Online Personals Watch

Thomas Enraght-Moony, Match.com CEO – OPW Exclusive

OPW INTERVIEW -- June 8 -- Match.com continues to go from strength to strength. Here’s a summary of key financials from the last three years.xls. Here’s my interview with the new CEO, Thomas Enraght-Moony. - Mark Brooks

The new Chemistry.com TV ad campaign is the most competitively aggressive campaign I’ve ever seen in the online dating industry. Why are you gunning for eHarmony?
Oh I wouldn’t say that Mark. It’s a lighthearted playful campaign based on factual statements that pokes a little fun at our competitors. But I think the broader point is that Chemistry is a product that is built on a value proposition that we call ‘Come as you are.’

The nature of relationships in 21st Century America is changing and we don’t think it’s for us to prescribe to somebody what the right kind of relationship is. We think it’s up to the person looking for a relationship to define what success means for them and that’s one of the underlying philosophical basis’ on which we built Chemistry. We’re very pleased with the results so far.

Earlier this year you introduced a pilot platinum program out of Dallas. How is the Match Platinum program going for you?
We’re very pleased with the early results and we’ve seen good response to this product. One of the things that is tremendously exciting for us is the insight and information that it gives us into our customers. Having someone from Match who is in daily contact with people seeking a relationship is a little different than what we’ve ever had with the online side of the business. So we’re really pleased with the early results and it’s a great source of customer information too.

What major hurdles do you think Match.com, and the market as a whole, will need to go through as you work towards building Match.com into a billion dollar a year company?
When I think about taking Match to being a billion dollar business, I think about doing it in two ways. The first way is we’re going to execute on our current strategy of product innovation based on customer insights.  So whether it’s a service like MatchTalk that we added last year, the Dr. Phil Mind Find Bind program, our platinum pilot, and Chemistry.com, these are all products that are driven by profound customer insight and which are aimed to help us further penetrate the category in the United States. There are over 92 million single people in the US and about 3 million or fewer are paying for some kind of online dating service. I think there’s a tremendous amount of runway ahead of us here in the US market. 

The second area of growth is in the international markets. The recent acquisition of eDodo in China and Net Club in France are examples of how we’re expanding internationally. We’ve got tremendous traction in all of the other countries that we are in as well. 

Do you see social networks as posing a threat or offering an opportunity? And how would you say the online dating and social networking industries might be able to work with each other?
I see the social networks as offering a real opportunity for Match. They bring more people online; they get more people to engage online. They get people comfortable with online. And what we know from our research is that social networks are a tremendous way for people to keep in contact with people they already know. There are huge benefits to being on the social networks. But what we also know at Match is that our only focus is on helping someone find a relationship. We created this industry when we launched Match in 1995 and we give customers the best opportunity to find a relationship that they’re looking for. From the upfront screening that we do with profiles to make sure that the people on Match are real to our advanced matching algorithms. Everyone in this building that comes to work every day is focused on nothing but helping people find the relationship they’re looking for. Match is complimentary to social networks. Social networks are a fast growing acquisition channels for us.

What’s your primary measurement of success right now?
When I talk about how do you get this to be a billion dollar company, it’s about driving more people into the category. That’s the primary metric that I look at for long term success of the business: Are we bringing enough new people into the market with innovative products and services? That’s how I measure our success.

Dr Song Li, SinoFriends Founder/CEO – Video Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- June 6 -- Dr Song Li is Founder/CEO of SinoFriends.com a.k.a. 96333.com, the oldest online dating service in China. He also runs Yeskee.com, one of the leading social networks. Here’s my video interview with Dr Li, the father of online dating in China. See About Us page at SinoFriends. - Mark Brooks

Dr. Li can you tell us more about the site that you run?
I'm the founder of SinoFriends Inc., which operates an online dating site 96333.com. We started about 2 years ago and now we have a database of about 5 million registered users. It's a paid online dating site with a business models similar to business models in the West. It's free to search and pay-to-communicate. Most of our paid users are professionals over 30 years old. We are based in Shenzhen, which is right across the river from Hong Kong.

How much are people paying on the site?
Our price is 999 RMB per year ($140) and we only offer yearly subscriptions. One of the major reasons that we do that is because in China most people don't have credit cards so therefore it's not possible to set up auto renewals, so we offer the annual fee. 

Michael Jones, Userplane CEO - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- June 2 -- Michael Jones is CEO of Userplane and VP at AOL. AOL acquired Userplane last August. Userplane offers instant messaging  and chat tool with text, voice and video capability, for online communities.  A web recorder for users to record voice and video, a site search tool, and a Desktop user presence tool. Userplane has come a long way, and it’s tools are now best in class, reliable and scalable. - Mark Brooks

What are Userplane’s biggest clients to date?
Well looking at network usage overall, we have a few top tenors, PlentyofFish being one. MySpace uses a tremendous volume of our products, Spark Networks uses a tremendous amount, and Date.com. Currently our client base ranges from major brand names down to small, completely unknown websites. There’s around 1,500 clients in our integrated portfolio.

