In case you missed it, the battleground for online dating dominance shifted over the weekend.

First, we learned that True.com is most likely delinquent on its advertising payments. As a result True’s ads are increasingly harder to find in the usual places like Myspace and it’s rankings continue to sink. More in the New York Times article, Is True.com Being Untrue to Advertising Partners?

A few datapoints:

• In June of 2006, True.com has been ranked as the nation’s No. 1 dating site, according to Hitwise.
• September 2006 I wrote that True was going to internally build and launch a targeted on-site advertising system. This was the first sign of trouble. Why go to the trouble to build an ad serving system when there are literally dozens to partner with?
• Back in March Markus wrote that True now has more unique visitors per month than singlesnet and match.com combined.
• Then came the Hot But Virtious New York Times article. Look at the traffic spike, then drop- off.

I’ve been saying all along that the True revenue juggernaut would never last. The capitalists will argue that “at least True made a lot of money,” but is that really how you want to measure success in the online dating space? And did they really?

Mark Brooks thinks ad rates will most likely go down and is worried that True.com damaged the reputation of the online dating industry. Certainly, some other site like Mate1 or SinglesNet will come in and pump up ad rates back up again. As for the reputation of the industry, we know all about that already.

Do you think this kind of stuff is being talked about at Tech Crunch 40 today? Of course not. silicon Valley and the Web 2.0 crowd are much more civil for the most part, because they understand that the stakes are much higher and that your competition might end up as your partner so it’s best to play as nice as possible. Not so in Texas, where is seems just about anything goes.

The dating industry has become a bare-knuckle brawl, the winners relying on creative accounting, sketchy business practices, low-brow advertising and questionable black-box matching systems.

And how is the consumer fairing in the middle of the mess? Not so well. A less than one percent success rate is nothing to crow about. Clearly, recommending people is a lot harder than introducing someone to a new band or author. We have a long way to go before online dating can be considered anything close to a successful industry. Yes, I know, $700 million in revenue, but I’ve never seen this number even remotely backed up?

With all the hype around Niche sites, they aren’t taking the business away from paid sites like everyone thought. Neither are the free sites for that matter, but that is a different topic alltogether.

Love Ain’t Chemistry

Upset at the idea of being Rejected by consumers, eHarmony has brought a complaint against Chemistry.com before the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The division ruled last week that Chemistry failed to defend its claim that it could use the “latest science of attraction to predict which single men and women you’ll have a relationship and dating chemistry with.” The division said Chemistry should discontinue that claim as well as several related to it.

Match said it disagrees with certain of NAD’s findings but would discontinue the claims at issue. NAD can refer cases to regulatory bodies, including the Federal Trade Commission, if its recommendations aren’t followed.

I have spend some time with Helen Fisher, the anthropologist who created the Chemistry matchmaking system and while I’m no scientist, I place a higher value on brain chemistry than I do answering multiple-choice tests, so there is my bias, right out in the open.

I’d like to know how the BBB was able to effectively consider all the evidence in just a few weeks. Here’s a link to the report,which is impossible to bookmark on the NAD website and downloaded as an asp file type for some reason.

Claims at issue included:

• “Introducing Chemistry.com—the first online personals site to understand the importance of chemistry in dating, serious relationships and even marriage.â€?

I’ll buy that, eHarmony doesn’t focus on Chemistry and it is the name of the company after all (Raises eyebrows).

• “At Chemistry.com we move beyond online personals and get you out dating in the real world faster, because that’s what really matters to single men and women who are seeking serious relationships or even marriage.â€?

I don’t see anything wrong with claiming to get you dating faster. Maybe call it a goal of the service?

• “Once we have your results, we use the latest science of attraction to predict which single men and women you’ll have a relationship and dating chemistry with.â€?

No problem with that, it’s the basis for the entire business model. Did the NAD read up on current state of the art matching and decide that Chemistry was not utilizing the latest science? I’m back to questioning what the BBB knows about scientific matching and what are the criteria for analysis?

