DALLAS, May 24th, 2010 – Match.com, an operating business of IAC (NASDAQ: IACI), today announced an agreement by which Match.com will become the exclusive online dating site on Yahoo!. Yahoo! Personals users will have the opportunity to move to a new co-branded Match.com experience, “Match.com on Yahoo!” where they will combine with the greater Match.com community. The Match.com on Yahoo! service is available starting today.

Yahoo! Personals users will receive special offers designed to help them enjoy all that Match.com has to offer. The two companies are working together to help users easily migrate to Match.com on Yahoo!. Over the next two months, existing Yahoo! Personals members will be given the opportunity to seamlessly migrate their Yahoo! Personals accounts over to the new experience. Match.com on Yahoo! offers compelling features including mobile access, daily personalized matches and robust search tools and will fully replace the existing Yahoo! Personals experience at the end of the transition period.

“The key to a successful online dating experience is having both a thriving community of active members and a sophisticated site experience optimized for dating success,” says Greg Blatt, CEO of Match.com. “By bringing Yahoo! Personals members to Match.com, our community, which we already believe to be the largest and most vibrant in the space, has become even more compelling for our members. When you add this to our unparalleled site experience, evolving every month with new features and enhancements, we feel the distance between the online dating experience we offer and that of others in the space is growing even larger.”

“Yahoo!’s vision is to be the center of people’s online lives and we continue to focus on providing the best experiences for our users and advertisers. Through our partnership with Match.com, the leader in the online dating category, we will offer an enhanced experience to singles looking to find the right match,” said Greg Hintz, senior director, Americas Listings and Audience SEO at Yahoo!.

The long-term arrangement provides that Match.com will be the exclusive online dating provider and display advertiser on Yahoo!. Match.com will receive media placements on the site, as well as occupy the position served by the personals navigational link on the Yahoo! homepage.

About IAC
IAC operates more than 50 leading and diversified Internet businesses across 30 countries … our mission is to harness the power of interactivity to make daily life easier and more productive for people all over the world. To view a full list of the companies of IAC please visit our website at http://www.iac.com.

About Match.com
Match.com pioneered online dating when it launched on the Web in 1995 and continues to lead this exciting and evolving category after more than a decade. Throughout its 15-year history, Match.com has helped millions of singles meet and fall in love. Match.com provides a rich tapestry of ethnicities, interests, goals, ambitions, quirks, looks and personalities from which to choose. Match.com operates some of the leading subscription-based online dating sites in 25 countries, in 8 languages and spanning five continents, as well as oversees its ongoing investment in Meetic. Match.com also powers online dating on MSN across Asia, Australia, the United States and Latin America. Match.com is an operating business of IAC.

-Amy Canaday
Match.com Public Relations

10 Quick Questions with Andrew Conru:

1. Back in 1994 when you started up WebPersonals.com, did you ever think that the industry would be this huge?

I knew that the Internet was going to be revolutionary the first time I saw how it enabled people worldwide to see postings instantaneously.  At that time, the dating industry was split between traditional matchmakers and newspaper personals.  It was clear to me that it was easier, faster, and cheaper to use a central online database than to go to a niche matchmaker or use phone-based newspaper personals.  While I understood that online dating would change the way people meet, I didn’t fully grasp the extent that it would change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

2. Is there any new technology that you see getting incorporated into online dating that will revolutionize it? Mobile, GPS, Apps, Video, VOIP, Matching

Online dating can mean many things to different people – mostly related to how filtering done by the “system” (how do members obtain validation or credibility?), access restrictions (how do members prove their intentions?), are people interacting in realtime,  and the dating process being facilitated (introduction verses matchmaking).

There are four elements to online dating:  access, member profiles, searching/matching, and member interaction.  While technology can often improve the experience, the benefits are more evolutionary than revolutionary.  For example, the trend of “always-on” access via mobile devices does open members to more spontaneous meetings especially when coupled with GPS technology.

As far as member profiles, most people are comfortable only with uploading photos and creating text profiles.  That being said, we’ve always tried to find ways for people to be more expressive in their profiles – adding voice profiles, video profiles, and other ways for people to differentiate themselves.  There seems to be a natural inhibition in people that limits about 5% of people to add more than a photo to their profile.

I think one of the last areas open to the biggest gains in innovation is in matching technology.  Matching technology includes searching, filtering, access control, privacy, and automative agent-based services.  Two challenges facing online dating sites is the increasing expectations of members and imbalances in gender dynamics.  When I started the first online dating service in 1994, there was an immediate benefit for members… as people’s expectations of their dates stayed constant while the number of candidates soared.  After a few years, however, people become much more selective of their ideal match and now often feel less satisfied with the online dating experience.  They report that online dating sites have tons of profiles but it gets harder and harder to find a good match (while actually, the matches are better than before just that they have become more picky).

Imbalances in gender dynamics also currently results in a suboptimal suboptimal.  In most mainstream dating sites, men send 50 times more emails than women… this happens in part to the hunter nature of men as well as the fact that faced by an avalanche of emails, women respond to a tiny fraction of them which results in men having to send even more to get a single reply.  This in turn, makes men unhappy with their response rate and women unhappy with the quality and selectivity of the men.

I believe that the next wave of online personal services will be less dependent of gee-whiz technology but on the ability for people (mostly women) to select, filter, and challenge their suiters.  That is, users will start embracing software agents to dynamically interview each other prior to allowing human contact.

A key consideration as to what technology can be applied to online dating is the extent to which participants are interacting in real-time.  For the most part, online dating is pretty asynchronous – people filter and interact primarily via email message exchanges prior meeting.   GPS, Video, VOIP are all tools to enable real-time synchronous interactions.  While there are many exciting applications of these technologies to facilitate instant hookups (e.g., among friends or gay bars), they tend not to be embraced in mainstream dating sites.

3. You were one of the pioneers in developing niche community sites with AsiaFriendFinder and BigChurch. What do you see as the future in affinity dating and what made you think that these niche groups would be so successful?

I think when people visualize the perfect online dating experience, they think of a site that only have perfect candidates for THEM.  In the early days of online dating, we had to come up with ways to make people feel comfortable that they would find good matches and one way was to show them that all the members of a site matched their primary filter (e.g., Chinese language or Christians).  While it is true that a general purpose site could advertise “hey we have Chinese speakers or Christians”, some people feel more comfortable with a niche site.  Niche dating sites will continue so long as they have critical mass (number of active members) and larger general-purpose dating sites continue to give broad marketing messages.

4. Do you think that there is room for an emerging dating company to compete with the likes of Friendfinder Network, Match.com or eHarmony?

The mainstream online dating industry has a few challenges that could be exploited by a disruptive player – namely that they charge for access and have to pay for traffic.  While there are a few fast-growing sites that provide free services, they must find non-financial ways to throttle usage, provide user-intention validation and make enough revenue via advertising to buy traffic.  There is also always the potential for a first-mover company to take advantage of new traffic markets.

5. What do you think of eHarmony’s approach to personality test matchmaking vs. searching profiles? Do you think they have done a good job on the brand trust side of things with their offline commercials?

There are two general categories of online daters – those who like to take things in their own hands (e.g., search) and those who prefer to take the advice of others (e.g., matchmakers).  For many, there is a strong historical and emotional bias that a 3rd party or an expert can do a better job picking a spouse than an individual… just like people hire a stock broker to pick stocks… they believe that a dating expert or matchmaker can screen candidates better.

