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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Jangl on TypePad, and Tagged.com. Jangle is blowing up, is Myspace intergration next?
Microsoft and Match partner. MS to offer Instant Messaging capabilities to Match members. Hopefully this works better than the old Match chat app which was rendered mute by everyone’s pop-up ad blockers.
Chemistry.com: Come as you are.
eharmony chooses Strongmail. Why is most of [...]

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Collaboradate has a new blog.
Spark Networks 10-k, lots of financial info, including picking up Schmooze-a-Palooza for $50k. This document should be required reading for anyone in the dating business. If you are about to launch a new dating site, make sure to read “Risk Factors, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of [...]

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Hot or not goes free: They buy into the idea that free dating sites will subsume paid sites. To some extent I agree. Sites like Match hit a ceiling and have to grow by acquisition and international expansion. Free sites are taking away some of the thunder of paid sites- social networking sites, not free [...]

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I spent several hours on the phone yesterday catching up on dating industry news.
Jeff from LonelyBloggers.com I had a great introductory call. Lot’s of parallels in our thinking and we both have a lot of “back in the day” experience with early web stuff.
Jeff runs the site on Dolphin, a slick implementation. I particularly [...]

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I just finished adding a new theme to my other blog, The Progress Bar, with a new template. TBP is where I write about Web 2.0, social media, identity, leading-edge internet marketing and other early-adopter topics that don’t quite fit into a blog about the online dating industry.
Online dating does have quite a number of [...]

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I hope everyone had a great holidays. I escaped to the woods of Vermont for a week of badly needed downtime. I’m glad my parents finally got satellite internet access but it felt great to sit on front of the wood stove with a regular book instead of a Powerbook for a few days.
I have [...]

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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 [...]

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Ellen Gamerman at the WSJ wrote an article about rating, reputation (reg req’d) and online dating.

More and more dating sites are integrating reputation and testimonial features, including Engage.com (one-time client), Consumating and JDate.

The result is an emerging caste system, where highly rated daters see a lot of action, and others are deemed undateable. The online [...]

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According to Adrants, Alloy Media + Marketing has released a study that found adults age 18-30 place far more emphasis on a brand’s social responsibility than its use of celebrity endorsers. This on the heels of a year filled with dating sites touting celebrity endorsements and star psychologists, but to what degree of success? [...]

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