Robert Fathers, CEO of World Dating Partners, wrote in to clarify details about the deal with Relationship Exchange as well as give us a good look into WDP operations marketing and plans for 2008.
Relationship Exchange partners have been very loyal despite some hiccups in
the past, all the main partners at RE are transferring to WDP platform, and
after seeing the size of our existing system, the technology and the feature
rich sites that we produce, are confident that they want to step up their
advertising to get back to their original revenue. We are unlike
WhiteLabelDating or other similar services where the site is based around
URL masking re-direction, and programmed in PHP with MySQL as a database.
These systems are very restrictive and susceptible to collapse when they
expand, as well as not very secure, MySQL doesn’t have a good reputation as
its open source.
World Dating Partners on the other hand, has an enterprise system running
over 30 servers, was developed over 3 years in Java, using Spring
Technology, running over two Oracle storage units. This unique technology
besides costing over $5 million to develop, is backed by nearly 100 staff.
This will increase in the new year when we open offices in LA and later in
Boston. By the way the 20 million is our own collective database and not
entirely the Relationship Exchange one; alongside this were databases from
other companies that have recently joined us, one of 8 million, and another
of 3 as well as our own 5 million database. This now builds at around 1-2
million a month as more and more sites join us as a financially viable
option to running their own sites and cutting the overheads and headaches
related to running a large dating service.
The customer experience itself has every feature that you could possibly
imagine, which both draws in members at over 8,000 a day, with an extremely
high retention rate and currently being used by over 300 radio stations
worldwide, 34 TV stations and programs, over 30 newspapers worldwide,
including New York, South Africa, Australia, to name just a few. We are also
lucky enough now to be working with mainline magazine publishers in the UK
and USA with 150 brands and 200 in the UK and Europe. From a marketing point
of view WDP has only been active for around 6 months and now with a strong
financial background and history will start marketing in earnest this year,
I am sure you will hear a lot more about us over the next 12 months.
WDP has multiple platforms covering various main stream dating services,
each one can be used by any site owner to drill down into niches strictly
filtering members by geographical, ethnic or interest based criteria. This
can now be done in over 11 languages. Our White Label sites are true white
labels and not headers and footers like other services. The result of this
technology means that it is built to an enterprise level and covers all the
criteria required by public companies or any other blue chip customers. We
process 41 currencies and virtually every card that can be processed from
across Europe, the USA and Asia, this also includes direct debit processing
which in particular works well in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Austria.
World Dating Partners covers indemnity for every customer that joins our
system and we also run StrongMail and Optimost to increase customer
usability and guarantee email deliverability. We have strict protection of
members and registered with the data protection act and have extremely high
security. We are recognised now by iMedia as one of the top 80 Internet
organisations in Europe and chosen to represent ecommerce for APAC at a
recent conference on anti-fraud systems. This is because we have developed
our own unique protection system and spend a lot of time on manual checking
of profiles to keep our sites clean and allow our members to get on with the
dating they have in mind instead of worrying about who is going to scam
them.
World Dating Partners in the New Year are opening offices in Los Angeles and
later in Boston to expand our operation in the USA, with so many major
brands being used by our services now. The increase in business is due to
intelligent due diligence of companies, who research the current market
thoroughly to find a system that caters for their specific needs and
guarantees a high level of security and protection for their members, in
fact you don’t have to dig too deep to discover the differences, its why we
put so much into development. We were thinking of the future and not
immediate business.