Did you have to customize the Userplane service for many of your clients?
No, they typically use the API driven application as it stands. When clients have specific needs we slate their requests for development for a future release and then we work with them on those timelines. For instance, we’re doing some large media partnerships with companies like NBC that have some specific needs. But in general, everybody works off the same API driven version, which makes it very scalable and very safe for everybody. We have a centralized hosting center that hosts all of our applications in basically the same cluster. So if NBC is using it or MySpace is using it they’re all pulling from the same network. 

What improvements have you made to improve scalability?
We upgraded our network substantially and added a substantial amount of redundancy in the standard application service. We’re now working on opening up a point of presence internationally to diversify some of our bandwidth. We architected quite a bit of our system to be able to deal with large volumes of overflow or unexpected traffic bursts, as MySpace is growing. We implemented a better system to balance out the volume. So if a client starts with us on a 10 connection package and then they suddenly bump up and they’re hitting 5,000 or 10,000 connections we can actually handle that unexpected jump. At this point, we can handle MySpace size traffic and AOL size traffic.

Why are you offering an ad-supported version?
We’re using what we love to term as the “freemium model.” We have premium services, which are not ad-supported, but then we also have free services that are ad-supported. We had so many clients move over to ad-based websites, they were expecting large volumes of traffic growth and they didn’t want to have cost associated with our services. Even a large Userplane client on a premium model may only be paying us $10,000 or $20,000 a month, if they are extremely large. Our hope is to be able to open up a revenue sharing system back to all of our clients and become a key portion of their revenue. That’s what we’ve really been working towards.

What sort of CPM’s rates are you charging for advertising on Userplane products?
Anywhere between a dollar, up to tens of dollars for video ad units. It depends. We have in-house ad sales here that handle a lot of requests and we also work with AOL media groups that take care of monetizing some of our traffic as well.

Can a site customize the kind of ads that will appear on their Userplane services?
Yes. It’s customized automatically through preferences you select in the set up process for the instant install services. If you don’t like particular ads showing, you can email us the ad ID’s you want pulled, or if you want a specific type of category shown you can notify us and we can make sure we’re only showing that category.

What new products and developments do you have in the works Mike?
We just rolled out our integrated user list, which is a new type of buddy list for our integrated clients. That’s pretty exciting. It’s a fun list that shows when your friends are online, or the people you’re interested in are online. The sites that have started playing with it now are seeing substantially longer engagement times for their users, and a better frequency of communication between their users.

We are also pushing out a new version of our desktop application called Userplane Desktop. Originally we saw the desktop application as being a component of IM to allow people to generate IM’s down to the user’s desktop. That’s definitely one feature of it, but we found that the clients that were deploying it most successfully and were getting the most usage out of it were actually using it primarily for alerts to say you have a new email to view, somebody has marked you as a friend, somebody is interested in meeting you, and driving traffic back to their website. This is actually the first product that we’ve ever had that has really driven external traffic back to the website. Most of our products are about increasing user engagement once you’re at the website. So we think this is actually going to be a pretty fundamental shift for us and also really improve our client’s traffic patterns.

Clients so far that have used it have had impressive adoption rates. Its definitely at a point that a lot of the fears that our clients had about users downloading an application are being shown as unfounded. If users love your community they probably will download a desktop application, install it, and be pleased if you tell them, “Hey there’s this activity and you should jump in right now and find your friend” or “You should jump in right now to respond to this message.” I think that’s being welcomed.

Greg Pierson, iovation Founder & CEO – OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- May 26 -- For the last three years at the internet dating and social networking conference I’ve heard requests for a service for sharing scammer IP addresses amongst dating companies. I never quite got around to setting up such a sharing service. Instead, I’d like to introduce you to iovation. They provide a device fingerprinting and and sharing service that goes way beyond the simple scammer IP address list sharing service I’d considered setting up. - Mark Brooks

What does iovation do?
We are the device reputation authority for the Internet. We’re building a real time platform that an online entity can reach out to understand something about the reputation of the laptops, PDA’s, cell phones, the physical devices that consumers use to connect to the web and ultimately to an online service.

The founders of iovation founded a previous business that we sold in 2004 for several hundred million dollars. The technology that under pins what Iovation is doing today was really born in this company.

How does iovation work?
We track every device that is used to connect to an online service and identify that device uniquely in the world, not unique to network A but unique period. When that device, in the future, connects to network B, network C, etc. we will still see it as the same unique device (laptop 101, for sake of discussion).

In addition to identifying devices uniquely in the world, we associate logins to a network to all the physical devices that they ever used to connect to that platform. When an account causes a problem on a network, understanding device to account relationships helps you understand all other accounts and all other devices related to that problem. Now what a network can do is associate the problem that occurred through account Bob but not just stop there. They can then understand all the physical devices that account Bob has ever used to connect to their network. They can then understand all other accounts that have ever used those devices and you can see how this could go from there. Account to multiple devices to multiple accounts to other devices, etc. We are identifying an entire collection of accounts and devices related through common log ins.

Many abusers of online retailers, social networks, and dating services require consumption of massive numbers of accounts. And generally speaking good Internet citizens don’t have that same type of behavior. So far first starters device to account relationships help identify potential problems that require investigation.  More valuable is that we stop the revolving door that exists on those networks. When most networks experience a problem with an account, they simply close the account, the problem is it doesn’t really do anything. So the actual individual behind that abusive account isn’t prevented from coming right back and potentially getting another chair, I mean right back into the network through the same computer and setting up another fraudulent identity and repeating the behavior you’re trying to stop in the first place.

