http://youtu.be/lB8IK7u-XV4
Interesting to see the continuing divergence between TheComplete.me and LikeBright (I’m an advisor). One practically needs an operating manual to understand how it works and the other you can use when you are hammered on Chardonnay.
I am gunning for TheComplete.me to step up their game, get the site working consistently show us how awesome they can be. I finally figured it out, TheComplete.me reminds me of MyYearbook before they rebranded at Meetme. Tons of functionality and looked awful. Maybe they just need to get to the next iteration of the design and streamline a few features before I warm up to it. Come on all you experienced ex-Match and dating industry people, show us what you got.
While I was editing this, all of a sudden this popped up on my screen:
A) Matchmaking is not a game; B) Why the duplicate copy on the site, sloppy; C) I guess walls are here to stay in social apps thanks to OKCupid; D) Oh joy, another place to answer even more questions! This all reinforces that TheComplete.me is breezy, cheesy and not for serious daters.
Perhaps I should stop comparing them to LikeBright, which seemed to clear a few months ago. Maybe the direct competition is MeetMe, or Tagged, which just received another $15 million in funding. Perhaps the competitive grouping is Badoo, Tagged, MeetMe and maybe TheComplete.me if they can buy some more traction. There are others to add to the list but these are the top players in terms of revenue.
OTOH, my primary complaint about LikeBright is that I’m getting tired of scrolling through page after page of good-looking women. Filters, please, maybe one like “Show me all woman who are even remotely interested in dating a guy like me” to begin with.
Speaking of MeetMe, they had record second quarter revenue of $13.1 million, up 706% year-over-year, amazing. Virtual currency products launched during the first quarter drove more than 50% of mobile revenue in the second quarter. 642,000 DAU (daily active users) on mobile. Them’s some nice numbers.
Still, they lost $3.8 million for the quarter. Acquiring members is and always will be expensive. regardless of social media or virality or anything else the marketing department cooks up. Just ask True.com and FriendFinder.
After a splashy introduction, Airtime Seems to Deflate. Eugene Wei, vice president of product management and marketing at Airtime, said that a “bunch of users” are on the site and that they are going to release some updates shortly. I said that Airtime Could be The Best Videodating Service Ever back in July. Repeat after me, we are not ready to video-date on a large scale yet.
Gawker is back on my radar, some great posts lately. I’ve talked to many women who have tried to get sponsors to support their goal of “dating across the country”. Those kinds of stunts pale in comparison to this. This Couple Would Like for Strangers to Pay for Them to Have Over 30 Different Exotic Weddings, Please. Awesome.
Jenna Worthham at the NY Times says, “Recent data from comScore, an analytics firm, shows that traffic across the 10 most popular dating sites did not increase over the past year. This may be partly because of the rising popularity of mobile dating apps.”
I spent 45 minutes on a supposedly solid iphone app recording an interview for All Things Considered. Turns out the audio quality wasn’t good enough :-( Smartphone Apps Help More Singles Find The Boy (Or Girl) Next Door. Julie Spira and Likebright are mentioned.
The largest dating platform in China, Jiayuan (NASDAQ: DATE), made more money last quarter. The number of average monthly paying user accounts for the second quarter 2012 was relatively flat as well. 1,222,880, compared to 1,139,171 for the corresponding period of 2011 and 1,171,031 for the previous quarter.
67,657,540 registered users, 5.1 million new users acquired during the quarter. Thats a lot of stale profiles.
The number of average monthly active user accounts remained flat at 5,333,341, actually down from the same time last year.
Jiayuan is basically as large as Match, POF and other top dating sites.
This is one acquisition that the stellar Match business development team seems to have missed out on. I would love to hear why they didn’t/couldn’t acquire the company.
Growth is great, but with Chinese dating sites being so scam-tastic, what are they going to do about cleaning up their act? Oh wait, you mean reduce fraud which would reduce the number of users which would reduce revenue? Scammers, come on in.
Kahnoodle is a mobile app/game that makes it easier for couples to do more of the fun and thoughtful stuff that brought them together in the first place. Date ideas for lazy husbands, secure channel for sexting, sex tips, whats not to like?
If you are going to scam someone, or sell drugs on CL, or just don’t want questionable online dates to know your real digits: Introducing Burner – temporary phone numbers for modern lives.
Senator Senator Charles E. Schumer is one heck of a matchmaker.
All is not roses in the mobile app world and mobile app startups are failing like it’s 1999.
The owner of French dating sites based on the trademark Cupidon wrote in to say that [redacted]. Update: The original text has been removed so I’ll leave it up to you to google it. I rarely remove information, in fact I prefer to keep it up when the corporate lawyers threaten me with legal action, but I’m about to go on a meditation weekend and my usual “The post stays up” fight is just not in me today.
The larger picture is that in the last 10+ years most lawyers have absolutely no clue on how to deal with bloggers, which amazes me. Usually I tell them to go pound sand, because 99% of what I write is factual and close enough to the truth that the other 1% is easy enough to deal amicably.
Theirs is a reasonable request though, Cupid wants Match or someone to buy them, so they have to keep their noses as clean as possible during the courting process. I hope they get bought for a big paycheck, that will be good for the entire industry and they have certainly earned it. I’ll give this “Episode with a scary Lawyer” rating a C+.
Clicked these links and ended up at this stupid Tao Of Badass PUA page. Illegal ad leading to a misleading and really cheesy video. It’s true, people will click anything and buy just about anything online. Especially lonely men.
The Unofficial eHarmony Blog says eHarmony shut down its eHarmony Advice Discussion Boards, deleting five years of member discussions and 20,000 community members. Oops. People supporting each other, talking about issues, healing old wounds and being inspired by others. Nope, not at eHarmony. Or at OKCupid for that matter. the only big discussion board on a dating site is at POF these days.
