Internet Dating Video News Summaries

Internet Dating Video News Summary #34

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 messmo Media.

According to ComScore Online Personals sites grew in popularity during the month of February, with a 5-percent increase to 24.2 million visitors. eHarmony ranked as the #1 personals site during the month, and attracted 5.0 million Americans alone. Match.com sites ranked second with 3.4 million visitors. PlentyOfFish.com attracted 2.8 million visitors, followed closely by SinglesNet with 2.6 million.

eHarmony recently invested in German dating site eDarling. eDarling was founded in the summer of 2009 and carries an estimated value of around 15-20 million EURO. eHarmony supposedly acquired 30% of the company as a result of the investment .

Match.com has officially launched an app for Android. The app gives users the opportunity to find their soul mates right from their Android handset. The best part is the app is free to download.

Australian dating site RSVP recently launched a new campaign focusing on RSVP’s dating success stories. The campaign known as ‘Everyday Moments’ features real life couples sharing their relationship experiences and success stories. The new campaign will see 15-second vignettes online and televised nationally.

According to studies by comscore, Canadians are the world’s most active online daters. Canadians supposedly spend more days a month and minutes per day on dating sites than users in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany. PlentyofFish is one of the most popular dating sites benefiting from Canadian daters. The site recently surpassed 105M logins in one month with as many as 1.5M people visiting daily, and as many as 380,000 messages being sent between members hourly according to Markus Frind.

UK based dating site BeNaughty.com has been growing rapidly over the past couple of years. The website has officially reached 3M member profiles.

Online dating for single seniors has also seen a substantial increase lately. According to the latest DatingData poll from SeniorPeopleMeet.com. 43% of single seniors named the internet as the best transformation in regards to dating and communication.

Dating service GameCrush has launched a new service to help connect male Xbox fanatics with game-playing females. Featured dates cost 400 GameCrush credits which can only be bought in batches of 500 for $8.25 USD. The service currently boasts ~1,200 profiles and hopes to expand to other game consoles in the future.

Cinema chain company Cineworld is partnering up with Easydate to form a new online dating service called Back Row Dating. The service will offer an innovative feature to help single movie lovers meet their perfect partner through similar taste in movies.

The official iDate Awards video is now live at iDateAwards.com. You can see all the award winners there, along with some video of the event itself.

Last but not least, the International Marriage Brokers Bill could seemingly prevent online dating sites from running gender specific pricing schemes.

According to Legislative staff member, Lisa Baugher, "the term “international marriage broker” does not apply to an organization that does not charge a fee based on gender or country of origin to any party for the services provided. This would apply to temporary promotions offering different pricing schemes based on gender or country of origin as well." It wasn’t specified whether or not the regulations will have an impact on a “ladies night” event in real time.

This edition of Online Personals Watch’s Weekly News Roundup has been sponsored by messmo Media.

Make real money with mobile dating. Talk to Brendan O’Kane of messmo Media.

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.

Internet Dating Video News Summary #15

OPW Weekly News Summary - Oct 29th, 2009 from Mark Brooks on Vimeo.

Hello, and welcome to Online Personal Watch’s Weekly News Roundup. I’m Mark Brooks, and here are the latest headlines from around the internet dating industry.

Match and Chemistry’s parent company, IAC, had a profitable third quarter, thanks to its asset sales. Yet revenue from Match and IAC’s dating sites dropped by $13 million to 81 million dollars. IAC attributed the decline to the absence of Match Europe, which was sold to French competitor Meetic last June. One bright spot for Match? Paid subscriptions grew by five percent to 1.4 million. Why is this? Match tell me it's basically because they're better at targetting users. Case in point, its interesting how they blanketed the Oodle.com classifieds site recently. Its tough for any other dating site to get a shoe-in on Oodle now that they've loaded 700,000 profiles from Match.com.

I talked with Merger Market this week about the possibility that FriendFinder Networks could sell its non-core businesses before the end of this year. It really was quite hypothetical. Sure, its unlikely but its possible. Properties that don't really fit the fold include Gradfinder and BigChurch. FriendFinder filed for an IPO last December in hopes of raising up to 460 million dollars to pay off its debts.

Noel Biderman runs Ashley Madison. He thinks FriendFinder would be wise to attempt to sell its international properties to companies focused on a particular geographic region. i.e. FriendFinder’s Latino dating site, Amigos, might have better success in the hands of a company concentrating solely on the Latino market. FriendFinder’s sites could bring in between 7x to 8x EBITDA, according to Noel.

