Hello, and welcome to Online Personals Watch’s Weekly News Roundup. I’m Mark Brooks, and here are the latest headlines from around the industry.
This edition of the weekly news roundup is kindly sponsored by iTelebill.
Match.com is launching a new TV campaign to promote its MatchAffinity relationship service on Thursday, April first. The service will attempt to match committed registrants with other compatible singles. The compatibility is based on the results of an in-depth affinity personality test, which members take upon joining the service.
Online dating app service SNAP Interactive has announced its operating results for the full year of 2009. The full year revenue came in at $3,170,725, which was an increase of just $159k over 2008s results. Most of the revenue was generated from advertisements, premium features placed on various apps, as well as subscription fees to AreYouInterested. They lost $102k in 2009 as compared to a net income loss of $797k in 2008. That’s a nice improvement, but we would like to have seen them grow revenues more this year.
EasyDate recently acquired Allegran’s online dating business. The acquisition increased EasyDate’s current portfolio of dating sites from seven to twelve. EasyDate has also reached a milestone with its Facebook app BeNaughty. BeNaughty boasts an active user base breaching one million.
Facebook dating apps in general saw a massive user drop last month when Facebook turned off its app notifications. Upstart companies such as Zoosk and AreYouInterested took quite a hit as a result. Zoosk went from 6.9 million facebook users to 3.7 million users from March 6th to April 5th and AreYouInterested went from 2.2 million Facebook users to 1.2 million users from March 6th to April 5th according to Allfacebook app statistics.
Dating service GameCrush was forced to shut down only a week after its launch date, due to the overabundance of user requests. The site is a full-fledged social networking platform for gamers that allows visitors to set up profiles, browse profiles, and chat with each other through video and text messaging for a small fee. The service is currently trying to add more servers to meet user demands.
Owner of Executive Dating LLC, Barrie Turner has been arrested for fraud! Turner is alleged to be in connection with the operation of more than 200 websites offering “executive dating” services. Since 2005, more than 100 people have filed consumer complaints accusing Turner of fraud for failing to provide legitimate matchmaking for paid services. Investigators estimate that Executive Dating received more than $1.2M in mailed and wired payments.
Gay matchmaking site myPartner.com is officially on the auction block. The website focuses on serious long term relationships for gay dating and matchmaking. Site spokesperson Patrick Perrine has confirmed that myPartner.com is for sale. Patrick can be reached directly at patrick@mypartner.com for those who are interested.
Be sure to head over to OPW1.com and check out our interview with President of MeetMoi, Alexander Harrington. We also have lovesites.com’s interview with Andrew Conru which you can find posted on the 31st of March.
This edition of Online Personals Watch’s Weekly News Roundup has been sponsored by iTelebill.
iTelebill – The mobile and voice payment specialists for all your online & micro billing payment requirements.
That’s all for this week’s news roundup. Tune in again next week as we bring you the latest and greatest from the world of online dating. No ads, no fluff, just raw news and CEO interviews. I’m Mark Brooks. Thank you.