I believe that self-assessment tests, specific suggestions on how to better search, and many profile with personality data give online daters a better chance at success.  The challenge is to get enough members willing to spend the time to complete the tests.

eHarmony has capitalized on the fear that people make bad dating decisions.  Their advertising seems effective by targeting older women who may have had bad dating experiences as well as by using anecdotal evidence on the effectiveness of their matchmaking algorithm.   Just as financial firms will still advertise turning control to a broker, online matchmaking sites will continue to advertise the same.  eHarmony’s message to single people is that dating is very difficult, that an expert (system) can do better than they could at picking a spouse.

6. If you never got into the online dating industry, what is another online business that you would have pursued?

Search company?  I was doing a couple different online companies about the same time as online dating – one being the first company to centralize banner ads, one of the first to do online shopping, and some early social networking sites.  It is often difficult to know what your opportunity costs are when you are focusing on your primary company.  My educational background is in system controls and optimization which fits well to many aspects of Internet businesses.

7. Do you think that Social Networks are a big threat to the dating industry at large? Have you ever heard of the new fad “Twatting” (Twitter Dating)?

Many people say that large social networks like Facebook could takeover the online dating world overnight.  I am a bit skeptical due to their current inability to have multiple, disconnected, and independently privacy-controlled profiles for a single user (e.g., let a user have multiple profiles that are not linked in a way).  In 2001, I modified FriendFinder.com to support both friend social networking and online dating.  It turned out not to be successful because members found that interacting with their current friends was a separate process than discovering new friends and dates.  They saw that enabling prospective dates to see their current friends was a dating liability.  We later consolidated the profiles back into one.

Entrepreneurs will always try to apply dating in new markets.  The challenge of Twitter Dating is that there is almost no filtering process that increases the value of an interaction.  The result is a flood of responses with minimal net value.

8. Do you think love can blossom in 140 characters or less?

Oh, stop… you had me at 139 characters!  The most common subject line sent to members of online dating sites is “hi”.  The question is more dependent on what the person had to do before they were able to send you that 140 characters… how were they screened?  how do you know that they have the potential to be worth loving?

9. What is one thing that you would tell someone pursuing a new start-up as the best piece of business advice you have learned over the past 16+ years as an entrepreneur?

Pick your battles… find the minimum product/service offering features that you need to have in order to have a complete solution and get it done as soon as possible.  You can always evolve your solution by listening to your customers.

10. What are one of your favorite websites online and what site drives you crazy? One of my favorite sites online at the moment is Ustream.tv and I hate Youtube.

I tend to spend more time thinking about how to build and improve web services than actually using them.   I see lots of potential in services that extend your social network offline such as the geolocation sites Foursquare/Gowala.   I wish Craigslist would either innovate or forward their free traffic to a site that would.  When society hands you a free monopoly, it’s your duty to innovate as if you have fierce competition.

===

I’d like to thank Andrew for taking the time to answer all of these questions with such insight. It has been a pleasure knowing Andrew over the past few years and watching the Friendfinder Network grow into such a successful business empire.

1. PlentyofFish (free dating site)
2. Match.com
3. Singlesnet
4. Yahoo! Personals
5. DateHookup.com (free dating site)
6. eHarmony (up one spot even with all of that TV advertising)
7. Adam4Adam (down one spot)
8. True.com (not sure how they are still top 10)
9. SeniorPeopleMeet.com
10. BlackPeopleMeet.com (both #9 and #10 are now Match.com properties)

Not much has changed in the online dating landscape except that the People Media niche properties jumped up high on the list probably because of that great partnership with AOL Personals. Some of the other note worthy sites that just made it into the top 25 list were Mate1.com (#15 to #12), Zoosk.com (#20 to #17) and the affair website AshleyMadison.com at #24.

1. PlentyofFish.com (free dating)
2. Singlesnet.com
3. Match.com
4. Yahoo Personals
5. DateHookup.com (free dating)
6. Adam4Adam (gay personals)
7. eHarmony.com
8. TRUE
9. Blackpeoplemeet (owned by Match)
10. Manhunt.net (gay personals)
11. Seniorpeoplemeet.com (owned by Match)
12. OnlineBootyCall.com
13. OkCupid (free dating)
14. Christian Mingle
15. Chemistry.com (Match.com premium dating)
16. Mingle2.com (free dating)
17. Mate1.com
18. Dream-Marriage.com
19. Black Singles
20. OutPersonals.com (gay personals)
21. SingleParentMeet.com (owned by Match)
22. Woome.com (live video dating)
23. Cupid.com
24. Zoosk.com (facebook app dating)
25. MSN Match (this should be added to Match.com)

I am not sure why Hitwise isn’t tracking the Friendfinder network, Meetic and Perfectmatch.com. I wonder where Date.com/Matchmaker.com, Lavalife and Jdate show up on this list.

Comscore ~ 6/09 / Unique Visitors

1. Singlesnet (3,428,000)
2. Yahoo Personals (3,159,000)
3. PlentyofFish (3,026,000)
4. Match (2,990,000)
5. TRUE (2,780,000)
6. People Media Sites (2,001,000) – BlackPeopleMeet, SeniorPeopleMeet.com
7. eHarmony (1,678,000)
8. Spark Networks (1,368,000) – Jdate, AmericanSingles.com
9. Mate1.com (1,301,000)
10. DateHookup.com (721,000)

If you add People Media to Match then they would be around 4,991,000 uniques which put them on top. Match recently acquired People Media’s network of sites. I am surprised to see eHarmony so low on this list considering all of the money they spend on TV placements.

“Peter” in this case is the Facebook user logged in to his account. The woman in the “Hot Singles” ad is his own wife. This isn’t an ad directly served by Facebook, but rather one from a third-party ad network that operates within the social network. Facebook does however use member photos in ads. You’re automatically opted-in by Facebook. That’s right, you have to actually go into your settings to turn this off. Your face may have already been used to advertise any number of things to the people on your friends-list. You can opt-out of being featured in ads by following these steps below:

Sign-in to your Facebook account and click Settings -> Privacy Settings -> News Feed and Wall -> Facebook Ads -> Appearance in Facebook Ads drop-down and click “No One.”

Online dating is one of the only verticals that seems to be working with Facebook advertising right now since you are able to filter out and target ads to users’ age, location, gender and whether they are married or single. In this case the advertiser didn’t mind advertising to married men since they do make up a good percentage of online dating site users anyways.

IAC/Match.com is buying into the niche groups subscription dating business with the acquisition of People Media from private equity firm American Capital Ltd. and various investors for $80 million in cash. The deal will add 27 dating sites with a combined 255,000 paying subcribers to the IAC (NSDQ: IACI) portfolio, including BlackPeopleMeet.com, LDSPlanet.com (Latter Day Saints dating), SingleParentMeet.com, SeniorPeopleMeet.com.

People Media earned $11.6 million in 2008 before depreciation and amortization, while Match.com reported $9.9 million in operating income before amortization. Fourteen-year-old Match.com had some 5.8 million unique users in May, compared with nearly 4 million for People Media’s combined sites, according to comScore Media Metrix. Both have a portal deals in place: Match.com powers MSN & AOL Personals online dating in the U.S and other countries; People Media has a similar deal with AOL Personals niche dating communities.

Match.com CEO Greg Blatt explains in the announcement that the combined company will continue to look for ways to play off the interest some people have in dating by demographics. Despite the disparities in the two businesses, Blatt expects to share product development and online marketing expertise and to market “a broader array of services” to the combined customer base. On area that isn’t mentioned: international expansion, which would seem likely given Match.com’s presence across in 24 countries and its overseas investment in European service Meetic.

