Internet Dating Video News Summaries

Internet Dating Video News Summary #32

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 IDEA.

Zoosk recently made Wall Street Journal’s list of top VC backed companies. The website came in #42 out of 50 and is impressively, the only Internet Dating company to make the list. The rankings were calculated based on the track record of success for the VC investors who sit on the company’s board, the amount of capital raised in the founding executives track record of success, and the recent growth in the value of the company.

AreYouInterested.com’s iphone app has officially breached 100,000 downloads. In addition, the app’s number of user sessions is up 56% in the last two months. Visitors are supposedly spending an average of 23 minutes on the mobile app per day. The app features a complete integration of web and mobile activity, allowing users to communicate in real time with other users who are online at the same time.

The Sex.com domain name is up for auction with bidding starting at $1M! The website name was last bought in 2006 for a reported $14M backed by DOM Partners LLC.

Gotham Dating is offering to pay a full years rent or fund a wedding for any couple that is a member of the site for one year, and has gotten married as a result of the membership.

Moving on, Skyecandy is leading the charge in putting an end to the bad rap of blind dates. The service allows users to sign up for 10 five-minute online speed dates in a row over Skype. The users are matched with partners based on age, basic details, and location. So far, the service has attracted ~18,000 users. Australia and the US appear to be adopting the trend the fastest.

Investors seem to be pumping more and more money into web services that are heavily reliant on Facebook. Smartdate recently secured $2.2M from investors to build its idea of using Facebook data as the basis of a matchmaking service. Facebook in general is due to post somewhere upwards of $1bn in revenue for 2010.

According to research from Packaged Facts, more than six out of ten Black Americans are unmarried. BlackPeopleMeet.com is playing a big role in a solution to the problem. The website has helped introduce tens of thousands of couples. The vast majority of its members are between ages 35-45. Every month, the site reaches 4% of the total black population in the US.

The long awaited results of the Meetic and Match joint-venture in Latina America are in! Meetic and Match have contributed their respective activities on the South American continent to Meetic’s ParPerfeito site, as well as Match.com’s activities in other Latin American countries. Following the deal, Match.com and Meetic each own 50% of the new joint venture’s equity. Match.com will control the entity’s operations.

Device reputation service, iovation, is playing a big part in keeping fraudsters off of the internet. The service has reportedly stopped Over 67,000 instances of spam, over 30,000 scams and solicitations, over 13,000 member profiles misrepresentations, and more than 5,000 cases of identity mining and phishing.

Chinese matchmaking website Zhenai.com boasts 23m registered users and has a sign up rate of 30,000 users a day. According to CEO and co-founder Dr Song Li. The website operates on two matrices: how many of its callers get at least one date with an aim of 93%, and the time is takes between establishing contact and the actual date. This is supposedly within two and a half weeks.

Last but not least, we’ve updated the job listings for the iDating industry again. Head over to OPW1.com and look for the post on March 8th if you’re interested! We also have a few interviews for you to take a look at. To hear Sam Yagan’s thoughts on great hill’s offer for Spark Networks, look for the post on March 11th. You can also find our interview with Founder of Smartdate, Fabrice Le Parc, posted on March 9th.

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

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 #31

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, and messmo Media.

Spark Networks financial stats are in for 2009 and here are the results! Spark Networks revenue for the fourth quarter of 2009 averaged in at $11.1M, with a 16% decrease compared to $13.2M for the fourth quarter of 2008.Revenue for the full year was at $45.4M which also decreased from $57.3M the prior year.

The average paying subscribers for the company, as a whole, in the fourth quarter of 2009 was 168,646, which decreased 5% compared to 177,011 for the fourth quarter of 2008.

The fourth quarter revenue for Jewish networks was $7.1M, at a decrease of 11%. Q4 revenue for general Market networks was $477,000, at a decrease of 63%, and Q4 revenue for Other Affinity Networks was $3.0M, at a decrease of 15%.

PE firm, Great Hill Partners, is currently working on making Spark Networks private. Great Hill initially bought a minority stake in Spark Networks in late 2005, and now owns about a quarter of the company’s stock. Great Hill is offering to buy the shares it does not own in a deal that would value the company at roughly $64M.

Moving on, EasyDate’s numbers are certainly on the rise. EasyDate boasts over 7M members, across a wide range of websites. 1.5M new members signed up in the second half of 2009 alone. According to Bill Dobbie, the company’s chairman, the company recorded £2.8M in profit on a £12M turnover on its last accounts, and expects turnover to reach about £20M this year.

Casual dating website First Affair is also growing at a steady pace. The website has obtained ~900K members so far since its initial launch in 2008.

Just in case you missed the announcement, Smartdate managed to raise €1.7M with European VC 360 Capital Partners. The estimated €2 million amount of seed funding will mainly be used to market the service, as they have an objective of one million users before the end of the year. Smartdate’s intent is to use Facebook Friends as a criteria for dating searches.