• “It’s our belief that meaningful relationships are built on two equally important foundations: compatibility and chemistry. Other sites may help you find out if you’re compatible, but only Chemistry’s next-generation system, based on years of research into human attraction and successful relationships, is designed to help you find both of these essential elements.â€?

Dr. Fisher labeled her research as preliminary, -1 points.

• “An advanced matching system that combines compatibility with chemistry.â€?

Hard to call this one. A great turn of phrase (says the marketer in me.)

• “Chemistry.com is the first site to match by both compatibility and chemistry.â€?

Replace chemistry with zip code or shoe size, is that wrong?

• “Chemistry.com is unique in several other ways as well. The 1-2-3 Meet process enables you to learn some important things about your potential partner before you meet, hence alleviating some of the awkwardness of our first encounter. The scheduling tool makes it easy to find a time and place to meet. Chemistry.com also provides you with potential matches so you don’t have to make the initial approach yourself.â€?

-1 point, that is basically the eHarmony pitch except they have something like 15 steps.
Eharmony has some incredibly smart people on their team, as does Chemistry. From my perspective, would you rather answer questions about the length of your fingers or answer 436 questions? Guess what, people like to do both.

Eharmony has prevailed this round and Chemistry clearly needs to focus and stay the course and keep the marketing machine going if they want to compete head to head with eHarmony.

Can you imagine if the Federal Trade Comission has to get involved and people start looking at True? Total bloodbath, nobody wins except for social networks, which by the way are all instituting background checks.

Finally, we have Match and WeAttract going at it this month and Yahoo! Personals settling out of court. It’s a good time to be a laywer in the online dating space.

One final thought. eHarmony = Microsoft and Chemistry = Apple.

No related posts.

Yahoo Personals has settled with one Robert Anthony over a date-baiting case from last fall. Yahoo has avoided wasting an enormous amount of time by settling, which means they paid the guy off. I don’t know much about the issue but it sounds like the guy thought he was dating a real person when in fact he was communicating with a test profile.

The takeaway of the settlement is that Y! Personals will inactivate stale profiles and continue to ferret out fake profiles, which they have done all along. Amending the Terms of Service Yahoo relies on members to report bad behavior, that’s the only way they are going to maintain any semblance of a clean database.

Most important is that profiles inactive for 120 days will be rendered unsearchable. This is great news and will hopefully cut down on the number of emails sent to people no longer in the system.

When a user cancels their subscription, a screen will be presented giving them the option to delete the profile, render it unsearchable or keep the profile active. If the user makes no selection, the profile will automatically be deactivated.

I am not clear on the difference between unsearchable and deactivated and in what context would you leave a dating site and leave your profile active?

More at Online Personals Watch.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo Personals Improves Search
2. Yahoo Personals Phishing scam?
3. Yahoo Personals Customizable profile

Recently I came across LawyersandSettlements.com, which has a page dedicated to a Match.com class action lawsuit and one for It’s Just Lunch, dated 2005 and December, 2006, respectively. The site looks like it’s prospecting, and something doesn’t feel right about it. Are there other sites out there like this?

Related posts:

1. Dating Sites Using Twitter for Customer Service
2. Match.com Repudiates Baseless Lawsuit
3. Astrological Matching Service

I saw this in my newsreader but Markus beat me to it:

 A lawsuit has been filed against TrueBeginnings, LLC, the owner and operator of the True.com online dating website…The complaint alleges that True.com charges its customers monthly service fees in excess of $50 per month, and that True.com charges its customers’ credit card or bank accounts for these fees.

There are several lawsuits againts True, Match and Yahoo pending. I’ll see what I can dig up, time for a legal update on the online dating industry.

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Law enforcement officials are charging that the online social network MySpace has discovered thousands of known sex offenders using its service, but has failed to act on the information. So much for the Sentinel Sentry sex offender database.

Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer of MySpace, supports legislation requiring convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses and instant messenger accounts with authorities. Sexual predators are pretty stupid when it comes to online chat, just watch an episode of To Catch a Predator, but does Nigam really think registering email and IM handles is going to curb the flow of the disturbed into Myspace?

