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 or social networking sites. Subscribe to the RSS feed (you can subscribe via email as well). Your comments and suggestions for stories are welcomed.

I finally got around to putting my sailing membership to good use this afternoon. My new friend Dana agreed to the adventure and make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. Dana wrote some of the code that powers the Mars landers. I consider the outing a success, we did not get run over by a ferry, LNG tanker, Homeland Security speedboat or tugboat.

I saw a press release about P2P dating software but am unable to locate the actual software. Let me know if you find a url that links to the actual software.

The old fashioned way of signing up for a internet dating website, putting your profile in with hundreds of others and paying a monthly fee for the privilege of searching that database of profiles is about to become totally obsolete. Dating Share, a phenomenal new P2P Dating Software is changing everything about how we handle romance using online dating sites.

Dating Share is a completely new way to handle online dating. You don’t pay a monthly fee to use our website. Instead, you download a P2P (peer-to-peer) software product that puts you directly in touch with a whole community of singles looking for romance online. P2P is the same technology used for music downloads and file sharing so you know this is the most up-to-date technology the internet has to offer.

The idea of Peer-Peer dating clients has been around for a while, but never seems to catch on. There are many desktop P2P clients like LimeWire and Transmission that are reasonably straightforward to use, but I’m having a difficult time seeing the general public actually downloading the client, searching for people, and figuring out how to communicate.

This has to be the worst dating site spam I’ve ever seen. I get at least 10 of these every day. I’m a big fan of creative spam. The spam I do like lately are the ones that use sensational headlines, which was popular approach to tricking people to click a link a while back and seems to be making a comeback. How can you not click on headlines like these: Cats found eating human corpse, Poker winner dies of heart attack, Paris Hylton falls down flight of stairs.

Yesterday I had lunch with Chris and Corey from iovation. A beautiful day to hang out on Boston harbor talking shop while looking at the skyline and boats of all kinds. I enjoy spending time with clients, often times I work with people that I never meet face to face, or only see once a year at conferences.

Today I met with someone who was active and extremely successful in the online dating space circa 2000 and it was interesting to hear stories about what it was like to start a site, achieve success and be acquired back in the day. Inspiration is good.

If you’re in the dating industry and find yourself in Boston, look me up.

ReadWriteWeb says:

Online reputation company Rapleaf has released a new study of 49.3 million people, revealing gender and age data about social network users. On most of the main social networks - including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 - women outnumber men by a considerable amount. On Facebook, the 18-24 age group is largest, with 1,685,029 women in that age group compared to 977,753 men. In MySpace, the same age group dominates, with 7,091,214 women and 5,226,788 men.

The only social networks studied that didn’t have more women than men in the 18-24 year old group were venerable old LinkedIn (where incidentally the 25-34 age group was tops) and a site called Perfspot.

See the complete article for a chart of various analysis of social networking users.

Scott Olson, VP marketing at iovation, has written about how easy it is to bypass background checks. Scott outlines precisely why I believe background check and fraud-detection companies should work together. They are pitching their services to the exact same people at dating and social networking companies and should be collaborating and teaming up to create a stronger service offering.

The article is light on details about how to get around background checks, I’d like to hear more about how to actually do this, maybe with an example.

These days I’m feeling more and more like a B2B matchmaker in the dating and social networking space.

Disclaimer: iovation is a advertiser and a client.

Senior dating site Lavelife Prime is about to begin charging it’s 40,000 members. It will be interesting to see what the attrition rate is once the paywall is in place. Wait, it’s for people over 45, not exactly seniors. Then why does search start at 40? Confusing. Depressing that I am eligible in five years.

Compete doesn’t have much on the traffic, probably because prime.lavalife.com doesn’t show up as it’s own destination. There are only 16 women between 40-45 within 25 miles of me in Boston and I recognize several from Match.

I just realized that most recent images did not include a clickable thumbnail, sorry about that.

Match has hit the wall in terms of US growth, continuing slight increase in revenue per subscriber. 1% subscriber growth to 1,326,500.

Revenue growth was driven by a 4% and 15% increase in international subscribers and revenue per subscriber, respectively, and 3% growth in revenue per subscriber in North America where subscribers were flat year-over-year. Chemistry.com continued to grow subscribers strongly during the quarter. Operating Income Before Amortization growth reflects lower customer acquisition costs as a percentage of revenue, due to more efficient spending. Operating income for the current period reflects amortization of non-cash marketing of $3.1 million, versus $7.2 million in the prior year period.

I wonder what the Chemistry numbers are like after the massive marketing spend during the last year.

Full details here.

I was reading about Chinese neocon nationalists in the New Yorker and came across this:

Parents shopping for suitable mates for their children gather in the city’s parks most weekends to scrutinize and discuss the resumes of candidates, handwritten on bits of paper and torn sheets of cardboard taped to trees, resting on benches, and leaning against the risers of stone steps. the personals (so specific that they include details like “hunts for girl 163 cm”) are written by other yearning mothers and fathers.

Talk about old school. Another reason why the Chinese singles market is wide open for more efficient matchmaking services. Just last week the total number of people online in China surpassed the US. I’m talking to several Chinese and Korean startups, lot’s of opportunities to explore. Maybe it’s time to translate the blog into Asian languages.

OnlineSpeedDating.com is available, a great strategic asset to an online speed dating company or one that’s about to enter that space. Contact vladravin at gmail dot com for details.