The IAC has plenty of cash left: IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller has said he’s willing to spend on the right properties. The $80 million cash payment for People Media barely makes a dent in the nearly $2 billion on hand. That gives them more than enough reserves if they should decide to follow through on the Yahoo Personals acquisition that has been valued at about $500 million. Read the IAC formal press release: IAC’s Match.com to Acquire People Media from American Capital.

“We would love to have Yahoo Personals, and there are discussions about that,” Mr. Diller said on a conference call. IAC owns rival dating site Match.com. Yahoo management has thrown around the idea on whether to sell its dating site for several years. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has expressed a new desire to sell-off products and services that aren’t core to its business.

Gene Munster, analyst at Piper Jaffray, said Yahoo Personals could be worth about $500 million, or three to four times an estimated $150 million in annual revenue for the unit.

This consolidation in the dating vertical would be huge leaving only one other top tier competitor, eHarmony left in the space. Sites like American Singles, Perfectmatch.com, Mate1, and Lavalife would move up a notch as new acquisition prospects. I am surprised some of the portals and newspaper properties like McClatchy Company haven’t purchased their own Personals site since classifieds are such an integrated service to the papers. Most portal sites like Comcast.net, Earthlink.net & ATT.net all have personals channels where they partner with sites like Match.com and eHarmony.com.

I wonder how much overlap in subscriber base exists between Match.com and Yahoo Personals and whether they would merge the databases into one if Yahoo would then become Yahoo Personals powered by Match.com or be left as a stand alone brand. It would make sense to me that they merge the data and then allow the Yahoo base full access to additional Match members and vice versa. This could increase conversions on both properties and really allow Match.com to move further ahead of its major competition eHarmony. The acquisition could also be very beneficial for the Chemistry.com brand that Match has struggled to grow and giving it a wider audience on Yahoo Personals would allow for a premium match-making service option.

-Brian R.

eHarmony’s latest move with their creative seems to be targeting the main stream dating scene and not being so scientific in approach and more natural in their messaging. I just don’t get why they aren’t doing targeting when they can so easily. There are 12,211,940 people on Facebook that live in the US, over 18 and single. You can even drill down your target to different cities and education and have the option to pay on a CPC or CPM.

-Brian R.

This Matchmaker.com banner is classic. Look at the girl looking at her computer with the phone in her hand. Remember when their logo was a illustrated match:

This was actually a Match.com banner with the faux drop downs. The CTR on these was ridiculous and then all of the publisher sites banned them since they weren’t functional HTML:

This is a remake Kiss.com banner of the famous Romance Wizard black banner that had a really high click through rate and again didn’t work.

I think this one went to a Russian mail order bride site. The finger in the teeth again is classic 2000 dating site imagery.

Single? Lonely? Looking for a strange looking girl with John Lennon shades on? Tribute to the defunct DatingFaces.com website.

This is some real direct messaging. Find a Date? Click Here! That about sums it up. I really thought that DatingClub.com was going to make it back in the late 90′s. They signed a couple of bad business development deals and fell off the map. I think the Looksmart deal killed them. Remember that search engine/directory?

uDate.com decided to just make a statement and say “uDate…the best matchmaking site there is!” The first thing I did when I started at uDate was improve the banners but could never get them to change the home page away from that dreadful purple we had.

Find millions of eligible singles at Match.com. I like when they started using “Go” instead of “Click Here” on their buttons for the call to action. I always thought that was funny for some reason. Ready…Go!

If you have any other old classic dating banners laying around taking up 20k of space on your hard drives then send them my way so I can share. DIGG This Page

-Brian R.

Under an agreement filed the previous week, True.com will compensate customers who were incorrectly charged for services since 2003. Customers were incorrectly charged membership fees after canceling their accounts or after accidentally clicking on links, according to the federal lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Texas. The agreement still must be approved by U.S. District Judge David C. Godbey before the refund process can begin, said Jonathan Tycko, an attorney representing plaintiff Thomas Wong.

Thomas Wong filed the lawsuit in June 2007, claiming he was billed at least three times by True.com after trying to cancel his membership. He claimed the company violated state and federal laws.

According to the settlement, True.com must also revise its auto-subscription system to avoid future members from being accidentally charged. This is going to put a real hurt in their renewals and I am sure that we’ll be seeing less of this slutty advertising that they have been doing for the past 5 years.

Both parties will identify eligible former customers and refer them to a Web site for refunds. Those charged one month of membership would receive $35 and those charged for more than two months would receive $50, according to the court documents. Some members would also be given a free 45-day membership to the site.

Jonathan Tycko said at least 150,000 members are expected to get a cash or membership refund, but the number could grow once the agreement is finalized. Gary D. Eisenstat, an attorney representing True.com, said the company believed it had a strong defense against Wong’s allegations, but decided it was more economical to settle the lawsuit. What kind of defense do you have against people that cancel their memberships and still get billed. That is called billing fraud and the adult industry has been notorious for this type of behavior and with CC payment systems already putting a ton of pressure on the dating industry with bad debt and charge backs I am surprised that they even still have their merchant account.

Give True.com a try to see if you can cancel their membership and not be continuously billed each month. Ha.

The IAC said that the Match European operation contributed about 13% of their operating income before amortization. That equals about $11.9 million of their overall unadjusted 2008 operating income of $91.3 million.

Meetic, which operates 10 online dating services in 15 European countries and Latin America, offers both online and mobile-phone based programs and has been a fast mover in online dating across the UK and Europe. Match.com is essentially licensing the Match.com brand for its European operations to Meetic, and Meetic will optimize the two brands on a market by market basis.

This deal basically puts an end to any competition in the UK dating market since Meetic has already acquired the other big contender DatingDirect.com and Match.co.uk had uDate.com through an older acquisition. It’ll be interesting to see how much money eHarmony wastes in the UK market this year trying to get a food hold of their US-based brand established. It is almost like Classmates trying to enter into the UK market and compete against FriendsReunited.com. It just won’t work.

-Brian R.

Here is the latest Top 25 Hitwise internet dating rankings list from 12/08:

1. Singlesnet.com
2. PlentyofFish.com
3. Match.com
4. Yahoo Personals
5. Adam4Adam.com – gay club
6. DateHookup.com – free dating site
7. Manhunt.net – gay personals
8. eHarmony.com
9. BlackPeopleMeet.com (People Media site)
10. True.com
11. OnlineBootyCall.com
12. OKCupid.com
13. Mingle2.com (formerly Justsayhi.com free dating)
14. OutPersonals.com (Various, Inc / Friendfinder Network)
15. SeniorPeopleMeet.com (People Media site)
16. Cupid.com
17. Mate1.com
18. SingleParentMeet.com (People Media site)
19. Love and Seek (People Media site)
20. Ashley Madison (Married affairs, not really dating)
21. ChristianMingle.com (Sparks Network)
22. Plentyoffish.com Forums (duplicate)
23. BBPeopleMeet.com  (People Media site)
24. Chemistry.com (Match.com / IAC)
25. BlackSingles.com (Sparks Network)

If you add up all of the Sparks Network property sites they would easily be top 5 along with People Data and their sites on this list. They forgot Gay.com personals, Friendfinder.com and the rest of their sites and international sites like Meetic and DatetheUK.com that are much larger then half of the sites on this list above.

-Brian R.