Legislators should prepare for a rude awakening when they find out of ineffective email and IM registration and tracking will turn out to be. Just look at how easy it is to change email addresses, member names and credit cards at online dating and social sites.

For every sicko who ends up in a living room facing MSNBC’s Chris Hansen there are 10 others far more advanced in feeding their sexual addictions. Proxy servers in Russian republics, encrypted P2P networks California-based sex slaves and the ability to buy credit card numbers on the net for $6 are the real concerns.

Myspace will never fully eradicate predators from Myspace, everthing they do is a best-effort. While I applaud most social and dating safety initiatives, I certainly hope Myspace’s  hunger for revenue does not get in the way of their responsibility to do whatever it takes to keep members as safe as possible.

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Is this for real? The National Organization of Short Statured Adults?

The National Organization Of Short Statured Adults is in receipt of numerous complaints regarding the internet based website EHARMONY.COM, 300 N. Lake Avenue Ste, 1111 Pasadena, CA 91101 USA. The complaints allege that the website is intentionally denying website membership to short statured men. Suspicions have been confirmed after numerous tests indicated that the exact same responses to the website’s membership questionnaire, with the exception of physical height, resulted in either approval of membership (when an acceptable tall height was submitted) or denial of membership (when a short height was submitted). These tests were conducted numerous times to ensure accuracy. The National Organization Of Short Statured Adults has requested a full explanation from the company but has yet to receive a response. The organization has issued a full boycott of the website until this matter can be resolved. A 1998 Miami University study concluded that height and the power associated therein, plays a role in the selection of a mate.

From the Unofficial eHarmony Blog. This is what happens when big corporations don’t have their own blogs. People go out and start them themselves.

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Fresh from the comments, Brandon at Net Choice says:

Today the Illinois legislature did what the Florida legislature wouldn’t do – crush a bad online dating bill in committee.

I had a premonition that things would go well in Springfield. Hey, it’s the Land of Lincoln and Illinois is the state where I was born!

But superstitions aside, the members of a House Judiciary Committee really carried the day here with their probing questions and clued-in skepticism about HB 563, the Internet Dating Disclosure and Safety Awareness Act.

Thanks Brandon. Leave your name and a link to your blog next time.

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Mashable thinks another social networking patent has been awarded to Friendster. Supposedly the patent, filed on August 25th 2006, was issued on March 6th 2007. Friendster already has several social networking patents.

Related posts:

1. Friendster’s Patent Possibilities
2. Yahoo files social networking patent
3. Social Networking Site Rankings

A few months ago Jessica Simpson was embarrassed when she mistakenly hired a professional gigolo from a dating site.

eHarmony: rock n’ Roller’s need not apply. News outlets are reporting that rock star Courtney Love was recently devastated when she failed the eHarmony personality test.

In a typo-laden message on her official website, Moonwashedrose.com, she writes, “Gurss what? After an hour plus of this thing they tell me that two percent of thier ‘Cliermnts ar elike me and there was noone for me.�?

Being married to Kurt Cobain and getting involved with lots of sketchy sex, drugs and rock will do that. Leno and Letterman are going to have a field day with this one.

This just in, Alec Baldwin is considering online dating. Zzzzz.

In other dating industry news, the owner of a Japanese online dating company was arrested for Sending 5.4 BILLION spam emails. Good riddance to the troll.

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Stephen Cohen, who stole Sex.com from Match.com founder Gary Kremen and whose whereabouts are still unknown — can now add “gangland murder attemptâ€? to his life story.

Who doesn’t like a story that includes a:

Convicted felon, a private investigator with a Stanford MBA, a Match.com startup dot-commer (now former) tweaker, a daughter caught smuggling 202 pounds of marijuana, a bizarre bid to buy Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and the operator of a Mexican shrimp farm. Don’t forget the Tijuana assassination attempt.

At tiny nibbles, via BoingBoing, of course.

Related posts:

1. Older Daters Worth More to Dating Sites
2. Plentyoffish Worth $1 Billion According to Founder
3. Are Facebook Application Users Worth $1.40 a Piece?