So what we are doing again through this platform we’re building is help organizations to better understand all related accounts and devices and shut them all off and prevent them from coming back and continuing the abuse.

Most important of all, we share reputation; we share the problems that are experienced with physical devices across all of the networks that use our platform. So if a computer is associated with say posting inappropriate content at site A, if in several months down the road that same computer attaches to a different social network, even if that computer has never before connected to that second social network, they will be made aware of the problem that occurred on network A, if they’re both subscribers to our system.  They get to make a better business decision as to what to do. It doesn’t mean they have to deny access, it just means they will be informed of that fact and they get to make a business call.

What industries do you work with? 
We have a strong presence in the gaming industry, so massive multi-player online games.  We’re also strong in financial services and e-commerce/online retail.

How can you help online dating companies specifically?
We have both online dating services and social networks coming to us with different issues but the issues are related to behavioral problems more than financial problems. Those networks, of course, some of them take financial transactions and when there are financial transactions taking place virtually there’s generally a use of financial instruments. So we can certainly help address that problem. (credit card chargebacks, for example).

But the thing that is unique to social networks and online dating services is that some of the abuses taking place there are not finance related, they are behavior related, posting of inappropriate content for example, stalking kids or using a platform to spam other accounts, using a platform to perpetrate other types of fraud against members, the so called Nigerian scam for example. So those types of non-financial related frauds aren’t addressed by many of the other risk mitigation platforms. And while the cost may not be “financial” in terms of actual dollars and cents; it is indeed financial if it affects the reputation of the site—and creates a sense of lost confidence in the safety of the site. This of course then can mushroom, and affect the reputation of the entire industry—so this is more than just an individual network problem; it’s a macro problem facing the entire online dating industry.

So I believe the reason there’s been tremendous interest among social networks and dating sites for what we’re doing is that we happen to have a platform that, in fact, helps stop the revolving door that exists relating to behavioral abuses and behavioral problems of those networks. Our system works the same way for say preventing the posting of inappropriate content at a social network or using a dating site to spam other members as it does when it’s being used by an online retail site to stop the passing of stolen credit cards. Same exact technology implemented in the same exact way, used exactly the same way, it’s just that it’s being targeted to stop one type of abuse in one vertical and a different type of abuse in another vertical but it’s the same platform.  So we’re allowing clients to share the information across multiple industries. And interestingly, we’re seeing very interesting cross-over; namely, a device associated with credit card fraud at a traditional eCommerce site that is trying to establish an account at a dating site. This is potentially very predictive information.

Ultimately, we don’t make the decision as to whether a device is allowed to set up accounts or post content or interact or transact with a site. We allow each of our subscribers to set up rules that are unique to each of their businesses. We follow rules that are unique to our subscribers. That’s a very important distinction.
The other thing that is very important to understand is you don’t have to share to use our service. So we do have, although it’s a very small number,  but a few of our current customers don’t share. That is an option. The catch is if they don’t share they don’t get the benefit of seeing device reputation data from other subscribers..

Can you work with other device print vendors?
Yes, although we haven’t had this come up. We’ve never been asked to do that but we are certainly open to it. What makes us valuable is our reputation authority. We believe that we do device printing as well if not better then anybody else in the world. But the real value of what we are building is a reputation authority. If we had a potential customer that had their own device printing technique or they liked the device printing solution of some other organization, we would be happy to try and incorporate that.

How many devices do you currently have on record?
I believe the current number is 8 ½ million.

Over how many years?
Iovation is in its 3rd year as a company; but the device reputation database was established five years ago (going back to our previous company), and has been growing from there.

What are iovation’s goals for 2007 with the online personals industry?
In ’07 we want to have a marquee subscriber to our service that we can work with as a partner to understand the issues that are unique to that vertical and make sure that we can understand those problems and can work with other social networks as a partner.

This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch

Saïd Amin, World Singles CEO - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- May 24 -- This is the fourth in a series of five interviews I recently conducted on the subject of scamming. Saïd Amin runs World Singles, which includes such sites as ArabLounge.com, EligibleGreeks.com, HyeSingles.com, IranianPersonals.com and SoulSingles.com. - Mark Brooks

What kind of scamming do you encounter on World Singles?
Most of the scammers originate from Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they are increasingly working with people in the USA/Canada. I think that scammers are a big problem for the entire industry. They pose as someone they are not, usually as a very attractive male or female and prey on unsuspecting members This is usually done by showing interest in those members via a flirt/email or by waiting for someone to contact them first. The more aggressive scammers will buy memberships and usually proceed to send a bevy of emails.

Scammer networks have since become more sophisticated. Two years ago it was a lot easier to review profiles and detect them. They have become more sophisticated with how they cover up their profiles. For example, we identify blocks of IP addresses originating from certain countries as high risk and take a second hard look at those profiles. Nowadays we are seeing an increasing number of profiles from USA/Canada based members that are also being logged in from IP addresses in other countries. So it’s essentially someone overseas working with someone in the States who, let’s say, has an AOL or Comcast account, and are working in tandem. It makes it more difficult for us to detect them. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are overseas scammer conferences or published books available on the black market that cover scamming 101 tips and strategies.

