Spark Networks

by David Evans on November 12, 2008 · 2 comments

in Finance

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 Startups 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.
We offer consulting services to dating sites and social networks as well.

Spark Networks is trending down, with a few positive notes.

  • JDate revenue and subscribers down
  • General market revenue down 49%
  • Revenue for Offline & Other Businesses down
  • Average paying subscribers down 10%
  • The Company purchased 1.6 million shares during the quarter at $3.81 per share for an aggregate amount of approximately $6.1 million.

SPARK NETWORKS REPORTS THIRD QUARTER 2008 FINANCIAL RESULTS

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eHarmony and Yahoo Announce partnership in Australia

by David Evans on November 12, 2008 · 0 comments

in Marketing

The unofficial eHarmony Blog continues to break great stories. Some of the posts are news oriented, like this post about how eHarmony partners with Yahoo for advertising in Austrailia. Other posts tend to dig deep into how eHarmony functions. Great stuff.

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Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: Nov 12, 2008

by David Evans on November 12, 2008 · 0 comments

in Social Networking

Tip of the hat to Jeremiah for continuing to produce the fantastic Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: Nov 12, 2008.

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More people Meeting, Getting Married Online

by David Evans on November 12, 2008 · 7 comments

in Research

oneinten.jpg One in eight people married last year in the US met online. That’s it? Let’s see that number somewhere around 3 and we’ll have something to talk about. Right now we’re still fumbling around trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

today I promise I will not be talking about the new niche site for mullet-lovers. I have standards, you know.

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Online Dating Links for 11-11

by David Evans on November 11, 2008 · 6 comments

in Uncategorized

Craigslist charging for erotic services. We’ll see how using a fake credit card to authenticate pimps works out.

“Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer the American Landscape.

Adaptive Websites: MIT Technology Review has a great article about Adapting Websites to Users, a good read if you are interested in creating a closer connection to/between your viewers/readers/members/customers. Typical dating sites don’t do anything special with what they know about you. Maybe you see photos of the gender you’re interested in, or some basic geo-targeted ads (Hot girls want to meet you in [insert your town name]!) which is a total fallacy. Adult Friend Finder and Fling do this all the time. I do have to say that the amount of customized affiliate ads AFF offers is staggering.

Lesbians on Bonefish, via Online Personals Watch. Speaking of lesbians, IMVU has launched some pretty racy banner ads.

zoosk redesign.jpgZoosk redesigned their site. I’ve been comparing the people on Zoosk and Are You Interested, and the AYI people are much better looking and responsive to emails, at least in my experience.

Skadate has 5 Tips how to get relevant ads and make money on your web site.

Perfectmatch is up 47% over the last quarter.

Recently released statistics from Perfectmatch.com show a spike in new members of 47% over the last quarter, accelerating a trend that started at the beginning of 2008. In addition, matches are up 125%, as members are renewing their subscriptions and finding more perfect matches than ever before. Among the members, a staggering 92% are using the Duet Compatibility System (Duet), the site’s research-based matching and capability program, to access personality types different from their own.

Online Dating News has launched a site for Online Dating Commercials and spoof videos. Not sure why they didn’t just add it as a feature to their site. They also launched a site called Onlinedatingbookmarks, which has exactly 5, all affiliate links to top 10 sites. Someone tell me why this is useful.

Janis Spindel, famed Matchmaker, is now getting paid in Rolls Royces. Matchmakers are great for the few people that can afford them, but what is their success rate?

The latest Jupiter Report has given Mark Brooks a nice bit of promotion. Mark is quite good at getting his name out there, laying out a few soundbites and dropping client names. It’s a great skill to have. Do dating sites actually purchase these generic reports? Is there anything in them you can’t read here?

Facebook Marketing Bible, November 2008 edition.

Lots of stories about location-based dating lately. I’ve been talking to several companies getting involved in the space. If you don’t have a ton of money, an absolutely top-notch design and programming team and a killer conduit to millions of users, you’re going to fail. The problem with all of these services is that nobody is using them yet. They have to be part of a larger site like PoF, Match or Facebook to be truly useful, although Loopt got a great spike when they were features on an Apple tv ad. Check me out on Brightkite, thats the only place I periodically update my location with notes and photos.

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Videospokesmodels, Cheaper than Dr. Phil

by David Evans on November 11, 2008 · 0 comments

in Features

videospokesperson1.jpg If you can’t afford a celebrity for your website, you may want to check out VideoSpokesModel.com. Not a bad deal for a couple hundred bucks. I’ll take her over your pitch/Help/FAQ section any day.

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Yahoo On Track To Be World’s Largest Dating Site

by David Evans on November 11, 2008 · 5 comments

in Dating Sites

Yahoo is by far the largest dating site. PlentyOfFish, Match and SinglesNet combined don’t even come close to the number of singles on Yahoo. Let’s look at a few reasons why why Yahoo isn’t owning the market.

To compound how far Yahoo has fallen, remember that it has launched and shuttered several attempts at social networks. Now Yahoo is building out a new “social” platform and recently Yahoo rolled out new profiles, replacing ancient attempts at letting people describe themselves with a few links and some text. Tech Crunch says to go get our Shiny New Yahoo Profiles and was there when Yahoo Previewed Its New Application Platform.

Yahoo begins the rollout of its new user profile today, which marks the first tangible product release for the social part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS. The profile is one of the anchors (mail is the other) to Yahoo’s strategy of turning the site into one big social network.

