Archive for the ‘Match.com’ Category
Hooking Up With The Last Online Dating Trends
LA TIMES – June 23 - Last week business owners and industry experts
discussed the latest trends and ideas at the iDate 2010 Internet Dating
Conference. We asked Mark Brooks, an industry expert and the event’s
spokesperson, to tell us a bit about what’s going on. Upwardly mobile:
Over the last few years, mobile dating has skyrocketed. (In February,
Whitney Casey, Match.com‘s relationship expert, said that the mobile
members alone grew 250% from 2008 to 2009). More important, Brooks says
users are now willing to pay for it, thus helping the industry have
“moderate growth over the year and looking up for 2012.” Brooks praises
GPS-based dating site Skout, which certainly thought bigger. Called the
HotMap, Skout‘s iPad app gives a real-time rundown of nearby
singles. Brooks also said that dating sites need to “look at other
industries” like movie-theater chain Cinemark, or Starbuck’s. “They’re
there anyway, they might as well form an alliance or bond,” he says. FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES
Are Dating Web Sites Past Their Prime?
THE BIG MONEY – June 27 – Most subscription-based sites have been
battling a downward trend for a while. And since last year, Match.com‘s
traffic has been flat at best. As Techcrunch notes, Match.com does most
of its growing these days by buying competing Web sites, rather than
reinventing the world’s oldest dance. Match.com is also becoming
Yahoo’s official personals service. In the same vein, eHarmony found
itself last summer trying to explain how a 20% increase in
registrations led to a 33% drop in traffic. The numbers suggest that
while singles in search of a match may post a profile, they’re not
finding who they’re looking for. The true threat is “noneconomic”
competition that steals market share and has no interest in selling
out. Markus Frind created Plenty of Fish as a coding exercise in 2003.
Primarily supported by advertising, Frind this year introduced a paid
membership level for users who are “serious,” but the site still has
free access. But as in any good arms race, even Frind is now promising
that his site can predict whom its users will end up marrying, so he is
taking the fight to paid sites’ intellectual turf. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
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See all posts on Plentyoffish
Millions Of Argentines Looking For Love On The Web
LAHT – June 27 - Some 5M Argentines look for a girlfriend or boyfriend
through online dating services, with about 50,000 local users a
day. Argentina has 22% more singles than people who are married or in a
relationship, and, after Brazil, is the Latin American country with the
greatest acceptance of dating over the Internet. Among its 60M Latin
American subscribers, Match.com has 4M Argentines. FULL ARTICLE @ LAHT