How serious is this scamming issue?
How serious? Every dating site is plagued by scammer activity; some sites and niches attract more scammers than others. I think one scammer is one too many. Singles are bravely taking ownership for their journey, posting a dating profile and putting themselves out there in the hopes of increasing their chances for finding a romantic partner. Members who join dating sites are trusting us to help them find a partner in a safe environment. Scammers, work to undermine this trust with our brand and the dating industry as a whole.

I agree and that’s my next question actually, what kind of effect do you think it has on the industry for the long term?
It hurts the industry but it is also an opportunity because it increases the value of the companies who diligently invest time and energy to ensure a safe space for singles to meet. I think that a lot of sites in the dating sector are not responsible enough in how they address scammers as far as educating their members and being transparent when scammer emails are sent and read by unsuspecting members.

When catching a scammer we suspend their profile, remove the messages that they sent and replace them with a message explaining that they have received an email from a person/scammer who is posing as someone he/she is not. There’s certainly a PR hit when this occurs; a member may have invested time emailing back and forth and now the site is recommending that they cease all communication with this individual whom we suspect to be scammer. Talk about taking the air out of a balloon of someone who may have been really excited at his or her initial communiqué with a member. Some members appreciate our proactive nature, but generally speaking there’s still a PR hit. Nevertheless, I feel that this is a responsible way to address such cases. I rather be up front with our members rather than brushing it under the rug and let our members continue emailing back forth on or off the site and risk getting scammed out of money, time, and emotions.

What else are you doing right now to combat scammers?
We double check every membership sold and review screened profiles with high risk IP addresses a second time. The same applies to profiles that have been accessed by multiple IP addresses.  There are some internal tools that we use to help us and are looking to companies like Iovation for additional measures to assist us in eliminating scammer activity.

What time does scamming take from your day?
It takes up time and resources. From dealing with charge backs, reviewing IP addresses, profiles, double checking the profile/billing details for sold memberships etc., we spend a few hours each day on this.

How do you think the industry can work together to combat scammers?
The idea has been floated around by others, but it would be great to have one company that specializes in cleaning out databases or one place where all dating site operators can share banned IP addresses, email addresses, pictures, nicknames, etc. Doing so would behoove dating operators, the dating industry as a whole and most importantly, help protect our members.

What do you think the industry would pay?
I can’t speak for others but we are open to spending a good chunk of money for a service that would help fight scammer activity. The price points for such services should be determined by their value, as defined by a decrease in charge backs and overall effectiveness in catching paid/non paid scammers. Preventing scammers from joining our niche dating sites is of utmost importance and something we take pride in addressing on a daily basis. I have a responsibility to protect our members from scammers and while I’m probably not going to bat 100%, I’m striving for 100% nonetheless.

Abe Smilowitz, Webdate COO - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- May 21 -- This is the third of five feature interviews on the topic of scamming. Abe Smilowitz is COO of WealthyMen.com, Fling.com and Webdate.com. - Mark Brooks

What kind of scamming do you encounter across Fling.com and WebDate.com and WealthyMen.com?
Like with every other dating site, it’s an issue that we’re always combating. The two types of scamming that occur are end user scamming and webmaster scamming.

The end user scamming is usually individuals that are coming in primarily from foreign countries pretending to be either attractive women, primarily, or attractive men. They chat and email back and forth with individuals and gain their trust. Then they ask for money or favors or any sort of particulars, but it’s primarily money that they’re looking for.

We obviously try to combat those fraudulent users by having several self reporting tools on the site where other users can report scammers with fake pictures, people that have solicited them for money or solicited them to go to other sites and that sort of thing. We feel that the best method is having the users self report because when you’re doing thousands of sign ups a day it becomes very difficult to manually scan every single sign up and follow what they’re doing.

Some of them are actually quite good. They use authentic photos and they write a full profile or copy someone else’s profile and it seems like a real person. We have users also that work for us that are surfing the site and use the site themselves and chat with other users and kind of get a feel for it and some of them have actually been duped by some of the scammers. They’re chatting and they think that it’s an attractive young woman and they’re talking back and forth for a week and then she comes out with, “Oh I need $200 for my mother’s operation.”

I don’t know if there’s a fool proof way to get rid of them 100%. I think the best way to do it obviously is to have people actively monitor the site, use the site, have the users self report and have a no tolerance policy where if someone’s doing that, a moderator will go and check out the profile, check out the series of emails or chats that they’ve sent back and forth and if it’s found that they are partaking in that kind of activity, they’re automatically disabled and we disable their IP address if possible.

Have you noticed that the number of incidents of scamming increasing or is it level or declining?
I know that it has actually decreased on our site because once we figured out that this kind of activity was going on we’ve actively been pursuing it and monitoring it. We do various types of IP monitoring. We banned several countries from using the site. That’s really the best way to try and get rid of these guys. That in conjunction with moderators and active users reporting back to our customer service and letting them know, “Hey this particular person is a scammer,” or, ”this profile is a bad profile,“ and we go in and police it.

