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.