BRANDREPUBLIC -- July 9 -- The UK Public Carriage Office, which
regulates advertising on vehicles across the UK, has banned married
dating website IllicitEncounters.co.
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Mark Brooks: People tell white lies. iDaters should ask 'is your photo up to date' and 'is your profile and marriage status info accurate.' Sometimes profiles can be online a looong time. Users will join and cycle in and out of relationships (and their idating memberships) and neglect to update their profiles. ProfileHelper.com, LookBetterOnline.com and e-cyrano.com help users put their best profile forward. IWantU is dead and dying at this stage. See Compete graph of IWantU. (Full Disclosure: Fling is a client. The Founder of ProfileHelper.com is on the Courtland Brooks team.)
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TIME -- June 29 -- AshleyMadison.com, a personals site designed to facilitate extra-marital affairs, has released an iPhone and Blackberry app. AshleyMadison's membership has doubled over the past year to 4m. Over the past month alone, 679,000 men and women have used the service to contact a cheating partner. FULL ARTICLE @ TIME
INDIAN EXPRESS -- May 27 -- As per the RedHotPie.com.au survey, which drew 8763 responses, almost as many women as men instigate the idea of group sex - 46% compared with 54%. The most common reasons given for group sex are excitement, variety and to spice up long-term relationships. FULL ARTICLE @ INDIAN EXPRESS
CNBC -- May 19 -- Companies spend huge amounts of time and money naming new products to elicit certain emotions. So Mars, the candy company, thought "Fling" would be a good name for a candy bar aimed at diet-conscious women. The bar "tastes indulgent" but has less than 85 calories. "Naughty...but not that Naughty" is the tagline. Women wanting to find out more would probably go online and type in Fling.com right? That would be a mistake. Fling.com sends them to a porn site,"The Hottest Place to Hook Up". Instead, Mars had to settle for FlingChocolate.com. FULL ARTICLE @ CNBC
OPW INTERVIEW -- May 9 -- RedHotPie is a top 10 dating site in Australia. Here’s our interview with the co-founders, Max McGuire and Mark Semaan. - Mark Brooks
What’s your founding story?
Max:
Back in 2002, we had a brainstorm that we wanted to get into the
digital industry. At the time there was a need for online dating in
Australia, particularly with a community feel. Australia was being
serviced mainly by the international products that weren’t speaking
with an Australian voice. We combined our relevant talents in IT, web
development, and sales and marketing, and built RedHotPie.
Tell us more about the Australian voice. How is that different from America and the UK?
Max:
Speaking with an Australian voice means the user is able to identify
with what the site is saying. In particular, we speak about Australian
events or Australian places and in Australian colloquial terms.
Mark: We do offline gatherings, events and parties to get people together and tie the online with the offline aspect.
But you don’t run them yourselves; you let other people run them, correct?
Max:
It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement but yes, we have our party and
event partners, and we support and promote them. We hand pick them.
People approach us and we look at their bonafides and what they’re
trying to achieve with their event, and if it fits the RedHotPie model,
we jump straight in.
So if you get complaints about a particular brand of event or a particular provider then you would tend to pull it?
Max:
Oh absolutely. If there is some problem, we would no longer support
them. It’s a very important aspect of taking the cyber out of your
product and actually having real world events.
I’m intrigued with the name RedHotPie. Can you tell us how you came about the name?
Max: I think everyone would agree that trying to come up with a name is always a challenge.
We
wanted something interesting and quirky. So in the name, the ‘Hot’ part
was more saying that we’re edgy, we’re a product with passion, and the
‘Pie’ part was where we wanted to go with having a community. Get your
slice of the pie, be part of the pie. So we ended up with RedHotPie.
How are you situated against the likes of RSVP? I think they’re still the number one in Australia.
Max: Yeah, RSVP
is a very significant brand name in Australia. They’ve been around the
longest and have been brand building an awful long time. They’re sort
of what we consider to be a little less flamboyant, or you can call it
“vanilla dating”. We like to have a more party feel, a more passion
feel, and then again we’re very much more about this community and
creating the stickiness and the sense of belonging.
How much would say the webcams have contributed to RedHotPie’s success?
Mark:
With the webcam, we focus a lot on the reality aspect of the site. We
started on a small scale and every 6 months we add a bigger pipe for
the room because it keeps on growing. There is a definite shift that
people want to see who they’re communicating with and that it’s real.
Max: And in the Australian marketplace, we were the first with webcam chat where some other Australian based start-ups are still playing around with Java applets and Java chat.
You also have a couple that give advice, Bessie and Geoff. Can you tell us about Bessie and Geoff?
Max:
Bessie Bardot and Geoff Barker are partners in life and they have a
celebrity status in Australia which makes them recognizable to our
users. They’re published authors of books on dating and relationship
advice. Geoff’s last book was “What’s On a Man’s Mind?” which was
directed more towards giving girls some insights into how the male mind
works. It was important for us to have someone our users could identify
with.
You have recently launched in the UK I understand.
Max:
Yes, we went live in the UK in 2007 so it’s fairly recent in the age of
RedHotPie, which is 6 ½ years old now. We’ve spent some time and effort
and considerable money branding the product in the UK. We’re working
towards traction and market share there.