How serious of a problem do you think it is for the industry as a whole?
I don’t think it’s a problem that’s going to destroy the industry but I think that it’s definitely a problem and I think it’s going to continue to be a problem. The only real way to prevent it 100%, I guess, would be to set up some kind of police state where you would have the government run some kind of check on you to make sure you are who you are.

I think that it’s going to be a problem and I think the industry needs to do the best that they can to combat it. It would be good to have obviously some kind of sharing of information because I’m sure there’s other sites and other executives at sites that have figured out different methods of combating it. I’m sure I’ve thought of things that other people haven’t.

The pooling of ideas is always a good thing and would help the industry as a whole but I think it’s always going to exist on the sites and the best you can do is try to educate the users about it.

Anyone that’s asking you for money, you should really obviously never give them money unless you’ve met the person, you know the person and you feel comfortable doing that. But someone you don’t even know, you never met and you’ve just been chatting with them online for a week or so, I don’t think it would be a good idea to send them cash. I think a lot of this really comes down to the users level of responsibility and common sense about what they’re doing. I understand that some of these users are lonely and at weak points where they’re looking for someone to talk to.

It’s a difficult problem and I think the users need to be more aware of it and need to be a little more standoffish and never divulge financial information or give any money to anyone on a community site.

What can the industry do as a whole?  Have you tried reaching out to other sites to share the IP addresses of scammers, for example?
No, I personally haven’t but I think that would be a good idea. I think it would need to come from an independent source. I don’t know that it would necessarily make sense for me as a site owner to go ahead and contact some of my competitors and go through that. I think that it would probably be more credible if it came from a third party independent source.

Do you know of any providers of such a service?
No, I don’t know of anyone that actually does that.

How high on the priority list should it be for the industry to try and eradicate scammers?
I think that it’s something that should be high on the priority list to heighten the credibility of our sites. You want to obviously give your users the best experience possible and you want the site to work for them.  I mean, what are they going to your site for? They’re going there to meet another person and have either some kind of friendship or romantic relationship with another individual that meets the criteria of what they’re looking for. Your end goal is to achieve that for users. Obviously, when someone is tricked and cheated at their most vulnerable time, that’s not a good experience for users, and that’s not the type of reputation site owners want to have amongst users. So I think it’s a very important issue.

Kevin Greene, AnotherFriend CEO - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- May 18 -- Kevin Greene is the CEO of Ireland's leading internet dating site, AnotherFriend.com.  This is the second of five OPW interviews on the subject of scamming in the internet dating industry. - Mark Brooks

What kind of scammers do you normally encounter in Europe and Ireland?
Firstly, someone dies and they have stashed away $30 million and if you send over some money they can transfer the money into your account and you get 50%.  These scammers will send messages to hundreds and hundreds of members. The second is the Russian angle. A girl develops relationships with a number of men on the site and basically tries to scam them for cash. “I’m trying to get my ticket to come over to Ireland and I don’t have enough money for the ticket,” etc.  Those are the main two types of scams that we’ve come across.

Is scamming a serious issue?
For us, we probably catch it pretty quickly and if we don’t catch it pretty quickly our members will let us know. It’s more of a problem for customer support when we get a 100 emails in from our members saying that somebody is scamming. It’s also an issue if we catch a scammer and delete their emails.  Then we have members saying, “I got a notification that I had this email in my inbox and its not there, where is it?” So from customer support point of view, it’s a lot of time but if we can catch it quickly it saves that problem.

Is it affecting your site’s reputation?
To a certain extent. Where we have some problems is in chargebacks because scammers will generally come in and pay straight away, then we get chargebacks. Obviously, we lose money and we get kind of fined for the chargebacks. Our gateway only allows so many chargebacks before they could possibly cut us off. That’s a big, big issue. Probably about 50% of the chargebacks tend to be from scammers.

So you could half your charge back rate if you didn’t have any scammers?
Yes. We would catch a lot of them but sometimes they actually come in and set up an account and upgrade and leave it for a month or two before they actually do anything with it. So it’s very hard to catch them at that stage.

Generally speaking what are you doing right now to combat scammers?
We have a number of different things that we’re doing. We block IP address based on location. Our membership primarily comes from Ireland and a certain percentage from the US, the UK, and Australia. We block pretty much the whole of Africa, Russia and a few other places. That certainly has reduced our chargebacks by 80%. Now people still get through because they could be in the US or whatever, which is a bit harder.

The other thing we do is we scan for certain keywords in the mail and if it matches the criteria we’ll stop the mail. The mail will never be sent but the person sending it thinks it is. They can see everybody but nobody can see them. I know a number of sites that are using that system and I would say it’s pretty common in the industry. If they’re in the ‘ghost table’ and they try to make a payment a page will just keep saying the card was rejected. We also have triggers. If an extreme amount of mail is being sent by a particular user. If its over a certain number of emails in a certain time period it rings an alarm bell somewhere.

What would you save if you could eradicate scamming?
If we had no system, it would be a lot of revenue. We have a pretty good system in here at the moment very few get through. What I would worry about is the problems that we would have with Mastercard or Visa.