It was interesting to read other people’s reaction to the site launch. Match.com like other large businesses is just fighting for market share. That is all it boils down to. They aren’t afraid of free dating models as they know the quality is the concern and that people will usually start off on a free site then migrate to a membership based service and pay for 3-4 months. They are just trying to position themselves to capture more of these types of referral leads. Sites like PlentyofFish.com, OKCupid.com and Mingle2.com (formerly Justsayhi.com) think that they are competing with the big boys when they should be doing partnerships with them. If you watch how the free sites in the adult industry work with the premium pay sites then it would all make sense instead of using Google AdSense as your revenue stream. Businesses that rely on Google are getting lower valuations because you are relying on the big boys buying advertising on Google’s content or site targeted network. I am an online media buyer and I usually don’t buy on Google’s content network due to fraud and low quality traffic from domain parkers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this site doesn’t take off unless they are going to pour some serious marketing dollars into it. Dustin at DateHookup.com spent a lot of money and time to get his traffic and SEO going. I think he was like 3 years invested when he started hitting critical mass. I don’t think Match has that much patience for this project to go gold. My prediction for 2009 isn’t that the free dating sites will be fighting the pay sites but that we are going to see some acquisition activity on the free dating sites by the big boys. I would like to see Markus get acquired but I don’t think he has a good grasp of what his site is actually worth as he keeps comparing it to Facebook and other social network acquisitions. Trust me POF is far, far away from anything related to FB. Trust me, I am grossly addicted to Facebook and can’t even stand being on the POF homepage but I love what Markus has done for the industry.

If you want to check out Match.com’s new free dating service it is called DowntoEarth.com.

The site is visually appealing and I love that they are focused on the US and Canada to stay away from scammers in Africa and Eastern Europe. Hopefully they have some good IP address detection and proxy server blocking software built into the site.

-Brian R.

ooVoo Webcam Meeting Software

I just came across this slick group video chat application called ooVoo.com. You can have webcam meetings with up to 6 people with high resolution video. I wonder if a dating service will integrate a feature or application like this for meeting rooms or virtual speed dating. There hasn’t been an application in online dating that has been revolutionary for years outside of sophisticated matching algorithms that usually send you bad matches 90% of the time.

ooVoo also allows you to record your video chats, send video messages, add video effects, call your non-ooVoo friends with their VOIP technology, send files, text chat and find friends. If I was a large online dating brand I would be knocking down their doors to acquire this business.

I have heard that students use the application for group study and since you can send files to people your homework and notes can be shared. When you make phone calls a neat record of your calls is listed, though Skype’s history tab in the contact window is a little more convenient. ooVoo lets you easily use your webcam to replace the placeholder avatar with your own face. Transferring files in ooVoo is easy and when you receive new files, they arrive with very clear and helpful dialog. You can create a Video Message in Oovoo as simple as hitting the red Record button. I am not sure how they intend on monetizing the application as it seems to still be in beta right now but they do have a webcam store with some good quality cam links so you can upgrade your video experience and quality. The application is available for both PC and Mac users which is also a huge plus for them.

I have partners in two different cities and we just might give this a shot since Skype didn’t turn out to be a easy enough solution for us all. My Mac came equipped with a webcam so I am all ready to go.

ooVoo Download

-Brian R.

FriendFinder Networks Inc, an owner of niche dating websites and publisher of the adult men’s magazine Penthouse, filed for a $460 million IPO. FriendFinder has plans to use the proceeds of its IPO primarily to pay off debt, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Penthouse Media Group, a Florida-based company bought FriendFinder, Inc in December of 2007 for $500 million in an effort to gain a leading position in the online adult market with FriendFinder’s AdultFriendFinder.com property. According to the regulatory filing, FriendFinder’s net income between Jan. 1 to Dec. 6, 2007, was $48.6 million, but down 20.5% from the full year in 2006. FriendFinder had seen a lot of new competition in the adult dating space with competitors like SexSearch.com and Fling.com coming on the scene and growing quickly. In July this year, Penthouse Media Group changed its name to FriendFinder Networks Inc. in getting ready for the initial public offering. This is an amazing story considering how many people over the years have said that Friendfinder.com would never be able to sell or be acquired because of its association with the adult industry. To top that off they are even going public. I will be quick to pick up some “FFN” stock as I know that sex sells and we have been an affiliate of AFF for years.

FriendFinder has close to 1 million paying subscribers to the adult sites, paying an average of $19 per month, and 78,000 paying members to its general sites, paying an average of $16 per month. Most of the revenue comes from the paid subscribers as dating sites typically don’t have outside advertising on them because of conversion dilution concerns. 44% of the FF revenue comes from their affiliate program which is where the risk factor comes in as the competitive programs have been really aggressive with payouts to try to take some of this market of adult webmasters.

Andrew Conru, former CEO of FriendFinder, Inc., Medley.com, Inc. and Various, Inc. will finally get his well deserved payday in the industry. He started in the dating industry in the mid 90′s with one if not the first dating site, Webpersonals.com. He sold the property in 1995 and started over again with Friendfinder.com. His dating empire grew to about 27 different niche dating and social networking properties under the company Various. Conru was always reinventing the industry and testing new verticals and had niche sites like BigChurch.com, SeniorFriendFinder.com and MillionaireMate.com. According to the SEC documents that FriendFinder filed, Andrew Conru might still be on the payroll as an Independent Contractor. It must be strange being a contractor for a business that you built and owned but very rewarding to watch it go public on the NYSE.

-Brian R.

Bar Scene Dating is Out.

Is love and romance tied to the economy? Many would think that a dating service membership may be considered a service that you buy into if you have discretionary income but Reuter’s reported recently in an article “Falling stock markets spur searches for love online” that a list of web sites have reported increased activity since the economic crisis hit in September, 2008. People are looking for a companion during these rough times and are saving money on the traditional dating scene of meeting in bars and have headed to the internet in search of their partners instead.

I guess it is nice to have a partner with you for comfort when times get a little tough. People are understanding this need and while they can’t control the factors of the economy they can take charge of their personal lives.

Match.com reported that it had experienced its largest membership increase in the last 7 years in the month of November. Perfectmatch.com said that it saw a 47% increase in the number of members in the 3 months to November, 2008 as compared to the previous 3 months. Is online dating an recession proof business? All of this data seems to be supporting that theory and it sort of makes sense that if people aren’t going out as much and using traditional methods of meeting people that they will most likely be spending more time on their computers looking for love online instead.

One of these dating companies should do an “Economic Love Stimulus” package promotion and discount their membership for a week or so. Thomas Enraght-Moony, CEO of Match.com says “During these trying times, people are looking for hope in their inbox.”

I know that the winter season generally makes people feel lonely if they don’t have a date to bring to all of the holiday parties and family gatherings. You also have the anxiety of the New Years celebration where you want to bring in the new year with someone special. Of course the greeting card companies coming knocking right after with Valentine’s Day. It is so hard to be just single and happy anymore and know we got the economy pressuring us too. Wow. Quit saving your hard earned money and go buy a dating membership or you can just cancel your Netflix account and quit sitting at home watching movies by yourself.

added: LA Times article: No recession for online dating sites. – 12/28/08

-Brian R.

The new website named Compatible Partners will provide a dating service with “male seeking a male” or “female seeking a female” options. The site will be launched by March 31st. The settlement was the result of a discrimination complaint filed by Eric McKinley against eHarmony in 2005, which will be dismissed under the settlement agreement. The New Jersey complaint is not the only legal action to be brought against eHarmony for failing to provide a same-sex option.

