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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Although Match.com, made up less than 5% of his holding company IAC’s $6.5 billion in sales last year, it accounted for more than 10% of the company’s $464 million in profits. In the past two years, Match has boosted the number of paying customers by a third.
At Match, 23 percent of subscribers are over 50, [...]

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Scientific American has taken online dating to task, applying various research methodologies and coming up with some interesting conclusions in an unfortunately titled article, The Truth About Online Dating.
I’ve talked with some of the researchers mentioned. Jeana Frost at Boston University and I have met a few times to discuss the more technical aspects of [...]

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In November 2005, Court Rye wrote a Match.com case study. I stumbled across it doing a random Google search for industry information. His portfolio states he worked with Match.com employees to identify alternative business strategies, marketing techniques, and technology related opportunities and proposed RSS integration and chat room facilitation with sponsored events as a means [...]

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Are dating site operational costs higher than social networks? Markus at PlentyOfFish says “operational costs of a dating site significantly higher then social networking sites.� I doubt that 100%. Come on Markus, enough with the hype, or at least back up your assertions. You know your numbers but sometimes they appear a bit too “bendy� [...]

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Launched in 1999 by music marketing entrepreneur Clark Benson and Northwestern University fund-raiser Karen DeMars, eCRUSH was designed with viral marketing in mind, as members can send email “crushes� to non-members, who must then register with eCRUSH to digitally unmask their admirers.
The addition of eCRUSH is both a chance for Hearst to sell eCRUSH inventory [...]

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Fred Stutzman on the latest Pew Internet and American Life Project, which released data from their recent survey of teen Social Networks use.

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Markus links to a great post comparing unique visitors vs. actual member logins to dating sites and show the top 10 rankings for each.
…Ranking online dating sites purely on visitor traffic is flawed; membership is a prerequisite to use the services, and member activity is the foundation of successful matchmaking. Looking at how members [...]

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… and how it relates to Yahoo’s revenue projections. Freshmen need to generate 900 pageviews per month Yahoo expects to make their numbers.
Fred Stutzman says:
Social networks like the Facebook are situationally relevant. This means that at different points in a person’s life, the information needs answered by the site are different. For Facebook, the [...]

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A certain high-ranking official with close ties to the clandestine dating/social-networking industrial complex has forwarded me top secret footage of recently-release video of Eharmony’s CEO speaking with Marketwatch’s Bambi Francisco.

Bambi Francisco :Have subscriber Acquisition Costs (SAC) gone up for eHarmony?

Greg Waldorf: No.

Dave, talking to monitor: Greg, what’s up with the eye roll? Looks like the [...]

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