How can the industry work together to combat scammers?
One is educating the users, but the problem with educating them is you don’t want to scare them either, especially if they’re new to online dating. I think it’s important that your customer service is pretty much on the ball and you have systems in place that minimize scamming activity. I think it would be great if there was a central resource whereby the industry as a whole got together. But the problem is anyone I’ve talked to is very secretive about what they’re doing. Personally, I reckon everyone’s doing the same thing but no one’s saying what they’re doing. It’s kind of surprising that people still fall for scammers. It happens though.

Nelson Rodriguez, Love Access CEO - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- May 16 -- Scammers are a proverbial pain in the neck for internet dating and social networking companies. Over the next ten days I’ll list five interviews on your least favorite subject matter.  These will be slow news days while I’m at the Asian Internet Dating Conference. Nelson Rodriguez is CEO of LoveAccess, along with TogetherChristian.com and MatchRanger.

What kind of scamming do you encounter?
Primary scamming comes in three flavors. The first flavor is the typical Nigerian Ghana. Over the last 6 months to a year, they’ve changed tactics. They say they are either a traveling businessman and they’re overseas or they’re a young girl overseas. They befriend people and instantly fall in love with their target. Then there’s the tragic event that occurs. Their mother’s very sick back in the States and they don’t have enough money to go travel back or they were coming home from work and they were mugged and had their rent money stolen and they’re going to be thrown out by their landlord.

The second set of scams is where they’re basically trying to find targets for mail drops. The scammer will make up some story where they are traveling abroad and they have an important package, something happened (e.g. their laptop failed) and they need to get it delivered, and they need someone they can trust that can sign for it and forward it over to them wherever they are. (The merchant ships the laptop before discovering the purchase was made off a stolen credit card. The forwarder sends the laptop on to the scammer in Nigeria, etc. The forwarder may be liable for the laptop).

Then there’s the Russian mail order bride scammers, which fall into two distinct groups. There’s the one set where a girl will string “x” number of men along at one time, befriend them, talk to them on the phone, instant message them, then  the tragic event occurs where they need some financial assistance. Then there’s actually a second set which is quasi-legitimate. There are actual dating agencies in Russia who charge top dollar, I mean ridiculous amounts of money, for these Russian women to find them American men. So basically the girl comes down to the dating office and signs up for whatever service and the agency then goes and floods all the dating sites with their profiles to get the correspondence going immediately to their Yahoo or Hotmail addresses. So the girl pretty much doesn’t know anything about where this person was contacted. They go to the office, because most of them don’t even have computers, open up their Hotmail account and they correspond back and forth. So the dating agencies in Russia use our dating sites to basically spam everybody to try and get a few leads for these girls.

The majority of scammers are just looking for money. And then the other form of abuse we encounter, which is not a scam per se but still a problem for us, where our site is used for credit card verifications. What happens is, they want to buy something at a Best Buy or Circuit City or something and these guys need to make sure that when the transaction goes through its perfect the first time around. So they’ll basically just run credit cards on us first before they go make their big purchase. This is a problem for us. We end up voiding the transaction if we catch it in time but the sad part is there’s no mechanism to be able to report to Visa or Mastercard or Amex that this is a very suspicious transaction and we believe that this credit card could be compromised. There’s no recourse for it. So there is no repercussions for them to use us. That’s really problematic because if we get enough of those we could lose our merchant account.

Have you encountered much in the way of affiliate scamming?
There’s always some scam they’re trying. And even the affiliate scamming guys have gotten really, really good. Before they would just go at it with a brute force method and all of a sudden make 500 accounts in one day. Now they’ll make 2 or 3 accounts every day and they’ll spread them out over the day. The CPA’s that we have to pay these days is very significant. Any affiliate program we use we pretty much have to assume we’re going to have to write off 10% to 15%.

Is that worthwhile for them?
Yeah I mean look if you make 10 profiles a day you know its $40 a day in commissions times 30 and, especially overseas, $40 a day turns into a lot of money. So like I said it’s not that hard, it takes a matter of 2 minutes to make a profile and they’ve gotten very, very, very good at doing it.

How much worse has scamming gotten and how serious of an issue is it?
I don’t think the levels have really changed much. It’s always been just a part of the business that you deal with. But as a percentage of the business as a whole it’s actually very small. You figure maybe 5% or even less of the profiles are fraudulent but that small percentage causes a lot of headache because in order to catch the 5% you have to scan the 95% to make sure everything is good and that’s what adds to all the operational overhead that we get. It’s very frustrating to catch that 5%.

Beyond the financial effects the scammers have, how do they affect your site’s reputation?
Oh it’s terrible. People send us customer service emails, ‘well I’m thinking about upgrading but I don’t know if this person is real or not.’ It’s not good for a business if the consumer isn’t confident what they’re getting is legitimate. Then it becomes very problematic because let’s say the person upgrades and then we catch the scammer, they’ve upgraded and the account they were trying to contact is basically banned, and these people are frustrated. They get very upset and then question anything and any kind of contact throughout the whole site. It leads to a full loss of confidence. If you’re getting let’s say five emails today and three of them are coming in from scammers, any reasonable person is just going to assume that all of them are fraudulent and basically you’re going to sign off the site. It hurts both sides and ultimately we’re the main losers here. It’s definitely a big problem.