In March, lawyers in California brought a lawsuit against the company on behalf of San Francisco resident Linda Carlson, who was denied access to eHarmony because she is gay. eHarmony was founded by evangelical Christian Dr. Neil Clark Warren and had ties with the influential religious conservative group Focus on the Family. Since eHarmony has taken on the $110 million investment from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures, there marketing has become a little more main stream and hopefully this law suit will open up the companies views on servicing the gay and religious singles communities.

eHarmony.com has grown to a top dating service with it’s focus on TV commercial spots and partnerships with large portals like AOL Personals and Comcast.net Dating. Have you had a positive or negative experience with eHarmony? Post your comments below.

Sign-up to be notified when the site goes live: Compatible Partners

-Brian R.

Netclub’s parent company at the time, Trader Classified Media, acquired Webseduction.com back in 2003 giving it a nice foothold in the French Canadian market. Netclub was actually started back in 1997 as a free dating service in France and the service is still 100% free for women and men have to pay 5.00 € for a Gold VIP monthly membership. They have over 4 million personal ads on their site and continue to grow in both Canada and France and have added English to their site. I joined and the sign-up form hadn’t been internationalized for US yet and the date of birth fields were still in European format and the “Area” and “State” fields were backwards. It also didn’t have Seattle listed as a city for Washington but instead “King” for the county that I live in. Either way I sorted through the form and the process was lightening quick. It didn’t even have my verify my email address or ask any other profile questions. I didn’t see much activity or profiles that were in the US but if you are looking for French Canadians or French speaking people in general the database was huge.

Match.com operates 35 country sites in 15 different languages. Netclub.com is probably a top 3 French dating site depending on which website measurement tool you look at and while they are not 100% free the cost of entry is low and the quality seems to still be there. According to JupiterResearch, European online dating is expected to grow 30% this next year.

I have heard rumors that Match.com is looking to launch a free dating service in the US market. I wonder if they will use the same model as Netclub since it seems to be working well for them. The only issue they will encounter is seeding the database in an already busy marketplace for free dating. This might mean acquiring a site like PlentyofFish, Justsayhi, or DateHookup.

-Brian R.

Here are the top 3 sites ranked by Hitwise in the U.K. – 8/08
1. PlentyofFish.com
2. DatingDirect.co.uk
3. Gaydar.co.uk

Here are the top Canadian sites ranked by Canada Comscore – 7/08
1. PlentyofFish.com
2. Lavalife.com
3. eHarmony.com

Hitwise US also reported the Top 10 Industry Search Terms – August, 2008

The terms listed below are ranked by volume of searches that successfully drove traffic to websites in the Hitwise Lifestyle – Dating category for the 4 weeks ending August 30, 2008, based on US Internet usage.

Rank / Search Term / Volume
1. match.com 4.44%
2. plentyoffish 3.88%
3. singlesnet.com 3.05%
4. plenty of fish 2.71%
5. singlesnet 2.58%
6. plentyoffish.com 2.17%
7. adam4adam 1.67%
8. eharmony 1.16%
9. yahoo personals 1.10%
10. datehookup 0.97%
Source – Hitwise

Check out the Snapshot report from Compete.com on eHarmony.com, Match.com, Yahoo Personals, Singlesnet.com and Plentyoffish.com. This month’s trend is pretty interesting considering that eHarmony just signed that deal with AOL Personals which is eating up half of Match.com’s space that they have exclusively occupied for years. Match.com’s business is very partnership focused with some presence in paid search and sprinkled display ads that appear on social network sites once in a while. eHarmony continues to pound the concrete with it’s cable network commercials with a different twist that looks to be focused more on a mainstream demographic. eHarmony also participates in paid search and bids aggressively on top terms like “dating” and “personals”. They have been a little more strategic lately with their business development efforts trying to put a dent into Match.com partnerships. This should be a pretty effective strategy considering they are becoming a household brand for dating now even though they have a 1-hour long sign-up process.

Yahoo! Personals has the power of their network behind them for free ad placements on the Yahoo home page and through out their properties. They buy paid search but aren’t aggressive at all. Yahoo Personals does really well in SEO on top dating terms because Google loves big brands and keeps squeezing the small guys out of the mix.

On the free side of things PlentyofFish.com seems to still be holding ground and growing. I see him buying a lot more paid search on Google lately and he evens bids on high cost terms for traffic. He must be working a pretty decent arbitrage to be able to afford this. I wonder what his gross to net spend is on Google AdWords and AdSense. Singlesnet.com had a strong year but they seem to be losing a little steam lately. They were all over the social networks and ad networks and are still buying heavily on search but I don’t see any partnerships with portals and ISPs. The ad model will eventually get too expensive and is not consistent to grow your business. In order to keep up with the growth they have seen they really need to secure some partnerships in the US. The one shady thing I have seen with them on search is that CPA networks that they have been working with are spamming the paid search listings and occupying several spots of shelf space. I have reported them several times but those networks are pretty aggressive at getting new ads back up in place of the ones removed.

We’ll start with a company, Relationship Exchange, that has been doing white label dating for quite sometime. They are owned and operated by Vintacom Media group up in Canada and Dreammates.com is their private brand and Dating.com also runs off of their platform. You can find a ton of partner information on their corporate site at: WorldDatingPartners.com

A new contender in this space is WhiteLabelDating.com. They are growing fast in the UK market targeting newspaper websites that are losing advertising dollars by the day and other portal and entertainment based sites. Since Internet World 2008 in May they have launched 482 new sites. Their database has also increased by 175% and revenue has grown by 58% month on month. Pretty impressive stats.

The 3rd company that does a great job at niche related domains in the Military, Seniors, BBW Singles, Pet Lovers, Active Singles, etc is Tango Wire. They don’t have a private brand but instead focus on the technology side of their business. We use them to promote our Military-Singles.com partnership domain. All of the other Army, Navy, and Military Singles partners contribute to our conversions as all of the profiles are in the same walled garden and as we send in new profiles we are adding to their databases and vice versa. They handle all billing and customer service related issues and offer easy to use customizable templates to setup your home page.

If you want to sell or auction off your domains then some good services to use are Sedo.com and Moniker.com that have several auctions a year at different domain conferences across the world. You have to submit your domains for review and acceptance into their auctions so they usually only take premium domains. Sedo.com will act as your domain broker and you can actually list an asking price and your domain will then appear in their marketplace for purchase. We have bought and sold many domains from these services and they are all highly respected companies in the industry.

added 12/29: I just came across a UK based white label dating service: Easy Date White Label Dating. They are the company behind the popular UK dating site DatetheUK.com and SpeedDaterUK.co.uk.

-Brian

The page looks to be co-sponsored by the two websites. My experience with this in the past doing business development partnerships in the dating vertical is that both sites will hurt in this relationship having to split the traffic and the consumers will get very confused as to what service they belong to.

I can understand AOL trying to diversify their revenue in the online dating/personals section of their business but this is a dangerous move especially since the Match.com brand is so integrated into Love.com which AOL owns and operates. Match.com should get aggressive in pushing eHarmony out of this partnership and making it exclusive again.

eHarmony must have sold the deal to the AOL execs as ‘casual dating’ versus ‘serious relationships’ but the truth is that people don’t really see any real difference in the two sites as Match.com owns and operates their own serious relationship site Chemistry.com that they could have easily integrated into this deal.

Serious relationships sites are categorized by the simple fact that they have “Personality Tests” in there sign-up process to filter or weed out “casual” daters. This is funny when you think that sites like Plenty of Fish even have personality tests and they are one of the largest casual dating sites online. I guess POF is a serious-casual dating site then right?

