Happy 2013 everyone. I took a few weeks off from posting over the holidays, back to a more normal schedule.
The dating industry busy season is once again upon us: The media frenzy has begun and the dating industry is preparing for iDate and Online Dating Summit, where I’m excited to give the keynote.
Meetic has acquired Massive Media, which owns Twoo.com, which I would categorize as an extremely successful Badoo clone. Launched in April 2011, Twoo has grown to 9.6 million visitors in an incredibly short period of time, just amazing. Price tag was around $25 million in cash. Not bad for a year and a half’s work. And so the Match empire continues to expand.
Meetic is getting into the party game, also sending out daily matches. Match’s influence clearly at play here.
WhiteLabelDating (7,600 sites worldwide, 16 million members, $75 million revenue) saw a 928% mobile revenue increase in December.
Dating Factory (11 million members, doubled revenue in 2012) launches monthly partner webinars: Online Dating Business: White Label Providers, Market, and Competition, Online Dating as a Money Maker Business: Why Does it Work? and Business Models with Dating Factory. The integration of World Dating Partners into the Dating Factory platform is also now complete. DF is offering 70% affiliate commissions on their Relationship.com site. They are offering the chance for a single affiliate to be the exclusive promoter of Relationship.com across PPC. That is one great url.
How Important Was Blogging To OkCupid’s Success? Via Forbes. sounds like OkCupid is going to do another blog post. After a long hiatus, I can’t wait to see what they come up with this time.
I cannot get enough of how how gay social networking fabulis performed a masterful business-focus pivot and its relaunch as a social shopping site Fab. Fab’s 2nd Pivot.
Splunk helps SNAP Interactive Uncover Key Business Insights based on over a billion data points enabling Are You Interested to analyze and react to user data in real-time.
SNAPs product teams test new features with a subset of users as often as 10 to 20 times per day. Utilizing dashboards within Splunk software, SNAPs development team reports that it can see in real-time increases in engagement and exactly how different A/B tests are performing. This new environment enables SNAP Interactive to iterate more quickly – ultimately benefiting users with an improved, more engaging product.
In addition, SNAP Interactive uses Splunk software to analyze reaction to the millions of emails that AreYouInterested.com generates each day.
Dating continues to becom more behavioral-driven, fantastic.
HowAboutWe has an Android app.
Social dating site Comiingle shuts down after a little over a year in operation. Social dating is expensive and now that there are a number of well-funded players in the space, I can see why investors would shy away from funding yet another player in the space.
Dating Trends in China: Chinese online dating is expected to reach $318 million by 2014, according to a recent report by Analysys International.
ChristianDating says that Internet dating is responsible for more divorces. I call BS on this, not seeing correlation that makes sense.
ChristianMingle (5 million members) spent $30 million on their advertising blitz. No wonder I was seeing their ads everywhere for months on end.
From NY Mag:
ChristianMingle’s spokeswoman has been offering a weird blend of Internet-era religious doctrine and legal disclaimer. “God can orchestrate and use the medium of Christian Mingle to allow people to find their match for one another on the site,” Ashley Reccord explained to CNN. “He may or may not use that means, but he can use that means.” Access to the medium that God may or may not use will cost users $18.99 a month for a three-month subscription.
It’s Not You, It’s Your Credit Score: I can’t imagine sharing my credit score on a date, but there are some dating sites out there that are based on this.
Your Cause Or Mine: A cause-related dating and community space that brings singles together while rallying around local causes.
Astrology-based flirting site Moonit has partnered with Zoom Media & Marketing to place its astrology content on ZoomSocial Network’s digital flat screens in 500 restaurants, bars and clubs across 10 major metro areas throughout the US. Patrons will be able to view entertaining, astrology-related content around themes like celebrities, music, movies, drinks, food, personality and relationship trivia. That’s pretty cool.
Face-matching site Soul2Match is taking a stand against fake profiles by allowing users to prove their real identities purely online using miiCard. this MiiCard video is great.
Perfect for long-distance relationships: Latty39 is a travel site that lets people find the cheapest aggregate for all parties to meet at after having input multiple take-off destinations. In the future, Latty39 will also factor in the cost of the hotel rooms and the area you want to stay in, whether it’s the city, the suburbs, or the country.
Niche site of the week: Ghost Singles, BOO!
Second amendment fans, gunloversdating.com is available. Who’s going to jump on that?
Match logged me out automatically overnight and when I woke up my laptop this morning this is the first thing I saw. Someone needs to do a better job tracking ad inventory at Match. This type of ad is definitely not up to their standards.
