’s Ryan Holmes

David Evans — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:32:12 +0000

Sprout Up is a free monthly event for forward-thinking Toronto area entrepreneurs to gather and mind-meld. This month’s event features HootSuite’s Ryan Holmes.

I mention this for a few reasons. First, I’ve been talking to Toronto-area dating sites about a special dating event being put together up north and I bet that Sprout Up would be a good place to meet other entrepreneurs and network.

Secondly, Hootsuite has been on my mind lately. I’ve been using it and a few other services as a testbed before I begin to officially recommend to clients. As a matter of fact, someone just told me about yet another social media tracking service that’s charging thousands of dollars a month to publish and track what’s being said about brands online. That’s fine if you have money to burn, but guess what, go sign up for HootSuite or CoTweet and you can get pretty much the same thing for free (for now).

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Online Dating Industry News For March 17, 2010

David Evans — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:10:40 +0000

Yesterday I spoke with Kate Brooks, the new Director of marketing communications for Zoosk. After we got off the phone I saw this ad on Facebook. Marketing gimick or could Zoosk actually be banned from Facebook?

5 Dating Apps For People With No Shame: The Girlfriend Keeper app is essentially an automated boyfriend, developed to ensure that you contact your girlfriend as much as you should. You notify it of your relationship’s seriousness, apply a contact frequency and then choose texts, emails or both to be sent to your partner.

A Spanish reader wrote in about this Zoosk ad currently running in Spain. supposedly the Spanish is “pretty lame” but I cannot testify to this. What was more interesting was hearing:

…it’s one of the first Facebook ads I’ve seen in portrait format. Given that it’s very hard to show a lady’s face (which facebook does rather insist on) and chest (which the advertiser wants) together in landscape, their workaround is just to cut the landscape in half to create portrait! I wonder what that does to their click-thru…

Interesting. I wonder what the A/B testing looks like for Facebook dating ads.

Melissa Braverman, Single Gal in the City, was in Atlanta And Kansas City over the weekend. March 1st, 2010, Melissa embarked on The Great Dating Blitz, an 8-week, 8-city dating tour across the U.S. Visit http://www.singlegalnyc.com for more info or check out her Facebook page.

Pingdom writes about Innovation by acquisition.

What do Flash, Android, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

I’ve been helping pair up vendors with dating sites for a long time. Vendors often come to the table with an off-kilter pitch or want too much money for their services, and dating sites aren’t always able to see the value proposition of a third-party service, which is where I come into the picture.
It’s unfortunante that the dating market does not function in a way that companies like IntroAnalytics, HonestyOnline, DatingHeadshots and many of the other companies I’ve worked with are able to be acquired, instead fighting day in and out to partner with dating sites.

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Online Dating Industry News For March 15, 2010

David Evans — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:52:21 +0000

The Dewy Color System came up when I was looking into IntroAnalytics and VisualDNA. Speaking of compatibility, Fernando Ardenghi has finally started a blog where he will be discussing his views about online dating compatibility and matching systems. If you’ve read his hundreds of comments here over the years, you already know what the blog is about. If not, go check out Breaking the Online Dating Sound Barrier.

Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? Here come’s DatingPixels.

Another firm is investigating potential claims against Spark Networks.

The 11 Most Expensive Domain Names Ever.

Marketing ingenuity: People pay thousands of dollars for trade show booths. Foursquare, the red-hot location-based service, spent $5.99 on their “booth” at SXSW.

WriteMatch Personality & Compatibility Profile on Facebook. I took a handwriting analysis course a few years ago. Turns out Charles Manson and I both cross our t’s the same way.

The Bachelorette star Jillian Harris sat down with 24Savvy.com in her Chicago home to talk about sex and money, the in-laws, the challenges of planning a wedding and her famous hot dog theory.

Dating factory has New cross-selling strategies for your web-sites.

Online Dating as Honest as Real Life.

5 ways anonymous video chat social networks sites can improve user experience via Shufflepeople.

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TGIF Edition of Online Dating Insider For March 12, 2010

David Evans — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:38:44 +0000

Someone just turned me on to the Lady Gaga Telephone video featuring Beyonce. A certain dating site makes an appearance at 4:27. Warning, this is one weird and sexy video.

Great post from Tony Karrer, the initial acting CTO for eHarmony.

Match continues to say that they have 15 million profiles. I wish they would refer to the number of active profiles, which is a much more authentic representation of the size of the database. Or better yet, read the Flash cookie on my hard drive or IP address lookup and say that there are NNN,000 active members in my area. Remember when the number was 20 million a while back? I don’t know offhand how many profiles Meetic and People Media and Singlesnet bring to the table, or even if those are counted in the 15 million.

The Outlook Social Connector for MySpace looks interesting. MySpace for Outlook enables you to view activity updates for friends and colleagues in the People Pane, synchronize your MySpace contact list to your Outlook contacts, and get one-click access to profiles.