Here is a quote from the CEO from eHarmony, Greg Waldorf: “We’ve always regarded matching services like eHarmony as distinct from more casual dating sites,”

EHarmony claims to be comfortable charging for its services while others offer free dating sites because the company is in the business of finding partners, not dates. Some 236 people eHarmony users are said to get married on average every day, according to a Harris Interactive study. That statistic is still very hard for me to accept or understand how they got those numbers confirmed.

I wonder if eHarmony will ever launch Gayharmony or Jharmony websites.

-Brian

Share some of your online dating experiences if you have used social networking sites to find love online and if you think it is a safe option being that so much more of your personal information is available on some of these sites like Facebook.

- Brian

Meetic.com is based in Boulogne-Billancourt, right outside of Paris. They are looking to expand into Germany and the U.K. dating markets. I don’t see a shortage of singles out there so at 10 Euros a share it seems like a good bargain. Any of the US site analytics companies always report international websites completely wrong with the exception of Hitwise. I would say that Meetic is probably the largest international dating service next to Match.com with tens of millions of singles in more than 20 countries.

Bloomberg.com Europe Article: Meetic Plunges to Record After Sales Miss Estimates

Here is the sites that topped the list:
1. Singlesnet
2. Plentyoffish
3. Yahoo! Personals
4. Match.com
5. Adam4Adam.com
6. DateHookup.com
7. TRUE.com
8. eHarmony.com

Other noteworthy sites that moved up and down were BlackPeopleMeet.com moved up from #11 to #10 and Mate1.com fell off the top 15 to the number 17th position. This list looks a lot different in the UK and other countries. Gaydar.co.uk usually tops the list in the UK and PlentyofFish in Canada followed closely by Lavalife. Isn’t it funny to see that eHarmony.com didn’t even make the top 5 list. Someone needs to tell them that they can’t promote an online dating site by simply buying TV commercials over and over.

If you look at Singlesnet, Match.com and Plenty of Fish on Compete.com you’ll see that Singlenet is still ahead of Match but that PlentyofFish looks to be substantially smaller in size than Match.com. This could be whether the two technologies have factored in partnership deals like Love@AOL and MSN Personals that drive a ton of volume and traffic to Match.com.

singlesnet.com vs. match.com vs. plentyoffish.com – Compete.com results.

Hitwise also reported “Free Dating Site” U.S. Rankings for June, 2008:
1. PlentyofFish.com
2. DateHookup.com
3. OKCupid.com
4. HotorNot.com
5. WebDate.com

If you aren’t familiar with Quantcast, they are an website analytics company similar to Web Trends and Google Analytics where site owners place javascript tags on pages they want to have tracked. They also use methods similar to the Hitwise and Comscore measures to estimate site popularity and website demographics.

Here is a snapshot of the eHarmony data and below is a link to the eHarmony traffic profile on Quantcast:

http://www.quantcast.com/eharmony.com

4,086,445 uniques in the US May 2008
204,275 uniques in Canada
27,960 uniques from Ghana
18,940 uniques from the UK

Monthly Traffic Summary – US
Page Views per Month – 352,187,056
Average Page Views per Visit – 15.68
Visits per Month - 22,465,275
Average Visits per Unique - 8.46
Uniques per Month - 2,655,417

One other interesting data point from looking at their analytics is that they aren’t at all visible as a brand outside of the US where you see Match.com in tons of international markets. Looks like eHarmony might need to get some of that $110 million dollars they raised back in Dec. 2004 to work. I’m glad they at least dropped Dr. Neil Clark Warren from the commercials.

In Australia, Match.com was chosen by ninemsn, a joint venture between Microsoft Corp and PBL media, to become the exclusive integrated dating provider on ninemsn. Under the agreement, Match.com will reach an audience of more than eight million people a month in Australia and expects to significantly increase its market share in the country. The new service, “ninemsn dating provided by Match.com” is fully integrated within the ninemsn network, including Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Messenger Today and Windows Live Spaces.

“We are thrilled to partner with ninemsn. The decision to select Match.com as their exclusive online dating partner further validates the strength of our product and fortifies our global partnership with MSN,” said Thomas Enraght-Moony, CEO of Match.com.

In Latin America, Match.com is partnering with Terra, the region’s largest internet portal. With this partnership, Match.com will be the exclusive online dating provider for Terra’s sites in 18 countries across Latin America. This new agreement extends Match.com’s existing relationship with Terra, where Match is the online dating provider for Terra in the US. Visit Amor@Terra.

“The opportunity to be affiliated with a company like Terra is incredibly exciting and we’re so pleased to be partnering with them. The partnership is truly a testament to the strengths of our product, our international team and the ability to apply our expertise to optimize the service at a very local level,” continued Enraght-Moony.

Match.com’s international business continues to be a key driver of the Company’s success. In Q1 2008, Match.com saw an eight percent growth in international subscribers and a twelve percent growth in revenue per subscriber. Match.com currently operates more than 37 local country sites in 15 languages, and the company’s reach spans six continents.

Along with JDate’s already-popular website features like live chat, instant messaging, and message forums, JDate will offer UK-based singles events and parties to bring Jewish singles in the UK together in real life settings.

Here is a quote from President and COO of Spark Networks that owns and operates Jdate:

“We are thrilled to bridge the Atlantic divide and re-introduce the UK Jewish community to JDate. It is a natural evolution that this emerging Jewish group will have the chance to utilize all of the site’s great features to meet their special someone.”

More Info on Jdate:

With over 650,000 active members worldwide, JDate is the leading online community for Jewish singles. JDate is owned and operated by Spark Networks (AMEX: LOV), one of the world’s leading providers of online personals services.

I started working for Kiss.com back in April of 1996 when my current business partner, Norman Clarke got me a job as a customer service / office assistant helping with emails, calls and order fullfillment. You have to go back to 96′ for a minute to understand how websites ran. Our online ordering system was done via emails that we printed out and entered into Filemaker Pro. We ran daily transaction batches using MacAuthorize over a 14.4 modem at the end of the day then emails people addresses they ordered. I think there was about 16 dating websites listed in Yahoo! (back when they were a directory) and the top dating sites were Webpersonals.com, Friendfinder.com and OneandOnly.com. Our boss, Lee Zehrer, a pioneer in internet dating purchased the domain Kiss.com back in December of 1994 and Match.com was registered in January of 1995. Back then internet dating was very much international dating and mail order bride focused.

There were large international dating services like Loveme.com, APrettyWoman.com and CherryBlossoms.com that featured womens’ profiles from Russia, Ukraine and the Philippines. You actually purchased member addresses and had to send them letters instead of emails. Most of the international profiles didn’t have email addresses and Hotmail wasn’t even a big site yet.

OneandOnly.com had launched one of the first affiliate programs and maybe even before Amazon.com and all of the dating directories like Cupidnet.com (purchased by Matchnet, LLC), Aarens.com, Singlessites.com, ASinglesPlace.com and Lovesites.com ruled the search engines. You need to go back to 96′ again when the main search engines were Altavista.com, Excite, Webcrawler, Lycos and Hotbot. Yahoo was powered by Inktomi. Google was still a project in a garage in Palo Alto, CA.

Everyone was racing to be #1 in a category that still didn’t have a good public image or acceptance. You didn’t go telling your friends that you were using the internet to find a date back then. A couple of quiet acquisitions happened in the early days but no major consolidation until OneandOnly.com, based in Dallas, TX and Match.com, then based in SF, CA, were both acquired by Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch. Then Cupid’s Network Inc., owned and operated by Daniel Bender, which included the property Cupidnet.com and AS.org (AmericanSingles.com) was purchased by Matchnet, PLC in May, 1999 for $3.6 million.

