Fellow social networking/dating blogger and consultant Mark Brooks and I got together last weekend for a long breakfast in Boston’s Seaport District.

My meetings with Mark are always informative and entertaining. Every time you think you know everything, there’s always a deal around the corner, a lawsuit pending or a site up for sale that didn’t make it across your radar. Staying informed is a big part of our business and I can count on one hand the number of go-to people who know exactly whats going on, Mark being on of them.

If you need a daily newsfeed about what’s going on in the dating world, Online Personals Watch is hands-down the authoritative source.

I’m waiting for a call back from the OK Cupid PR team, Sam Yagan is in town and wants to talk. I wonder what’s on his mind?

Related posts:

1. Online Personals Watch Off The Market
2. Ticonderoga Ventures hooks up with Online Personals Watch
3. Online Dating Newsfeed

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 the recent eHarmony news about it’s technical infrastructure?

Let’s Grab a Drink: What kind of beverage are you?

Classmates.com launches dating service. True is an advertiser, and Yahoo used to be onthe site as well, will they remain on the site?

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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 Operations.” If that doesn’t scare the beejeezus out of you and make you want to go back to your day job, and you have a few million in the bank, have at it. Otherwise, pat yourself on the back for having a good idea and move on.

Lattice models and the Black-Scholes-Merton formula… are one thing, just don’t forget, Spark is $38 million in debt  accumulated deficit.  It costs a lot more to run a dating site than most people think.

Lot’s going on at Jangl, the company that provides anonymous calling services to Match.com. New website, widget to embed in profiles, blogs, websites, etc. A video of their Spring VON presentation.

OPW ranks online dating sites based on success stories. I don’t get it. How do we know these are real people? Without authenticity, the numbers mean little.

PerfectMatch deploys fraud detection solution. Hey, we’re big enough to get hacked.

Related posts:

1. Dating Insider Links 10-22-10
2. Online Dating Links For 8-28-09
3. Friday 6-6 Links

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 dating sites in most cases.

Lavalife is trying something new, moving from credits to $29.99 subscriptions.  Let’s see how they do with that. Anyone want to guess how much market share they are going to loose?

I am tired of hearing that Match is going down because they charge for a decent  service. Free sites will say that until they are blue in the face and it may happen at some point, but that is not for a long time. Nothing but background noise and the only people listening are the ones who read this blog. Most consumers don’t care, they try new sites out all the time. I’m still waiting for a decent percentage of singles saying they are meeting better quality people on dating sites.

90 million singles, only a third of which are online dating at any one time. An untapped market of 60 million people and the answer is free dating sites? I don’t think so. I think it may be the opposite. Higher touch services, higher pricing, safer sites, authentic profiles and a better user experience.

Sam at OkCupid has made millions taking pay services and unleashing free versions. I respect that. The Internet is perfectly suited to making certain businesses more transparent or free, and there are plenty of examples of free being as good as, if not better, than paid.

Problem is, a lot of these rules don’t apply to online dating.

I bet we could bring 10 million more singles online with a few straightforward changes to typical industry practices.  

Most dating site operators don’t understand the difference between authentication and background checks. There is a lot of money to be made when people can authenticate their profile for a few bucks. When they figure that out, more singles will come online.

Dating sites ruined for themselves. They got to greedy, and left the door open for everyone to come in and make a mess of the place. The notion of a dating site having quality singles has gone out the window, the majority of sites are full of stale junk profiles and scammers.

Speaking of junk, when dating sites start showing ads that aren’t from the bottom of the barrel, maybe they won’t have to game search engines and artificially inflate pageviews to justify their existence.

Let’s lower the quality of our profiles, throw in lots of crappy advertising, save money by not hiring any customer service and hope we can flip this sucker before the bottom drops out. Nice business model but not very respectful to their members.

It’s no wonder people malign online dating. The industry doesn’t talk with each other, they won’t open up profiles, security is a pesky problem,  and with all eyes on the bottom line, innovation is all but ignored. I’m not talking about DNA testing for compatibility, I’m talking about basic changes to the way the business operates.

Just like free sites continue to pester us with the demise of paid dating, I will continue to tell the dating industry to wake up, think different and take a few risks. Same goes for the VC and angel investors who avoid the sector like the plague, for good reason most of the time. We need a few more well-funded dating sites. $10-25 million right off the bat. That’s what it takes these days to make serious inroads into the market. Show me a top-10 dating site that hasn’t spent this kind of money to get where it is today (besides Plenty of Fish, but that’s an ad network these days, not a dating site, and it’s an anomaly not likely to be repeated for quite some time.)