Have you found the Brits to be different from the Aussies?
I
think that most people who are interested in meeting other people, no
matter what their cultures or nationalities are, have the same sort of
desires or requirements, and probably not too different.
IRISH CENTRAL -- May 7 -- Ashley Madison, a Web site that helps people
have affairs is to launch in Ireland with a major marketing campaign
later this year. The site has been in operation in North America since
2001, and membership has gone up from 1m to 3.6m in the past 12 months
– in part thanks to the recession. FULL ARTICLE @ IRISH CENTRAL
MIAMI HERALD -- May 2 -- In March, Ashley Madison claimed annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars and 3.3m users worldwide. South Florida was its sixth-largest market (177k users), behind New York and Los Angeles. The Gender breakdown is 70-30 men-women; 60-40 in South Florida. Americans spent $957m on dating sites in 2008; in 2013, Forrester projects $1.5 billion. February data from Compete show that Adultfriendfinder and Fling logged 37.9m unique visitors, more than the next 12 dating sites combined. Sites like these and Ashley Madison have one big advantage over the competition: ''Their target audience is going to be on the site forever,'' says Mark Brooks, an Internet dating industry consultant. "The typical dating services are victims of their own success. After three months, people bail -- they sign off because they've met someone, or they skip over to another dating site. The people at Ashley Madison have already demonstrated they're not going to be committing any time soon, and they keep on cycling back around. It's a wonderful cash machine.'' ''Sneaky or deceptive is not my cup of tea,'' said Paul Falzone, founder of TheRightOne, and a professional matchmaker for 30 years. "These guys are totally the opposite of what we're about . . . Do you want to spend your life with someone you're compatible with, that you enjoy, or do you want to live a lie?'' FULL ARTICLE @ MIAMI HERALD
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MSNBC -- Mar 3 -- AshleyMadison.com caters to married people looking to have sex with other
married people. Ashley
Madison is hardly unique. It competes with other Web sites that do
exactly the same thing, such as ADatefinder.com. LonelyCheatingWives.com and MarriedDateClub.com. There are 3.4m
profiles on AshleyMadison, 72% of which are
male according to Noel Biderman, AM's founder. To Biderman it's all strictly business. "Blessed with that strain of amoral
entrepreneurialism in which money-making opportunities must be seized,
whether they be cigarettes, sex, or subprime mortgages." FULL ARTICLE @ MSNBC
VALLEYWAG -- Feb 26 -- A
porn star draping boobs over an employee's head. Lapdances on the
company dime. $50m in back taxes. These are just some of the
charges Penthouse publisher FriendFinder Networks is facing from an
ex-employee Natalie Cedeno. FriendFinder filed to go public last year.
It desperately
needs the $460m it hopes to raise in an IPO in order to pay down
$420m in debt. If the company has legal problems and labor
issues beyond what it disclosed in its SEC filings, its executives
could face heavy penalties, and the IPO would likely be scotched.
According to Cedeno, Various operated Adult FriendFinder for seven
years without drawing a single
sexual-harassment lawsuit from employees. FULL ARTICLE @ VALEYWAG
PRESS RELEASE -- Feb 13 -- BeNaughty.com has identified which days of
the year put the most strain on a relationship and found Valentine's
Day caused grief for one in ten couples. New Year's Day was top (53%)
with Christmas (21%) and Birthdays (16%) second and third in the
survey, conducted among 1000 18-55 year olds for BeNaughty.com. The
most cited reason for breaking up was simply falling out of love,
pressure of work, becoming bored of sex with their partner, they met
someone else and financial pressures.
SUN MEDIA -- Jan 29 -- Ashley Madison, the dating service for
cheaters, is crying foul after its Super Bowl commercial was rejected
by CTV without providing any explanation. The commercial itself is
available for viewing at www.ashleymadison.net/canada.mov. "I find the
rejection to be ridiculous given that a huge percentage of the NFL's
marketing content is for products like alcohol," said Noel Biderman,
president of Ashley Madison. FULL ARTICLE @ TORONTO SUN
LA TIMES -- Jan 10 -- Ashley Madison caters to people wanting to have an affair and claims 3.2m members. Noel Biderman, self-described happily married father of two, started the company in 2001. Biderman explained that in hard economic times, a lot of people who've been planning a divorce suddenly cannot afford one. He believes that hearing about the service in a commercial is not going to persuade anyone to have an affair. "It's a decision they've come to already. All I'm saying is, don't do it in the workplace where it could result in someone losing their job, don't go to a singles dating service and lie about your status, and don't hire a prostitute. FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES
CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE REPORT -- Oct '08 -- JupiterResearch predicts the
online dating industry will hit $1.9 billion by 2012, not including
matchmaking services at $250m+ in the U.S. Mark Brooks, who monitors
the personals industry, pegs 2004 as the year when dating sites
matured. "There are less people on dating sites, but they're spending
more money." The CEO of The Right One/Together Dating, Paul Falzone has
been in the business 20 years. "When times are good, people want
someone to share the fun with. When times are bad, they want
companionship."