We’re offering matchmaking services and doing background checks and that’s been very, very effective in keeping the scammers away. Most of them won’t come through but a couple of them have tried. They still try. They’re very, very aggressive and they’re always looking for new creative avenues.

You have to remember one thing with these guys, this is how they make their living. They have nothing to do all day long except try to figure out how to beat the system, work around it, and look for any holes in the armor. So they have every single advantage while we’re at a complete disadvantage. I’m focused on building services and quality into the site, not trying to figure out how to stop scammers.

How much time does it take from your teams day?
We have one person who manually reviews each and every single credit card transaction. And then we have a couple of people that review every single profile that comes through the system. Like I said, as they get better they slip through. You can only be so proactive and then you have to be reactive and wait for customer feedback. They’ll say, “Hey there’s something with this profile, check it out.” And then you can go in there. We’re always at a disadvantage waiting to react rather then trying to nip it in the butt before it becomes a problem.

How can the industry work together to combat scammers?
We could have some sort of common database that we can run like a hash on say an email address and IP address or something and compare it against the database and say, this IP address and this email address have made 40 accounts on 20 different dating sites today. But still it’s a lot of work. While valuable who wants to spend the money and time to do it.

How high on the priority list should it be for the industry to stamp out this problem?
It’s a daily priority for us. It’s built into operations. Like I said if it affects 5% of the business it’s not that ‘big’ of a problem. But is it a top priority? Of course it is, it always has to be. We have to work Saturday and Sundays because those scammers realize that on the weekends we were staffed less. So they would start working much harder on Friday nights and Saturday mornings to try to get some mileage out ahead of us, until Monday morning. We had to put on weekend people.

Frengo SVP, Dan Mosher - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Apr 14 -- Frengo is a 'Social Play Network.' It's MySpace on the go, with some fun bells and whistles. I talked with Dan Mosher, SVP Ops (formerly of Intermix/MySpace) - Mark Brooks

Dan can you tell me what is Frengo, why is it unique and why do people need it?
Frengo is a company that we put together where we created a set of games and text message services. The games revolve around sports and celebrity themes and popular culture themes. And the services revolve around the theme of bringing together groups and connecting groups and providing fun and interactive experiences for groups.

We put together a set of services and games that really connect people, provide fun entertainment vehicles and really bridge together some of the social networks that are online today with people’s mobile phones. I think people need Frengo because it makes your phone a lot more useful and allows you to share and compete and connect with friends, and within groups of friends in ways that you could never do before with your mobile phone.

Please see full interview at MobileDatingWatch.com

Baihe CEO, Jason Tian - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Mar 31 -- Baihe.com is China's 'eHarmony.' Baihe received funding last year from Mayfield's partner in China, GSR Ventures. They received $11 million of funding in 2005 after attracting 5 million free members. I interviewed Baihe.com's CEO, Jason Tian. - Mark Brooks

How and why did you start Baihe.com?
When Myspace started there were many companies similar to it in China and none of them had a revenue model. We found most users are actively seeking dating relationships, so we wanted to do something in the dating area and we wanted to be more focused. Then we researched the other online dating models and services and we found the eHarmony personality test based model to be the most effective, so we decided to do something like that. Then we launched Baihe.com in May of 2006. In Chinese, Baihe has three meanings: “one hundred years happy marriage”, “100% match”, “lily flower”.

How is it going so far?
We are the first in China to launch that type of service and we executed correctly so we’re growing very fast.  We have more than 8 million users to date.

It’s a free site, isn’t it?
We have tried to collect membership fees for some time but we found that in China the online payment system is very weak, so out of ten people who want to pay only one can pay successfully. If we charged now it would delay our growth. In China, at this stage, online dating is in its early growth stages. So we decided to offer our service for free, and this should help us to grow fast.

In late 2006, we launched a VIP service offering for busy professionals. We trained love consultants to serve them, to filter and verify identification of potential candidates and to help them in communicating with each other. In Q2, 2007, we are planing to launch more automatic value added services which will generate revenue for Baihe.

How is Baihe.com most different from eHarmony?
eHarmony is a paid service and we offer a free service. We also offer search for the users. eHarmony doesn’t allow their users to search but we allow Baihe users to search. Also, we sponsored top psychological research centers in China to develop a personality test and matching system for Chinese people.

What do you think are the main differences between the Chinese online dating market and the American online dating market?
In the Chinese market, I think the people treat marriage more seriously in general. We have a lot of users that are seeking serious relationships and they are in their early 20’s. For girls, maybe after 25, they are very seriously seeking a husband. I suppose in the U.S., and on eHarmony, users will be about 30 but in China the age will be younger than in the U.S.

The second difference is, the serious online dating market in the U.S. already has 10 years of history. But in China there isn’t a dominant player in the market. We only started to enter the market last year, so we’re in the very early stages in China.

Have you ever considered offering your site in English and reaching out to the American market like Asia Friend Finder?
For us, we think the China market is large enough. Secondly, we don’t think we understand the U.S. market well. Compared with eHarmony, we haven’t found any competitive advantage besides the cost. Maybe our R&D cost is much lower than eHarmony. We can translate our website into English and launch in the U.S. but we don’t know how to market in the U.S.  English is not our priority at least for the next two years.