SeniorPeopleMeet.com recently launched a new magazine. SeniorPeopleMeet.com Magazine is a free online magazine designed to serve the particular needs of singles within that community. The magazine should enable all senior singles to benefit from the latest dating tips, trends, and topics that are unique to them.

Match.com has officially retired the animated Jack and Jill lovers that have fronted its advertising for the past five years. Their new campaign features a trendy couple who find love singing as an unlikely duet. The new campaign was estimated at around £7m.

Finally, we have a plethora of interviews for you to check out this week! Head over to OPW1.com and look for our interviews with Bradley Boyd, CEO of matrimonial website SetForMarriage, posted on March 8th, Dave Wilkie, CEO of virtual dating service Weopia posted on March 2nd, and CNN’s interview with Jim Houran of OnlineDatingMagazine.com posted on March 5th.

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

iTelebill, the mobile payment specialists for all your online & micro billing requirements.

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 #30

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 sponsored by the Internet Dating Executive Alliance.

Online dating giant PlentyofFish.com is continuing to grow rapidly. The site reported that they have passed 105 million monthly logins just this month, with an average of up to 380,000 emails an hour sent between users. The latest Comscore numbers show that PlentyofFish is bigger than all of Match.com and Meetic properties combined worldwide.

Speaking of Match.com, the website recently signed an agreement to acquire Singlesnet. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. However, Greg Blatt, CEO of Match.com said "while Singlesnet’s traffic is currently in decline, we believe we can reverse that trend, increase the site’s profitability, and improve the overall user experience. Adrian Ong, who joined Match.com from Soulmates Technology, after the company was acquired, will be assuming the responsibility for Singlesnet.

Singlesnet’s traffic is down from over 7 million uniques a month in January of 2009 to 4.5 million a month in January of 2010. Singlesnet has also been rogue-ish in its marketing tactics in the past, so it’s good that Match.com is taking the website under its wing. Perhaps they can polish the site up and make it less of an embarrassment to the internet dating theme.

Moving on, online dating is booming in Germany. According to Nielsen, 7.5 Million German Internet users visited at least one dating site in January of 2010. Parship, Elitepartner, and Friendscout24 accounted for 16.4% of the overall active Internet users in Germany. Friendscout24 spent 39.8M Eur in advertising last year, and acquired 1.1m unique users in January of this year, followed by ElitePartner with 893,000 uniques, and FlirtCafe with 809,000 uniques.

Hot off the press, Smartdate.com has just raised 2.2 million Euros which is the largest seed round we’ve heard of in a while. The sites uses Facebook connect to connect with user profiles, and is headed by industry veteran Fabrice le Parc who previously worked with be2. He launched be2 in France, and Benelux, and worked on a French and a US reality dating show in the past.

While business is booming in Germany, dating site scams are on the rise in Australia. Australians reported losses of ~$70M to fraud and swindling to the consumer watchdog last year. However, real losses could in fact be much higher. Scams linked to dating sites were up by 30%. More than 12,000 people lost between 1 to $10,000. Two Australians actually lost more than $10M.

A new virtual dating service known as Weopia.com just recently launched. The service is intended to over shadow the bad rap of the awkward first date. Singles won’t have to click on Weopia to find a date, they just have to send in their avatars to Weopia to partake in a virtual date, which should help determine their compatibility levels.

Now for hookups and breakups!

LavaLife is being shopped by its owner, online marketer, Vertrue. Vertrue paid $113.9M initially to acquire Lavalife in 2004. Vertrue itself was actually bought out by private equity firms, One Equity Partners, Brencourt Investors, and Rho Ventures for $855M in 2007. Lavalife’s web properties have supposedlly been on the block for about four months.

HerWay.com partnered up with Honesty Online to allow members to share authenticated identity info with other members. The partnership should make it safer for singles on HerWay.com to meet each other in person.

Herway.com isn’t alone in its attempts to protect women. Maryland’s Legislation is trying to pass a Bill that might require men of Maryland who date, or otherwise communicate with foreign women to visit their local police department. If the bill is passed, it would require online dating sites to obtain a copy of police records and fingerprints for men who are citizens of Maryland, and disclose the records to female clients. Violation of the Bill could lead to a misdemeanor. Conviction could result in a fine not exceeding $12,000, or imprisonment not exceeding 1 year, if not both.

Last but not least, Harvard Professor, Michael Norton will be speaking at the Los Angeles Internet Dating conference in June. Norton is known for works such as The Counterfeit Self and The IKEA Effect. His work has been published in a number of leading academic journals, and several media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall street Journal, and the Washington Post. Norton’s presentation at the conference will discuss the advantages of virtual dating in the world of online dating.

This edition of Online Personals Watch’s Weekly News Roundup has been sponsored by the Internet Dating Executive Alliance who are helping the internet dating industry grow and prosper.

That’s all for this week’s news roundup. To check out our interview with Alex Mehr, CEO of Zoosk, head over to OPW1.com. Next up, an interview with the CEO of Weopia.com. 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.