The Free factor - Free has become a very real factor in the industry, with the emergence of PlentyOfFish.com. POF has more than 10m profiles, and 2m active monthly users. "He's the renegade of the market," said Brooks. "He's making the other players think about advertising money." Frind acknowledges that his $10m in yearly ad revenue has gotten people's attention, but he thinks the traditional dating sites are too invested in the paid-membership model to shift gears.
The Facebook factor - Many in the online dating industry believe social networks will not be a negative factor because SN are for friends and people are posting all sorts of material there they might not want a prospective date to see. But Robert Lee, who has been reviewing dating sites at ALoveLinksPlus.com, believes Facebook is going to figure out how to establish different layers of access, so a user can create a dating-oriented profiles that not everyone can see. As of Oct. 18, Facebook had 497 dating applications.
Different marketing and revenue models - "Personals ads" in newspapers was disrupted by the Internet in the mid-1990s but is being revived with a new focus on Web-first publishing, promoted in print. Another model uses the Web as its operating venue, but drives new customers through heavy advertising in traditional media. Cupid.com makes deals with radio stations to run ads for free in exchange for a share of revenue and claims a conversion rate of 13%. eHarmony and Match spend millions on TV advertising. The typical revenue model is "browse for free, connect for a fee." Matchmaking sites such as Kelleher and Associates, Together Dating and It's Just Lunch have a dual role in the online ecosphere. First, they buy leads from online dating sites, creating yet another line of revenue. Paul Falzone bought LoveAccess.com as a way to generate his own leads. In the 1980s, Falzone's cost per lead was $200-$250 using direct mail. Now his goal is to get that number to zero.
Growth of explicit sites - At the Internet Dating Conference held in London in September, the hallway buzz was all about the explosion in numbers of women signing up for adult sites like Fling.com and AdultFriendFinder. "I'd call it a sexual awakening," said Brooks. "Guys have always been interested in the adult sites, but this is new." The average length of membership on a regular dating site is three months, compared with five months on an adult site.
The future - Mobile and video remain theoretical game-changers,
enabling potential match-ups by proximity or direct communication.
Brooks sees another potential business model emerging from academic
research: a dramatic improvement in the quality of matching.
Full report available for AIM clients
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MYFOX HOUSTON -- Nov 3 -- Ashley Madison, the infidelity dating site,
announced their "Affair Guarantee Program" (sign up for a premiere
package and if you haven't experience an affair to remember within 3
months you get a full refund). The Affair Guarantee radio spot has been
airing in key
markets such as NY, LA, Washington DC, Dallas, Philly, Chicago, and
Houston however it was recently pulled from the Houston station due to
the controversy. Ashley Madison boasts over 2.5 m members and every
20s somebody new joins the site looking to have an affair. WATCH THE VIDEO HERE
PRESS OF ATLANTIC CITY -- Nov 1 -- DeLorenzo runs All State Investigation, an infidelity detective agency. He's also a writer, co-authoring the book "28 Tell-Tale Signs of a Cheating Spouse," and founder of the Web site Infidelity.com. He says society is much more open to extramarital affairs now than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. Noel Biderman agrees about society's growing tolerance for infidelity, so he created an online dating service called the Ashley Madison Agency that caters to attached men and women looking for an affair. Biderman said mainstream dating sites attract a lot of married customers. If people are going to have affairs anyway, why fight it? FULL ARTICLE @ PRESS OF ATLANTIC CITY
Mark Brooks: Infidelity.com is opening their Saudi Arabian office in Jeddah shortly. Sadly, no one will be in attendance from their head office for the opening ceremony.
THE OBSERVER -- Oct 26 -- The web has become a place through which to contact, meet
and have
sex with real people. Some sites are quite explicit about their
offerings.
AdultFriendFinder claims to be the world's biggest adult social network
and sex personals site. The site claims to have more than 2.5m members
registered in the UK. Other sites quite evidently do as they promise,
such as
Hookuparea.com and BeNaughty.com. And when a marriage is under strain,
spouses no longer have to go very far out of their way to cheat.
Illicit Encounters asks on its homepage: 'Married but Feeling
neglected? Illicit Encounters
launched in October 2003 and now has 245,000 members, mostly in the UK.
65% of them are male. The site provides a guide on how to conduct an
illicit affair, with
advice tips including using a separate SIM card in their mobile phone,
paying with cash instead of credit cards and never giving their
surname, exact location or workplace. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK
OPW -- Sep 9 -- AdultFriendFinder and Fling have been running close on traffic for a
while now, but Fling.com just overtook AdultFriendFinder.com for total
traffic according to Compete.com. See graph. I included Match.com to give some perspective on the graph. Fling is up 7.4% for the month with 22m unique visitors, and
AdultFriendFinder is down 3.5% for the month with 21.7m uniques. AFF
has a LOT of momentum, but Fling rides on a very considerable affiliate
network of its own. AFF still has a considerable lead for user
engagement and visits. These collossals of the adult dating world will
be duking it out for a long while to come but without Andrew Conru at
the helm, will AFF be able to maintain a lead? Your comments please.
(Disclosure: Fling is a client of Courtland Brooks).
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