Online Dating Insider

Online Dating Industry Weekly Wrapup 11-13-09

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:46:05 +0000

This was a big week for (re)connecting with people, including Hollywood types wanting to partner with dating sites, a dating startup making some serious cash you’ve never heard of, The New York Times, TheDatingLab, Trilibis, DatingHeadshots, Milabra, Intelius (Korbster!), working on a few things with DatingDNA, a few investors, Moonit, and a bunch of people I can’t mention publicly.

On my mind: Sam at BlackBox Republic, Meetmoi, viximo and Thread (which is copying HotorNot/Zoosk/Are You Interested but doing interesting Kismeet-style matchmaking).

Farmville is down on Facebook and I’m afraid my pumpkins and cows are dying! Talk about a time-suck, hours and hours this week setting up my farm. I want to meet the woman who’s farm is next to mine. If online dating was 10% as fun as good social games…

Several dating industry people in town recently, trying to get some face time with them.

OKcupid blog: How Races and Religions Match in Online Dating.Thanks Pemo.

Andrew Chen is reading Viral Loop. If your business relies on driving traffic, read this book.

A New Vibrator by Yves Behar Arouses Our Interest.

Hitwise Internet Dating Rankings Update.
Spark Networks Reports Third Quarter 2009 Financial Results.
Startups: Your Online Dating Site Will Fail.

This is novel, The Girlfriend Calculator, a social networking utility that helps you rate the gals in your life using the personal qualities that are most important to you. The Girlfriend Calculator’s calculating engine is based on the Theory of Reasoned Action, which provides a practical way to rate the choices in any scenario by using a scale of importance for the attributes relative to the choice and then weighing those attributes against the choices.

Reason why this app will either take off like gangbusters or fail:”Theory of Reasoned Action can be represented as B ≈ BI = w1AB + w2SN where B is behavior, BI is behavioral intention, AB is attitude toward behavior, SN is subjective norm, and w1 and w2 are weights representing the importance of each term.”

I’m heading to Toronto on Sunday to speak at a Fidelity conference about social media and social tools. I love the business of online dating and things like social media/viral/games/quizzes/psychology dovetail nicely. I also don’t like to be put in just one box, too much fascinating stuff to learn and people to work with.

Buying and Selling Facebook and Twitter Friends

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:12:16 +0000

uSocial.net — the company who recently began selling followers on Twitter — has just launched a new suite of services for Facebook, enabling people to purchase friends and fans depending on their needs.

But why would someone want to buy their friends on Facebook? Well according to company CEO Leon Hill, that’s a very easy question to answer.

“Facebook is an extremely effective marketing tool as anyone with a large number of targeted friends or fans can attest to.” Said Hill. “The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in.”

uSocial say they are able to very accurately target friends to be added to a user’s account by interest group or industry and also geographic location, making marketing any product or service to them extremely easy.

Orders are being taken on the site now and more information on uSocial’s new service can be gathered by going to .

My take: if you can’t make friends, buying them is probably not a good idea either. Twitter has supposedly tried to shut them down. You can get lots Twitter and Facebook friends cheap from various eastern bloc hacker botnets if thats your sort of thing. Reminds me of Myspace Friend Trains.

Match.com Application Available on Apple’s App Store

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:07:10 +0000

Old news but thought I would re-iterate here. For those of you who haven’t tried a mobile dating application, I was playing around with the Match.com iPhone application and I found it to be quite slick. Fingers crossed it fares better than the various ill-fated Facebook applications Match mucked around with.

The new Match.com application for iPhone and iPod touch provides members with the ability to easily communicate with the more than 15 million Match.com members wherever they go. Match.com members can edit their profile from their iPhone and iPod touch and upload photos to their Match.com profile. Taking full advantage of the built-in location-based technology, the new Match.com application for iPhone and iPod touch has an opt-in feature that gives members the ability to check out other singles in their area, making setting up a first date easy.

Actually, you can’t communicate with 15 million people on Match, only those who have paid a mobile subscription fee. Moving on.

I was confused about the pricing associated with signing up via the mobile app and Match was nice enough to send along the following a while back when the application launched.

Pricing:

- All features of the app are free for everyone to use (including non-subscribers) except the messaging feature. This is the same principle as the site.

- For match.com members with a subscription and a MatchMobile add-on, the iPhone app and all its features are available for free.

- For members with a subscription (but no MatchMobile add-on), i.e. your case, we are offering 60-days of free use of MatchMobile, which should allow members to use all features of the app for 60 days from the day of first use. After 60 days, members will need to purchase the MatchMobile add-on (currently $4.99/month) to use all the features of the app.