There is plenty of room for a new paid dating site to take on refugees from the top 10 sites. It doesn’t have to be a mashup of the latest technology, or bare-breasted advertising, it has to feature an impeccable database full of real people and a way to connect these people online before they meet in a safe, useful manner. Technology and boobs may get them in the door, but quality service is what keeps them coming back. Why is this so difficult to understand?

My girlfriend comes back from a month in Australia tonight. I promise I will be in a better mood tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. Date.com Releases Free Online Dating Toolbar
2. Is Advertising Killing Free Online Dating?
3. The First Success Story Of Free Online Dating

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 like the videoclips on various pages explaining the features of the site and how to use them. Many bloggers are single and to some extent lonely, another great niche. Don’t forget to check out their videos on YouTube. Talk about cheap advertising and traffic drivers.

Tim Johnson, head of communications at Jangl, gave me an update about what’s on the horizon for the company, which powers Match.com’s anonymous calling service. Tim has a blog, so does Jangl CEO Michael Cerda. I’m surprised at how many startup Sr. executives don’t have a blog these days. Absolutely necessary.

Jangl now offers widgets for your blog, social networking page or website. Besides the simplicity of adding anonymous calling to your web property, Jangl has removed the need to separately verify phone numbers, all this happens within the context of the widget, removing a great deal of friction for first-time users. Very cool. I’ve tried several flavors of anonymous calling services and nothing comes close to Jangl. It can be as easy to integrate as Userplane chat.

In a few weeks they will announce deals with a large blog network and social networking service. Lots more mind-blowing stuff coming from them that I can’t talk about.

Jury duty tomorrow. I’ll post a few more times today then who knows how long until I’m back.

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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 parallels with the Internet movers and shakers current love affair with Web 2.0. Subscription and advertising-based revenue, targeted advertising, identity, safety, creating community (not quite yet), attention and search are all key features of online dating that have direct parallels to the evolution of the Internet, especially in the social networking industry, which by no mistake is where most of the money and innovation is happening.

Head on over to The Progress Bar and join the conversation. Just like here, you can add the RSS feed or join via email.

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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 a several things I want to talk about as we start out the new year, from iDate to The Right One acquisition and a few other items that I didn’t get to before the break. Posting will get back up to speed over the next week or so.

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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?

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 romance industry doesn’t talk about the folks in the latter category, but they’re out there. They’re singles with seemingly innocent attributes that are setting off digital flags signaling they’re unfit to date, or maybe just slightly less fit than others. A forgetful dater who fails to return an email on Engage.com, for instance, could be branded as rude. Simply living in the wrong ZIP Code can push unlucky members of JDate to the bottom of the queue. Even at sites that haven’t adopted a ratings approach, a growing cliquishness, combined with the viral nature of the Web, means an offhand comment to one person can come back to haunt you when you meet someone else just a few weeks later.

I spent a considerable amount of time with Ellen on the phone talking about dating and reputation, only to have my choice quotes end up in the trash. Such is the life of a media contact. All the work and never enough glory. I’m not complaining, believe me. I work with identity and reputation startups as well as dating and social networking companies, and I expected the article to be more about emerging companies, mashups with sites and how powerful authentic testimonials can be.

Technorati Tags: reputation

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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? Where is the social responsibility in the online dating market?

Research consulting firm iResearch valued the China online dating market at 37 million yuan (US$4.5 million) for 2004 and 91 million yuan (US$11.2 million) for 2005, and predicts it will grow to 653 million yuan (US$80.5 million) in 2008. (China Daily)

Match.com CFO Lisbeth R. McNabb joins Board of Directors at Nexstar Broadcasting. (TMC Net)

Match is doing the first live tv ad in the UK. The ads will be pre-scripted and will also air after a delay of about 10 minutes so that the BACC can review them. Despite the slight delay, ITV classifies the ads as live. (Media Life)

Ford did live ads last year in London, and ‘The Tub’ had them as well. (The Guardian.)

We’ve had them for years, from Saturday Night Live to the live advertising on US television in the 1950′s. (Mark Cuban’s blog)

Technorati Tags: live+advertising

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