From Focus on what you’re good at, and nothing else!
Mike and Jason are two Southern California kids that specialize in dating (pickup artists). For a living, they teach men how to be attractive. When they first hit me up years ago for business advice, I thought these guys were full of crap and wouldn’t make a penny. Later I met some of their customers and I realized that they were solving a real pain in the market place.
If you fast forward to today, they decided to package up their knowledge in an ebook on their website, How to Get a Girlfriend, and they are now pulling in around $20,000 a month in profit. That’s not too shabby for two guys who start their workday at 11am.
Plentyoffish hacking update: Canadian media reached out for some perspective on the bizarre hacking allegations and I gladly obliged.
Last month I spoke with Unlimited Magazine about the economics of online dating, iDate and greasy sales funnels.
In case you missed this, eHarmony CEO Gregory Waldorf Resigned. Flat growth, stalled IPO, low valuation = new exec in the driver’s seat. Waldorf has done a great job of embedding eHarmony as a brand deep into our collective dating unconscious. Now its time to bring in the next CEO and go make some money.
Have you seen eHarmony’s new dating site, Jazzed? Compete and Quantcast are all over the map with traffic stats but what’s amazing is the quick growth and then during the busiest season of the year a massive decline in monthly visitors. Or maybe not.
This gave me pause on the Jazzed home page, “We are also one of the few online dating companies that protects your profile data from third-party sites and search engines.” Hooray for the closed silo model and no external search, lets make it even more difficult for people to find each other. Shrug.
Plentyoffish launched eVow to go after eHarmony and we are waiting for the subscription paywall to take effect to measure attrition rates. eHarmony launches Jazzed to go after Match.com, same thing with the paywall. Stats hard to get a grip on, but it looks like both companies were able to get anywhere from half a million to a million members very quickly.
Match launches several different confusing initiatives with no clear direction, which don’t see any traffic to speak of and go nowhere. This is really not a big deal because they realized they are better off buying and partnering than building, which proves to be a smart move. Everyone knows that eHarmony and Plentyoffish are going to have a heck of a time trying to monetize members on completely new sites.
Everyone else is doing niche and geographical sites and these companies are going up and down-market in the subscription-based dating world. Strange. But then again, what we really want to see is how eHarmony does in Japan.
According to ReadWriteWeb, Facebook Experimenting With Voice Calling. If they bake in videoconferencing, the WooMe/SpeedDate/Skype models will face stiff competition.
Women on Zoosk Prefer Football to Sex: 73% of women responded to a Zoosk Superbowl poll that they’d rather watch Sunday’s big game than have sex, whereas nearly 50% of men said they’d rather have sex than watch the game. Only 27% of women preferred sex to watching the game. What does this say about the people on casual dating sites?
PinkSofa is the world’s biggest online community for lesbians. Zy Drew describes herself as a “serial lesbian dater”, always seeking the elusive perfect woman, but never quite finding her. It continues to amaze me how many thousands of women out there are blogging about their love lives – and how really awful most of them are at doing so. Most of the time I want to reach out and give them a hug, because it seems like just about everyone talking about dating stories are doing so from a negative perspective. I guess thats what gets people to read them, we want to hear about painfully raw breakups, tales of deceit, angry ex’s and restraining orders. since when have we become so cynical about true love, unicorns and double-rainbows?
Someone needs to come up with a directory of the top dating blogs. How do you find the good ones?
Advertising Ideas: Dating sites, take a look at Adverblog, which compiles the best advertising from around the world.
