Free World Dating Sites

What is your split between Europe and the US
The majority of our revenue still comes from Europe and predominantly
the UK. So our core territories at present are the UK, Ireland, South
Africa, Australia and the US in that order. We’ve got big plans for the
US but it can easily be a graveyard for companies that don’t approach it
in the right way. So we need to make sure all of our CRM
is localized, the customer experience is localized and everything fits
in. It is important that we recognize that and treat the US as a
collection of different regions, and by regions I mean cities each with
their own attributes rather than do what many people do which is a one
size fits all solution. We won’t be doing that.

You have service in the US right now from my understanding, so are these improvements that you’re working on?
Yes we can absolutely service the USA. I don’t
want to give away too much about what we have in the pipeline other
than to say we realize we need to improve that experience and make it
really a better niche offering. We expect to be able to announce more
about that later this year.

There are two sides to your business. You have the
WhiteLabelDating side and then you have the Global Personals side of the
business. How do you differentiate the two different sides of the
business?
Global Personals is our limited company. People have known us as
WhiteLabelDating up to this point because that has been a massive part
of our business. So WhiteLabelDating is part of Global Personals. It
represents well in excess of 80% of our revenues.

We are a white label dating business first and foremost. However,
since we became the market leader we recognize that we have a
responsibility to help grow and shape the market. That is why we have
our own branded sites for the consumers such as Singles365.com and
DatingAgency.com, which allows us to help direct and shape the market,
which benefits us but absolutely benefits our partners.

When I visited you in Windsor not too long ago you mentioned
that you had been ‘fighting the good fight’ against abuse and scammers
recently and that it had been quite a battle. Tell us more about that.
We made a decision last year to really focus on the quality of our
customer experience. To do that we needed to manually moderate every
profile, every photo, every wink, icebreaker, diary entry and video.
Everything that goes through our system is checked by hand from people
in our offices in Windsor. We don’t outsource anything. It is time
consuming and it’s expensive but it does mean we can give the best
customer experience.

Since we launched our new moderation platform in February of this
year, we were hit in the short term. We found that scammers were
responsible for quite a bit of revenue for dating site operators because
if a scammer emails your member, that member is going to pay to
upgrade. So if you reduce the scammers your conversion rate is going to
be affected. However, we’ve ended this year in July and August with all
of our metrics performing better than they have ever done in our 7 year
history.

In an article recently you said there are some unethical
practices in the internet dating world that need stamping out. Tell us
more, what are they?
I think everyone recognizes that you can go for short term easy money in
online dating. It might get you some revenue in the short term; it
might be okay for 6 months or maybe a year or two. But if you want to
build a successful, long term, valuable business that will be around in
the years to come you have to take an ethical approach to business.

OPW reaches many executives in the industry. What would you like to say directly to the rest of the industry?
For the online dating category to grow, we do need to work together. We
need to, as an industry, clean up our act and invest in the customer
experience. We need to put the customer first rather than our bank
balances. You only do that by working together because one bad apple can
ruin the industry for lots of other people.

Can you see Global Personals ever IPO’ing?
I don’t think that would be on our horizons to be honest Mark. We are a
privately owned company and we’ve grown pretty heavily. We are now at
about 80 staff and when you came to our offices you were able to see
that we’ve grown rather nicely. We’re enjoying that growth and I
wouldn’t rule anything in or out over the next few years. We’ve
certainly got a good 3 to 5 year plan with strong growth ahead of us.
And we are enjoying ourselves in the process.

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