This brought a ton of visibility and validity to the online dating industry and tons of new projects got started and funded. There were sites like xSeeksy.com, Spring Street Networks, Socialnet, DatingFaces.com, DatingClub.com (run by Targetmatch out of Isreal) that were trying to take the industry by storm. Portals were signing partnership & advertising deals with these companies left and right. Spring Street Networks went after the low-tech newspaper market with a white label application. Socialnet tried to be a free dating service about 2 years too early. They even offered out their female-CEO as a potential date on the site. DatingFaces went down the ‘butler’ path to try to give you a more friendly experience and couldn’t get to critical mass fast enough. The DatingFaces database eventually got purchased by AOL to launch out their AIM personals service which never took off. People were still dating for free on Excite’s Classifieds2000 and Yahoo! Personals as they were still free services at the time.

Yahoo! Personals then decided to move to a subscription model after a short relationship with Match.com where they saw the revenue opportunity in the online dating space.

Webpersonals has had an interesting history as one of the first dating sites online which is still alive but has been rebranded. Interactive Media Group in Canada bought the URL webpersonals.com from Andrew Conru of Friendfinder.com back in 1997 where it started a free online dating service. In July 2001, Lavalife.com was rebranded and the webpersonals.com brand was combined into the new service. Lavalife was purchased in April, 2004 by MemberWorks Incorporated, a provider of consumer and membership services through affinity marketing and online channels for approximately $152.5 million CAD in cash.

Date.com is a privately owned company based in New York with offices in Miami Beach, Florida. The site was launched on Valentines Day in 1997 and became a subscription-based service with its re-launch in 2000. Avalanche LLC, owners and operators of Date.com acquired the Matchmaker.com service in Feb. 2006 and moved the users over to the Date.com platform but kept them separate from the Date.com user base.
Matchmaker.com was originally acquired by Lycos.com back in June, 2000. Matchmaker was broken into dozens of city and religious communities and had one of the first personality tests used to match potential members.

uDate.com was first launched commercially in February 1999 and was able to acquire customers quickly by offering consumers a feature rich experience. uDate.com, Inc. became the challenger for overall global market leadership of the online dating sector when it acquired the brand Kiss.com in 2001. uDate.com, Inc. became a public company trading under the ticker symbol UDAT on the OTCBB exchange. The Company was headquartered in Derby, United Kingdom. In Dec, 2002 USA Interactive entered into an agreement to acquire uDate.com, Inc for approximately $150 million in USA common stock.

Here we are today and the term ‘online dating’ has become a household term that everyone talks about with their friends and peers over lunch or drinks. I can now hardly run into anybody that doesn’t have an online dating story to tell about their own experience or a friends expeditions in dating on the internet.

Social network sites like Friendster and Myspace have revolutionized the technology and many sites have evolved their feature sets to include many of the social networking functionality. You can hardly watch cable TV anymore without seeing an eHarmony or Match.com ad or product placement in movies like Perfectmatch.com did with “Must Love Dogs”. The industry got past its akward and fast growth period, has done a little bit of consolidation and now faces the challenges of reinventing itself to keep up with technology advances in software development and the entire social media craze. Free dating services like OKCupid, PlentyofFish and Meeta.com are new challengers to the media giants for share of voice.

We’ll see where the next century of dating takes us but for now go out and meet someone online. It’s now officially “Kosher” to do so.

-Brian

note: if you find an inaccurate fact within this article please post a comment or email us directly so we can fix it. I hate passing on bad info.

Citations:
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bakera/ArticleE.htm
http://sec.edgar-online.com/2004/08/16/0001204459-04-000467/Section18.asp
http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/history/lavalife.html
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=62982

Before this season of “Dancing With the Stars” started, all of the dance couples took the Duet compatibility test, with mixed results. Pepper Schwartz talked about the test and the compatibility of the GMA anchors. For each of the DWTS couples, the Duet assessment analyzed personality factors, strengths and weaknesses as well as areas that are similar and complementary. On “Dancing With the Stars” tonight, Schwartz will talk about her analysis of the Duet test results and will reveal who she believes is the perfect match — and most likely to win the competition. And, conversely, who is least compatible and faces the biggest uphill climb.

See a sneak peak of the Duet Test results

The University of California Berkeley grads, James Hong and Jim Young, have sold HotOrNot for a reported $20 million to Avid Life Media out of Toronto, Canada. Avid Life Media is a network of targeted niche brands that looks to be acquiring web properties but their website has nothing more then a logo of the company on it.

Hong confirmed the sale but would not discuss the price, which was reported on the TechCrunch blog. I originally met James at a dating conference in Miami a few years back which I am sure he was there looking for m&a contacts.

HotorNot was launched back in the big dot-com craze in 2000 and created a social website phenomenon which then led to other similar photo rating sites like facethejury and ratemybody. The site hasn’t changed much since then except for the addition of a poorly executed dating service extension of the site and some facebook apps. Hong and Young will not be regular contributors to the new company. Hong posted in his blog that “All good things must come to an end. Eight years is a long time, and both Jim and I were mentally prepared to move on years ago.”

I wonder what this business would have been valued at in the internet hay days. Maybe 5x what they got?

MySpace will introduce its developer platform Tuesday, which will allow outside Web developers to create applications for the social networking site, just as they do on rival Facebook.

MySpace users, however, won’t get to see the results until next month. To give all developers an equal footing, MySpace is unveiling the platform at a party at its new San Francisco offices and will give the developers a month to create their programs. The applications will be made public in early March 2008.

The new platform takes a page from Palo Alto’s Facebook, which introduced its developers’ platform last year. Developers have created thousands of applications for Facebook, from online music services to games of Scrabble.

MySpace is also one of the partners of Google’s OpenSocial initiative, which will make it easy for developers to create an application that can run on multiple social networking sites.

Developers also will be able to make money by placing advertisements or selling services on the application’s preferences page. That is, when users adds a program to their MySpace profile, they will be directed to a page to personalize the application. On that page, the developer will be able to run ads and keep the ad revenues. In the future, developers also will be able to partner with MySpace to make money through targeted advertisements.

Meeta.com will also cater to alternative lifestyle and religious groups allowing users to maintain their privacy and contact preferences.  A Spanish language version of Meeta.com will also be available in the near future with a later launch.

This free social dating service will include a number of unique features such as the ability to create interest groups or select from a pre-assortment of groups, event/date invitations for singles and event planners, the freedom to add friends, bookmark users and communicate with other users for free, manage security and privacy preferences and build a member permalink identity on the site.

Look out for this new free dating service by signing up on Meeta.com’s beta site launch list. Bookmark the site and sign-up to be notified when the site launches: Meeta.com.

JDate.com has been one of the most successful niche dating sites in terms of converting free members to its premium paid subscription model. We have promoted several other religious niche sites with only half of the conversions that we see from JDate.com. JDate.com was started back in 1997 by Joe Y. Shapira and the publicly traded Spark Network has grown over the years to include other dating properties like AmericanSingles.com, BlackSingles.com, ChristianMingle.com and LDSMingle.com.

Spark Networks Inc. has a market cap of $131 million which has grown in the past few weeks probably because of the anticipation of an upcoming transaction. Comscore Media Metrix had Spark Network ranked No. 4 in November 2007 with around 2.45 million unique visitors. Spark reported $6.56 million in net income with revenue of $68.85 million for 2006. According to people close to the sale, Spark has hired the boutique investment bank AGM Partners to run the sale for them.