- For new Match.com members, i.e. registered members without a paid subscription, all features of the app except messaging (i.e. email) are free to use. For a limited period, Match is offering a 14-day free trial to Match.com and MatchMobile that will allow them to use all features of the app free for 14 days. After this trial period, members will need to purchase a match subscription to continue using all features of the service.

Location-based search feature:

- The app does not disclose your location to other users. Your current location is only used to deliver matches near you (based on their location and/or registered ZIP code).

Important to remember that Match doesn’t disclose your exact location. That is what freaks a lot of people out and keeps them from trying mobile apps. Match does a pretty good job of keeping new users calm about this.

SecondLove Launches On Facebook

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:56:53 +0000

A new Facebook dating application has launched called SecondLove (link to Fan page).
The folks at SecondLove were nice enough to describe the application and compare it with Zoosk and Thread.
According to our application description:

“SecondLove connects you with singles from across the world. It gives you excellent quality free online dating experience on Facebook.”

We make it simple and easy for millions of singles to find love on Facebook. The process is quite straight forward:
1. Facebook users ‘install’ SecondLove and create a basic dating profile. Later they can add more details if they want.
2. They can search their potential love using basic or advanced search
3. Users can send messages or winks to others to express their interest
4. Users can also add certain members to their ‘Hot favorites’.
5. SecondLove users can also report other users.

SecondLove is different from Zoosk and Thread in certain ways.
1. Thread is built on the concept of connecting a user with ‘friends-of-friends’, and thus limiting them to a narrow target. We bring the traditional online dating to Facebook in its simplest form. People create a short profile and they can start searching and flirting with other user in no time.
2. SecondLove has more light and clean user interface as compared to Zoosk. Conceptually SecondLove is similar to Zoosk, except that its more simple and only available on Facebook platform.
3. SecondLove tries to blend its user interface as similar to Facebook as possible, where as Zoosk has quite ‘odd’ user interface which doesn’t blend at all with Facebook. Thread is a independent Facebook Connect site, so its a different bread in that sense when compared to Zoosk and SecondLove.

At the moment, we don’t show any ads in SecondLove .We are focusing on better consumer experience and building the user base.

There you have it. Another Facebook dating application. Go get yourself a date.

Twitter Client Tweetdeck Could be Great For Online Dating

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:50:36 +0000

I rarely visit the Twitter website directly, the majority of my interaction is via Tweetdeck or various clients on my iPhone. Tweetdeck is fantastic, it even lets me view and post to various Facebook features like activity streams and photos and even Myspace.

Tweetdeck may very well be the first mainstream desktop client we all use to manage our social lives. Which gets me thinking about subscribing to multiple dating sites and having a Tweetdeck-like app to deal with all of the email, notes on members, etc, but that is for another post.

Social Gaming is a Big Scam and More Facebook News

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:49:39 +0000

This was a big week for social gaming and mobile billing companies. Back in June at iDate LA, several people brought the social gaming and mobile billing markets. It looks like the sector is about to get cleaned up,

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues”

Continued Action Against Deceptive Ads

Are social gaming offers scamming users? A detailed analysis of Techcrunch’s Scamville article.

Facebook ad API looks interesting.
Facebook Facial-Recognition Tagger Goes Live. This is really cool.
New Koobface Component Imitates Facebook User. The Koobface botnet has pushed out a new component that automates the following routines:

Registering a Facebook account
Confirming an email address in Gmail to activate the registered Facebook account
Joining random Facebook groups
Adding Facebook friends
Posting messages to Facebook friends’ walls

Zoosk and Are YOU Interested Facebook stats

10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook Ads Every Performance Advertiser Should Know

Facebook Coming Soon: Ability to Measure Stream Activity

Facebook Connect for Web Startups Design Guide

Senior Marketing Executive Seeks Dating Industry Position

dave@digicraft.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:31:57 +0000

Senior level marketing executive possessing extensive experience with top 10 dating site seeking new opportunity. Over ten years of integrated marketing experience on both client and agency side with vast knowledge of the online dating industry. Experience defining and executing multi-million dollar marketing campaigns across all forms of media including online, print and radio. In-depth understanding of media planning/buying (CPA, CPM, SEM and email), including managing, optimizing and reporting. Contacts and working relationships with all top tier networks and websites and an extensive Rolodex of contacts. Contact seniormarketingexec@gmail.com.

Fling Goes Mobile

dave@digicraft.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:10:27 +0000

Fling.com has gone mobile.