Even if the casual online dater belongs to one paid and one free dating sites, keeping track of emails, flirts and canned search results takes a lot of time. Don’t forget who’s viewed/bookmarked you, which I consider incredibly important to keep tabs on. Where is the dating management system for Outlook?

Dating Ad Network interviewed Sam Yagan, co-founder of OKCupid.

We have about 5 million unique visitors to our website every month.

…we analyze all of the interactions that are happening on our site. We aggregate the data, we do some statistical analysis to try to find trends and we publish those trends back out on our blog.

More please!

Steve Klebe of Vindicia on What will it take to make mobile payments mainstream in the US? Redg Snodgrass, who was at Skout, chimes in ad well. Redg is now Director of Digital Distribution, Alcatel-Lucent. He showed me some of the very cool monetization and tracking services aggregation he’s working on, very interesting stuff and potentially a game-changer in the social and mobile application space.

Shufflepeople stats.

According to PeopleMedia, there are a lot of single black people out there (6 out of 10 blacks are single). No

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The Marriage Ref

David Evans — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:21:09 +0000

Did you watch the Marriage Ref last night? Jerry Seinfeld’s latest show is absolutely hilarious. Larry David, Madonna and Ricky Gervais (The Office) were on the panel.

Each week on the show, celebrity guests dole out advice to husbands and wives who find themselves in stressful yet often humorous (to outsiders, anyway) conflicts with their spouses. On Thursday’s show, one husband had a problem with his wife keeping her dead previous husband’s prosthetic leg in their closet.

Madonna just held her own and was on the defensive most of the time, it was David and Gervais who stole the show with their amusing anecdotes, quips and general tomfoolery.

If you are in a dysfunctional relationship, tell your story and you might get on the show.

When Ricky Gervais says “This is the weirdest show I’ve ever been on,” you know you have to tune in. The Marriage Ref is on Thursdays at 10/9 central.

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Online Dating Industry News March 10, 2010

David Evans — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:07:09 +0000

The HowAboutWe.Com Date Contest: Here’s the deal. Propose your best NYC date idea as a post on our Facebook Fan Page. The people (one guy, one gal) whose dates gain the most “Likes” win! And HowAboutWe.Com will pay for the winners to go on their dates for up to $150! (See details below about how to enter.) If you want ideas for the contest or want to hear more about the story behind the site, check out our newly released Blog.

Zoosk has a new Director of marketing communications, welcome to Kate Brooks.

Zoosk has 50 million members in just over 2 years with 100,000 new singles joining the community daily. Zoosk is clearly comparing themselves with the top five paid dating sites. Ballsy comparison, but one look at Zoosk and you’ll see that it’s basically morphed into a dating site, with some useful features like paying to show up more prominently in the search results.

Zoosk is spending an ungodly amount of money on advertising and their affiliate program seems to be liked by the big affiliates. I can’t visit five web pages or Youtube videos without seeing a Zoosk ad. Their numbers are going through the roof.

Zoosk’s primary competition wrote in to say that the AreYouInterested mobile application passed 100,000 downloads.

While updating my Yahoo IM avatar I ran across Yahoo Avatar Town. I liked the female welcome avatar, but I was unable to flirt with her.

I wish Online Personals Watch would stop promoting adultery by writing about it so often. That kind of behavior does not reflect well on their brand or the online dating industry as a whole.

I’ve been looking at Flirtomatic, the popular London-based mobile social network Similar to Zoosk Boost and various ways dating sites get people to pay to show up at the top of search results, Flirtomatic launches Flirtwords — ‘AdSense’ for users. What a great idea.

Flirtomatic launches an iPhone application.
Mark Curtis of Flirtomatic shows us around their office.
Pondigo is a dating site for single alumni from our nation’s top colleges, universities, and graduate programs. Ring-knockers rejoice, the service verifies that all of its members are graduates of a short list of top academic programs ranging from Harvard University to Stanford Business School, Amherst College to the University of Virginia Law School.
Seduce people on Chatroulette and French Connection will send you a voucher to spend on their clothes.

Double Your Success With Online Dating in One Easy Step

The new GirlAskHimOut dating site is pretty self-explanatory.
RentaFriend can help you find a local Friend-For-Rent fast and easily. Whether you are looking to hire a friendly companion to attend a social event or party with you, someone to introduce you to new people, or someone to go to movie or a restaurant with, RentAFriend.com can help. Hire a Friend to show you around an unfamiliar town, teach you a new skill or hobby, or just someone for companionship.
Breaking Up? Call Death Bear.

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Seeking Couple Who Have Tested Dating Sites Matching Systems

David Evans — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:52:07 +0000

Katy says: I’m a Columbia News Service reporter interested in speaking with couples who have met offline, who have later joined dating sites to see if they would be matched up or to test the site’s claims. I’m also interested in speaking with people who won’t join established dating sites like eHarmony and Match.com, but will use Facebook and other social media to find dates. Please contact me at kbo2104@columbia.edu.

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