Shayan at Zoosk turned me onto this article – Why Dating Sites Should Care About Virtual Goods.

Eharmony spends $93.3 million in advertising in 9 months, almost twice as much as Match.com.

Eharmony changes its community guidelines and forgot to mention it.

Eharmony buys FertileThoughts.com (old but relevant, still on acquisition spree).

10 Best iPhone Apps for Dating

Online Dating – Blocking The Bad Guys

Great iPhone preso on AppStore retention curves, pricing strategies, engagement metrics, etc.

Great presentation about AppStore retention curves, pricing strategies, engagement metrics and more from Pinch Media, which provides developers with an analytics library to monitor app usage in iPhone applications. Thanks Andrew Chen.

Developer Analytics tracks social media applications.

Inside Facebook on Facebook Chat: Latest Stats

Current Facebook Chat Statistics

   * 300+ million chat messages are sent per day

   * 4+ million active channels at peak

   * There are “well over” 100 machines supporting Chat

   * 67% of users have chatted at least once (so about 117 million people)

   * The first message sent using Facebook Chat: “msn chat?”

After one week, a million people using Google’s Latitude service.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Insider Links For 1-16-09
2. Online Dating Insider Links for 10-1-08
3. Online Dating Industry Links 5-3-11

Recently Date.com rolled out virtual gifts and wanted share a bit about how the program is doing.

• Version 1.0 is doing well. It’s a learning experience for both Date and it’s members.
• Features lower-priced inventory in order to gauge interest and better understand the dynamics of virtual gifting.
• Token-based, 10 for $1, highest priced item is about $5. Wonder if this will change as some people probably want to send more expensive gifts.
• Gifts are static for now, animation and Flash coming soon.
• Work in progress, more to come as they learn from the experience. Tweaking system often, tight feeback loop.

Leave a comment if your dating site is trying out virtual gifts, with viximo or developed in house.

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Lot’s of news to cover, rumors to mull over, a tremendous amounts of comments, dating site launches and as always, much love to our sponsors, Userplane, SkaDate, ivoation and Dating Ad Network. Click their ads and find out how they can help you run a successful online dating site.

I had lunch with Ravi @ Viximo this week and then headed over to check out their new offices. Ravi has a great blog post up on his blog, Virtual Goods Branding 101. Viximo just launched their virtual gifting system for Birthday Calendar on Facebook two weeks ago. 500k unique impressions, 166,000 installs and over 20k virtual gifts sent. I see 175k daily active users. Nice numbers given the lack of traction new FB applications have been getting lately. Supposedly 200k daily users is the magic number, when things really start to happen.

New Dating Site urls?

I had a lengthly conversation with someone in China today who knows the Asian dating market incredibly well. I’ll be writing more about this growing sector in the future. The numbers don’t lie, Asian dating is the next frontier and the land-grab for market share is taking off, although it’s a longer-term play and what works in North America and EU doesn’t work at all in Asia. Companies that understand this and reflect different cultural values on their dating sites will make a fortune.

Google launches Ad Planner. I’ve been checking out the Dating & Relationships and Personals Channels. Chemistry.com is listed under Poetry?

Seattle-based Eyealike, a developer of technology for visual search, has put a new spin on its product: finding your next mate. According to Eyealike, it has added a new image search solution for facial recognition and similarity matching. The new feature is targeted at searching social networking and online dating websites, which helps people find potential mates using what the firm describes as “personal preferences for face shape, skin color, and hair color.” Via Northwest Innovation. I first wrote about the Eyealike beta last fall.

Social dating site Meeta launches today. The main focus is on enabling members to create groups,

Meeta.com has created “Meeta.com Groups” for those looking to tailor matching preferences, and as a complement to Meeta.com Groups, Meeta.com Forums allows members to share their thoughts on any internet dating topic. Forums including “Dating General Discussion,” “Relationship Issues,” “Dating and Love Advice,” “Sex and Sexuality Issues,” and “Dating Over 40″ provide members the opportunity to talk not to each other, but rather with each other; thus encouraging member-to-member communication and furthering member success within the site.

Meeta was founded by Brian Rauschenbach, Norman Clarke and Jason Llorin–all Internet dating pioneers with experience from online dating companies including Match.com, uDate.com, Perfectmatch.com, Kiss.com and ePersonals.com. Co-founder Brian Rauschenbach began a career in online marketing in 1996 working for the Seattle-based online dating company, Kiss.com. Press Release.

Cross Facebook with Meetup, add a dating component, add forums and you get the gist of the service. With a massive marketing budget the site could get some traction. Certainly boasts an all-star management team.

VdateOnline says videochat dating is enjoying extreme growth.

VdateOnline remains the only site offering its members free video or photo profiles, instant live webcam dating, video profile sharing, and virtual video dating.

Sometimes assaulting people with features works.

Dating in a modern style compared a few dating directories.

Disabledcupid launched.

Iovation Newsletter is out but only via email, where’s the link to the website version?

This SpeedDate landing page perplexed me. SEO gone awry?

Internet Business Law Services director Martha Arias says:

The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 (IMBRA) does not ‘exclusively’ regulate online dating sites (or online marriage brokers) and it is not intended to protect online-dating U.S. citizen brides. Indeed as its name suggests, IMBRA imposes law requirements on ‘international marriage’ brokers and intents to protect ‘immigrant women’ that may become victims of domestic abuse.

Andrew Chen is the man when it comes to social networking traffic analysis and statistics.

I have a big 7.5 mile running race on Sunday, wish me luck.

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