Fling.com’s mobile site is now available and the conversions have been amazing. If you have a smart phone, go to fling.com on your phone or check it out here. The payout on Fling Mobile sales are $25pps. Get your link code and redirect script here! The redirect script detects if a mobile browser is trying to access your site and redirects them to Fling Mobile with your affiliate ID.

I wonder what the perversion, I mean conversion rates will be?

Online Dating Industry News For 11-9-09

dave@digicraft.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:50:15 +0000

Over the weekend I tossed DownToEarth into the Tech Crunch Deadpool. I hope that STiR, stays alive longer than DTE, which was with us for a little less than a year. STiR’s web page titles say “Dance Clubs, Bars and Nightlife with reviews and recommendations from Stir.com”. The jump from upstart PlentyofFish competitor backed by Match.com to nightlife reviews is jarring, to say the least.

Ironic Update: Last week DownToEarth.com redirected to STiR.com, now it points to back to itself.

In an Online Personals Watch exclusive about STiR, Mark Brooks said “They should be forwarding it to Stir.com shortly. I was told by the GM of Stir.com that the DTE members would all be rolled over to Stir.com.” I personally would be pretty pissed if someone “rolled me over” to another website without telling me. Perpetually bad mojo with a move like that. Just ask speed date Facebook app users about how that feels. Someone at Match needs to make up their mind.

Perusing the Tech Crunch CrunchBase For Match.com I see that “Over 60,000 new users register each day[on Match properties], and over 400 Match.com users report an engagement or marriage each month.” They should update that number, especially since eHarmony says its responsible for 2% of all weddings, which is a much larger number than 4,800 weddings a year attributed to Match. I’m still waiting for someone to survey eHarmony members and figure out what the divorce rate is for them after several years.

This Yahoo Asia dating site powered by Meetic gave me pause. Yahoo doesn’t even run it’s own Asian dating sites anymore? More and more large dating sites are doing deals to get out of unprofitable markets, especially in EU (See Match/MEETIC.) Funny enough, it’s seems like Match is doing more social networking deals than dating deals in Asia, although I may be off base here.

Look at IMVU getting into the dating space. Holy avatar sex Batman.

Sam Moorcroft on PlentyOfFish and the role of free vs. paid dating. Nice one, Sam.

Friendly Takes on Zoosk, Are You Interested and HotOrNot. Do we really need yet another clone? At least they mention friends I have in common with a person, but thats a small dial tweak, nothing really new here.They also removed 99% of the AYI features.

Current Online Dating and Dating Services Facts & Statistics from DatingSitesReviews.

I finally got a Google Wave invite and saw that 6 Rounds has an extension already, nice.

Clicck And GenePartner To Collaborate On DNA Study Of Gays And Lesbians. All hail the mystical gay gene, but what about us straight people?

OKCupid Ice Breakers in Beta

dave@digicraft.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:03:19 +0000

Getting online daters to stray out of their comfort zones and search for new people has always been a problem for dating sites. Usually, search is a set it and forget it situation, where users set their initial search criteria and then leave it like that forever. You see the same people, over and over and over again, and it gets tiring.

Some sites put a gallery of members on the home page. These are often hand-picked beauties that you have no chance with, but they are effective at getting you to send them an email. Online daters, especially women, love getting hundreds of emails every day on dating sites. What else could they possible have to do besides respond to your tender missive?

A year ago Match implemented the Daily 5, which put 5 new people in front of members they might not have necessarily come in contact with. It drove up traffic to some extent

PlentyofFish has always done a pretty good job at putting new people in front of me, albeit in a gallery style view which just has you clicking on the hottest people and ignoring the rest.

OKCupid’s Daily Quiver is awesome, predating many popular copycat features like Daily5. I use it all the time. Simple, straightforward and it plain works.

Over the weekend I was clued into the new OKCupid Ice Breakers feature, currently in beta. I found out about it when a an email showed up from someone asking me about snowboarding. I wrote them back and realized this was something new, the email was about snowboarding. Nothing about “Great profile”, or “sexy eyes” or “I want to be of making your acquaintance in the time that is of near.” (not that OKC has a scammer problem, it’s probably the cleanest dating site I’ve been on.)

When I finally saw the Ice Breakers link in the navigation I clicked it and was greeted with the attached photo. I cycled through a bunch of people, I don’t really want to talk to women about poker but I will entertain a brief conversation about biking, politics or if left-handed people are better lovers. What’s kind of cool is that you don’t get to see the person’s profile or photo. Seems like OKCupid took this from their Crazy Blind Date, which never really did it for me but kudos for Sam and the gang for trying something new.

It will be interesting to see if Ice Breakers increase the amount of member communication and result in more relationships. Check it out for yourself.