Which Dating Sites Got The Best And Worst PR In 2013?

COURTLAND BROOKS - Jan 3 - Here are the Courtland Brooks rankings of the top 10 and the worst 4 performing idating sites for PR in 2013. We used Meltwater News and our qualitative analysis.

1. Match - not a surprise... They got some negative press too, lawsuits mostly.  i.e. Recently the one claiming that a photo of a woman who was never a Match member was used on several profiles, which got quite a lot of coverage. The press mostly wrote positively about Match.
2. eHarmony - again, not a surprise. We think, Match and eHarmony don´t need to do much to get press mentions... They lost some key people this year, and the press didn´t miss that. Lately, their new product eH+ got quite a lot of coverage.
3. Tinder - We read something about them literally every day. The articles just say the same again and again and we don´t run them all. Still, there were 46 posts added to the Tinder news category on Online Personals Watch last year.
4. OkCupid - Scored multiple new partnerships, Coinbase, Virgin Mobile, etc.  They announced the restart of OkTrends (but where's the content?).  They also did some questionable things like adding an ad blocker and an "ugly people filter," but these things just spurred discussion and actually brought them more press. They also got some bad press around security issues and the shut down of Tallygram, a Facebook-based friend-finding app that they started in November 2012.
5. AshleyMadison - got some negative press as well in the form of lawsuits against them.  Everything we´d consider to be negative for other dating sites, actually works for them. They like to stoke controversy. They also launched in several countries and got funding in 2013.
6. Grindr - got solid and mostly positive press coverage.
7. Down (BangWithFriends) - launched in February and had a great start with press, but became old news quickly.
8. HowAboutWe - is another site with a solid and consistent press coverage over the years. Actually we never read any negative articles about them - that´s quite unique.
9. Spark Networks brands - Spark Networks as a company and it´s brands also got quite a lot of press mentions.
10. Zoosk - another company with lots of rosy positive press coverage.

We expected POF to be on this list but they didn´t appear in the press as often as they did in the past. We still ran 20 posts about them last year, but a lot of the news was based on their blog posts.  Lately they got some negative press because of the TRUE deal. Also Meltwater shows lower numbers than in the past.

And then there's Badoo.  OPW only ran 5 posts on them last year, that´s a bit strange.

And now the poor guys with a lot of negative press...

• TRUE. The company behind the site went bankrupt last year, but the website is still up. And they tried to sell their members profiles to POF and that brought them a lot of negative press.
• Another company with a lot of problems last year was FriendFinder - the debts and bankruptcy. But the end of the year brought some hope for them with Conru (the original founder and CEO and major shareholder) emerging as the CEO again.
• And of course, Cupid. The fake-profile case got quite a lot of coverage and actually eventually damaged the company profits and forced them to take some significant steps to fix the situation by selling their adult assets.
• White Label Dating had some similar problems with fake-profile coverage, but besides the ITV show, their case didn't get as much coverage and despite them producing one press release after another last year, they almost didn´t score any real press hits last year.

So that's 2013. Happy New Year for 2014! 

Learn more about Courtland Brooks