Also in international news, statistics from September show singles in the U.K., Spain and Switzerland have had a change of heart regarding their favorite dating sites.

Here is a comparison of Nielsen’s U.K. unique audience rankings from this past August and September.

U.K., Nielsen Online/Unique Audience
August 2009

1. Friends Reunited Dating (605,000)
2. PlentyofFish (574,000)
3. Match (468,000)  

September 2009

1. PlentyofFish (576,000) 
2. DatingDirect.com (520,000)
3. Friends Reunited Dating (498,000)

As you can see, former #1 Friends Reunited Dating fell to third place after it lost 100,000 uniques visitors a month points in just a month. This drop-off allowed PlentyofFish at 576,000 uniques to move into the top spot, even though the free dating site’s unique audience ranking only improved by two points from August.

PlentyofFish also finished on top of comScore’s U.K. rankings for September. They estimated the site had 794,000 unique visitors. Why the difference between the comScore and Nielsen numbers? Well, I've run numbers with comScore and Nielson as far back as 2003 and seen as much as an order of magnitude difference between them. The differences are a lot less these days. Its really a matter of how from where they pull their numbers, and how they do their math. Ultimately, the best bet is to draw your conclusions on rankings from multiple competitive intelligence sources. Which is why I list them at Markslist.com. Just type in that domain and you'll see the latest rankings each month.

DateTheUK came in second to Plentyoffish.com in the UK with 733,000 uniques. Actually DateTheUK’s parent company, EasyDate, was honored this week by Deloitte as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the U.K. EasyDate’s revenue increased 10x from 2004 to 2008. Deloitte ranked EasyDate at #30 on their annual Technology Fast 50 list for the U.K.

As mentioned earlier, there’s also a new #1 dating site in Spain, according to Nielsen.

Spain, Nielsen Online/Unique Audience
August 2009

1. FriendScout24 (626,000)
2. Meetic (442,000)
3. TeEncontre.com (305,000)

September 2009

1. C-Date (561,000)
2. Meetic (478,000)
3. Easyflirt (466,000)

Casual dating site C-Date is now in first place after not even being ranked in the top three last month. C-Date saw 561,000 uniques in Spain for September.

FriendScout24 may have lost its #1 ranking in Spain, but the site did better over in Switzerland.

Switzerland, Nielsen Online/Unique Audience
August 2009

1. Parship (72,000)
2. FriendScout24 (67,000)
3. Swissfriends.ch (54,000)

September 2009

1. FriendScout24 (73,000)
2. Swissfriends.ch (65,000)
3. Parship (64,000) 

FriendScout24 grabbed the top spot with 73,000 uniques. Last month’s #1, Parship, fell to #3 with a 64,000 unique visitors in September.

Also of note: In Germany, eDarling and be2 replaced Loomin.de and Bildkontakte.de at #2 and #3, respectively.

Interestingly, many dating sites in Europe saw a general decline in their unique audience numbers during the month of September.

I asked comScore how many people visit dating sites worldwide and they were kind enough to share their latest worldwide number. In August 2009 there were 113 million unique visitors to dating sites around the world. Well there you have it. That's 113 million uniques. To put that number in perspective. That's more than the entire population of England, Spain and Portugal combined.

For more information, visit OnlinePersonalsWatch.com and click on the International Ranking sections, or you can just visit Markslist.com to forward into the rankings.

Over in China, there are more than 100 matchmaking Web sites. However, according to e-commerce site Alibaba.com, less than 10 Chinese matchmaking site have over a million subscribers. China's largest matchmaking site is currently Zhenai.com, which has 20 million registered users. The site’s membership plans range from free to $879 per year. iResearch predicts the overall online dating market in China in 2010 will reach 140 million users, generating approximately 176 million dollars.

Finally, you may have noticed that the Internet Dating Conference has a had a design refresh. Did you also notice the new iDate Awards. Nominations are now open. Members of the Internet Dating Executive Alliance will be nominating most of the companies over the next couple of weeks. You can also nominate companies that you feel are the best in category. There are 11 categories this year. Please go to iDateAwards.com to find out more. I'll be covering this more next week.

This edition of Online Personal Watch’s Weekly News Roundup has been sponsored by Iovation. Iovation, helping the internet dating industry to work together to beat scammers expose cybercriminals and fight fraud with device reputation.

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.