Turns out they deleted everyone’s profile information, which upset people to no end. Not that there was much to delete, but still, unexpected. Update: turns out you can request your old profile data at Customer Care. This is a good example of what’s wrong with Yahoo. Who in the world approved the process of removing all data from profiles? I understand that with hundreds of millions of profiles, making changes is never easy, but it seems like Yahoo made a lot of mistakes that I wouldn’t have expected.

yprofile1.jpgYahoo is a champion at squandering opportunities and their stock price shows it. Morale is down, more layoffs are probably coming and the executive directory might as well be written on a whiteboard it changes so often. And that’s just Yahoo Personals.

Here’s my new profile, empty, oops!

yprofile4.jpg The Managing your alias and profile post explaining the changes has 1,100 comments. Here’s the explanation of what happens when you start sharing data with third-party applications. And you though Facebook app data sharing was difficult to explain? I wonder how many comments the post explaining data sharing is going to have.

What Can Yahoo Do to Improve Dating?

Yahoo spent an enormous amount of time and energy upgrading their dating site platform. I spoke with Yahoo a year ago, about the upgrade, back when Susan Mernit was still around. Doesn’t seem like anything has changed in ages. Why go through the process of a massive infrastructure upgrade and do so little with it? At least they can start to achieve feature parity with the competition.

Yahoo has the largest number of profiles of any website. At the core, they should add a checkbox to your profile that let’s people self-identify as being single. Bingo, add tens of millions of singles to their database. If they make dating more social, which they should, they could tie lifestream data, Flickr photos, MyBlogLog communities and lots of data from other Yahoo properties. That’s where things start to get interesting.

I certainly hope someone at Yahoo Personals has the foresight, power and organizational skills to make this happen. It’s a great brand, the site looks great and works well, for the most part, but the lack of keeping up has me worried about it’s viability in the long term. Yahoo Personals started with a hell of a lot more going for it than any other dating site, but will it ever really flourish?

Otherwise we get to think about what it will be like if Microsoft runs Yahoo Personals (and how weird that would be because MS has a huge deal with Match.)

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Niche Dating Sites Offering White Label Solutions

by David Evans on November 7, 2008 · 6 comments

in White Label

millionairematchlogo.gifRecently I have been contacted by a number of companies wanting to set me up with my own dating site. The twist is that these companies already run destination dating sites. MillionaireMatch says:

We can set it up for you at no cost if you have strong interest in work-at-home business. You can pick the name for the millionaire dating site, and own the domain and brand. We take care of all the backend and engineering work.

You don’t have to worry that no one exists at your millionaire dating site at the beginning. Your site will share millions of quality profiles with other millionaire sites we have already set up. Your users can immediately contact hundreds of thousands of other users once they register at your millionaire dating site.

You can earn money if you have users registering with or without becoming a payment member.

It is easy to get users visiting your deaf dating site by doing the followings:

1. Invite friends, friends of your friends to visit your dating site;
2. Write blogs on popular sites. Think about how to promote your dating site in
smart way;
3. Create friend circle on some social networking sites to get to know more
friends.;
4. Use business card, fly sheet to promote your dating site when joining social activities;

I met the owner of Millionaire Match recently, MM is one of the more successful dating sites for affluent people and those attracted to them. Interesting to see them branching out to offer private label version of their site. As dating site traffic numbers continue to remain flat or deteriorate, will we see more dating sites offering private label version of their sites and how will these established niches compete with White Label Dating, Bonefish and World Dating Partners?

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Online Dating Insider Links 11-6-08

by David Evans on November 6, 2008 · 1 comment

in Uncategorized

Congrats to Evan Mark Katz, who got married last weekend.

You Give Leads A Bad Name: Most of the debatable tactics examples of from the online dating market.

WorldFriends Mixes Facebook With Match.com : Good article about how to blend advertising dollars with subscription fees.

Allegran Lays Off 70% Of Workforce.

Premier Singles Launches Meet747.com Speed Dating Service.

84% Of Craig’s List Personals Ads Are Fake : No duh.

Singapore has accredited its first batch of dating agencies. The SDU Trust Mark is aimed at building confidence in dating services and to weed out dubious agencies.

Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: Oct 29, 2008

Irrepressible widget-maker RockYou targets Asia, raises $17M.

Meanwhile, Xiaonei has just introduced a virtual currency system for buying and selling virtual goods. Users buy the currency, called Xiaonei Dou, using real money, then pay to buy virtual goods within games built by third parties. Overall, virtual goods are a $1.2 billion business in China, Sequoia Capital’s Roelef Botha said earlier this summer — larger than the country’s advertising market. Virtual goods are in promising but early stages on Facebook and other sites popular outside of Asia.

FaceBook Micropayments for gifts.

6 ways how to get a discount in eHarmony.

Mark Brooks lists Ten Mistakes Made By Dating Sites. I can list 100.

Dating Ad Network interviews iovation.

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Social Networking News For 11-6-2008

by David Evans on November 6, 2008 · 0 comments

in Uncategorized

fbpreselectedriends.png Facebook Enables Pre-Selected Random Friends: Over the weekend I was complaining about how Facebook’s Friend Select API is not very good. It throws up a generic canvas displaying all of your friends, which is a pain when inviting people to dating applications because you have to cherry-pick people and if you have 100 or more friends this can be time-consuming.

TechCrunch writes about Facebook Growing Pains, it may be looking to raise more money. Facebook is on track to make $250 million this year. Myspace is on track for $800 million.

Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space.

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