This could easily turn into a bid war amongst the suitors as the online dating industry struggles with drops in traffic and conversions this past year. JDate has a very strong and well respected brand in the Jewish community and is a very viral product considering very little is spent promoting it versus their mainstream brand AmericanSingles.com. I just pray that eHarmony doesn’t pony up the money, buy the site and run it into the ground with their religious biases.

Many of you have probably seen last year’s “Rejected By eHarmony” campaign, depicting the people who have been turned away from eHarmony for not being happy enough, gay, or just unmatchable. The campaign proved very successful. According to New York Times, Chemistry experienced an 80 percent growth rate and gay and lesbian members increased by 200 percent.

This time around, Chemistry is planning to spend more than last April’s campaign budget of $20 million. The new ads that attack eHarmony for refusing to match same sex couples and for the evangelical Christian beliefs of eHarmony’s founder, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, will be featured in weekly newspapers and magazines.

Below is an example of one of the new print ads Chemistry will be featuring.

Penthouse Media Group CEO Marc H. Bell has stated that “Various is an attractive addition to our already strong print platform, and one that puts Penthouse in a very robust position in the ever-growing online social networking arena. We like where the business combination puts us and that this transaction will enhance PMGI’s current and future licensing, print and interactive ventures.”

Various, Inc. has developed over 25 online networking communities including FriendFinder Network Inc., Passion.com, Steamray Inc., and Adult Friend Finder, one of the most trafficked websites in the world. The company boasts an extensive and growing member base of more than 260 million people and 1.2 million subscribers.

“We are excited to be combining our substantial internet presence with one of the most recognized adult entertainment brands in the world,” said Lars Mapstead, VP of Marketing for Various, Inc. “Together we will expand in many areas, both online and offline, to solidify our position as the world leader in adult entertainment.”

As prominent companies in the adult entertainment market, looks like Penthouse and Various will benefit extremely by pairing up traditional print marketing with online networking.

This company’s partnership with Commission Junction is currently inactive.
https://signup.cj.com/member/brandedPublisherSignUp.do?air_refmerchantid=1473360

We have been promoting True.com since they rebranded from True Beginnings over to True.com and have always been paid on time and have even had personal contacts there that we have met in person at The Affiliate Summit trade show in Las Vegas. I emailed their regular customer service, the affiliate email True.affiliates@true.com, and our contacts Cornell McGee (CMO) and David Wright (SEO Manager) and both of their emails bounced back. We never received a response to the ones we sent to customer service either.

I just started doing a little research online to find a phone number for them to get some information on what is going on and when they intend on paying CJ so their affiliates like ourselves can be paid as well. I found this phone number on a coupon site and it actually worked and I was able to talk to a customer service rep that informed me that they we’re no longer running any “affiliation programs” but he took down my number and said that he would pass it along internally for someone to call me back with some details as to what is happening.

Here is the phone number to True.com in case you might want to ask them yourself: 1.866.583.TRUE (8783). Customer Service Email: customercare@TRUE.com

I will give it a few days to see if we get a response and will then reach out to CJ to see if they have a status update as well. If you happen to know some information please email it to us anonymously or comment on this post. Here are some other interesting articles that I came across when I did a search on their company name instead of the domain name:

True Beginnings LLC:
http://www.google.com/search?en&q=true+beginnings+llc

Class action lawsuit filed against Irving-based True.com dating website
Website terms incorporated by ‘continue’ button, rules US court
Is True.com Being Untrue to Advertising Partners?

eHarmony claims to be able to help you find your “Soulmate” using their 29 dimensions of compatibility with their 436 question personality profiler. (takes about 1 hour to fill out) The problem is that the system that eHarmony is built on had originally been geared towards being a Christian dating service website and has always giving preference to Christians with most of its early marketing towards Christian websites and portals. eHarmony was officially founded in 2000 by Ph.D and author, Neil Clark Warren, who has written several books on dating and marriage. The site was built with one round of venture funding of $3M by Fayez Sarofim & Co.There is an eHarmony Blog that has done a little research based off of eHarmony rejection letters and have come up with this list of top five reasons:

Reason #1. You said you are separated or married on page 14. 30% of eHarmony rejects fall into this category, according to a May 2007 article in the Washington Post.

Reason #2. You said you are below 21 on page 14. 27% percent fall into this category.

Reason #3. You said you were married more than twice on page 14.1 “eHarmony also rejects anyone younger than 60 who’s been married more than four times,” according to the Washington Post article. (Their personality test asks these three items only when you’re almost done.)

Reason #4. Your answers don’t add up, i.e., (a) you clicked random answers or (b) for example, you put “1″ under Aloof on the first page, but then checked “Outgoing” on page 6. 9% of rejects fall into this category.

Reason #5. You scored low on the following personality traits — eHarmony calls them dimensions:

* Self-Concept (how you perceive yourself)
* Emotional Status (feeling happy, fulfilled and hopeful)
* Character (honesty and trustworthiness)
* Obstreperousness (the black hole dimension)
* Character (honesty and trustworthiness)
* Emotion Management: Anger (expressing negative emotions constructively)
* Conflict Resolution (resolving issues).
* Family Background (happy childhood and supportiveness of your parents)

This is crazy huh? Well I don’t know many people that are in their 20′s or 30′s that are completely emotionally stable and that haven’t had rough family upbringing. Either a bunch of people are lying on their personality tests or I am hanging out with the wrong crowd.

I found a few other articles of other people that were rejected on Consumerist.com – More eHarmony.com Discrimination Victims

Time Magazine has named eHarmony.com as one of the 5 worse websites and sites to avoid. You can see the entire list and read the editorial comments here:

eHarmony.com named Top Worse Websites by Time.com

eHarmony had this coming to them especially after Chemistry.com slammed them in their “Rejected by eHarmony” ad campaign that appeared in both print and television commercials. Rumor has it that Chemistry.com spent about $12 Million on the entire ad campaign that had spots running during shows like The Office. This campaign single handedly has let a lot of air out of the pro-Christian regime that eHarmony hasn’t put much effort into hiding. This has got to be a complete PR nightmare for them and I am sure there will be a come back of Dr. Warren Neil on the commercials before too long.

How are they going to explain the profile rejection of over a million users that were non-Christian, gay or depressed according to their personality test. How would you feel if you just spent 45 minutes to complete eHarmony’s eHarmony’s 436 compatibility survey questions and then were rejected by them?

Here is the message that you’ll see if they deem you a ‘freak’:

Unable to match you at this time:
eHarmony is based upon a complex matching system developed through extensive research with married couples. One of the requirements for successful matching is that participants to fall within certain defined profiles. If we find that we will not be able to match a user using these profiles, we feel it is only fair to inform them early in the process.

We are so convinced of the importance of creating compatible matches to help people establish happy, lasting relationships that we sometimes choose not to provide service rather than risk an uncertain match.

Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service. We hope that you understand, and we regret our inability to provide service for you at this time.

 

Check out the Time.com follow up article on eHarmony: Is eHarmony Biased Against Gays?

Check out the 30 second Chemistry.com commercial “Rejected by eHarmony.com” on YouTube that was done by their agency Hanft, Raboy & Partners.

If you are looking for a relationship focused website that doesn’t discriminate against your religious or sexual preference but that still uses a personality test to help you find your soulmate, try either Chemistry.com or Perfectmatch.com.