Is Mobile Internet Dating big in China?
Yes. There are 400 million mobile phone users. This year there are 80 million new users in China, so we also launched a mobile service several months ago and we have around a half million users now. They are very active.

What do you hope to achieve through the end of 2007?
We want to establish our revenue model. It is our top priority for 2007, and to break even by the end of 2007 is our goal. 

Lavalife CEO, Marina Glogovac - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Mar 23 -- Marina Glogovac is the new CEO of Lavalife. Here's my recent interview with her... - Mark Brooks

What's your background Marina?
I moved to Canada from Belgrade, ex-Yugoslavia in 1987 where I had just completed a degree in Comparative Literature and worked as a free-lance journalist and writer. When I moved to Toronto I  began my career in the advertising industry. From there, I found my way into ad sales and publishing; my first such job was with Toronto's alternative news weekly, NOW Magazine. 

I spent the next several years with NOW, growing and expanding it and launching other alternative news weeklies and ventures such as the North by Northeast (NXNE) music festival and conference. During that time, Lavalife was an advertising client of mine, though at that time they were strictly operating their IVR Telepersonals system, known today as Lavalife by Phone. While at NOW I earned a Master in Organizational Learning and Change with a focus in Strategy Development from the University of Toronto.

I continued my career in magazine publishing, and worked on a variety of media outlets as well as events. Over the next 10 years, I oversaw the development of some of Canada's best-known media brands.

After I left the magazine world, I worked with CueBall, a U.S.-based consultancy to the international media and entertainment industries. In 2004, I did some strategy consulting work around direct marketing as well as ad sales for Lavalife.com which ultimately led to a full-time role with the firm, overseeing the company's online dating website. It was one of the first Internet dating sites to emerge and has been a leader in the industry since its inception. After joining this incredible team and working with them to expand the company's vision and services, I assumed control of other revenues streams and was named Chief Executive Officer in October 2006.

How is Lavalife differentiated in the online dating market?
Lavalife is more than a web-based business. We operate products and services on three consumer platforms or channels. The first is our voice business, Lavalife by Phone, launched in 1987. Actually, Lavalife invented technology-based dating. We have recently transitioned our voice business onto a VoIP-based platform, enabling us to acquire additional voice customers via web-based fused applications and earning a prestigious award for technical innovation from the Canadian Information Productivity Awards along the way. The second platform is our Web platform, Lavalife.com. The third platform is our Mobile platform, Lavalife Mobile, which is where we've focused much of our attention on this past couple of years. We are currently the North American Mobile dating leader with half a dozen mobile-based chat and entertainment products, and this will continue to be a high growth zone for us.

One of the key things differentiating Lavalife from its competitors is its strong brand. It is one of the most recognizable brands in Canada and is similarly well-established in most large U.S. cities and in Australia. Most dating sites do not have a brand. We have invested heavily in the development of the Lavalife brand over the last few years and we have developed a brand that resonates with downtown, cosmopolitan, liberated, open-minded, youthful singles. Brands are complex and highly valuable assets. The Lavalife brand is more about casual dating and celebrating singlehood. In the world of an abundant Internet universe with low barriers to entry and low differentiation due to new programming languages and other technological advancements, brand and branded content will continue to be important to consumers, suppliers, partners and other stake holders.

We have also been broadening the scope of our business through the development of new content. We recently launched LavalifeMagazine.com, which has received an incredibly positive response from both advertisers and, most importantly, from our members. The magazine has myriad regular features, including an interactive column titled the Profile Doctor. Every day, our members submit dozens and dozens of profiles to be evaluated and edited by our experts. We have recently acquired a ring tones company. Both of these new developments add additional content and services that help not only connect but engage and entertain our members and also attract a new audience and users to Lavalife.

We're especially lucky to have diverse and synergistic revenue streams, ranging from our different platforms, our broad product offerings, as well as advertising revenue. This is a key difference between Lavalife and almost all of our competitors, who are singularly focused. 

Another differentiator for Lavalife is our highly successful Event series, which takes the online dating experience "offline" and allows us to come face-to-face with singles. For the past year, we have hosted monthly Flirt with Flavor events in Miami, Boston, New York and Chicago in some of the hottest, new clubs in partnership with Absolut Vodka. The events were a huge success. We also recently launched a large event series in Canada this fall called Click-at-a-Flick. I attend as many of these events as possible, because it allows me to see first-hand what singles are up to and to get to know our users – which I love.

How are you seeing the online dating and singles industry evolving, in your favor?
So much is happening in the world of online dating. The shifts have been quite similar to any new media or communication channel that first emerges, and then matures, expands, niches and fragments. The activity and the growth is fueled by an enormous increase in the time consumers spend on the web – not just younger people, but also the 40+ age group as well.

The Internet space and the online dating industry is very fluid. When an industry initially develops, there is usually one dominant business model. However, any industry will begin to diversify creatively and become more in tune with consumers – it's a type of collaborative learning together that is especially fast on the Internet. As the industry segments and matures, it diversifies its offerings and it develops deeper, more specific and nuanced bonds with its consumers

To that extent, we are seeing rapid popularity of free, ad-revenue based websites. This is supported by ever increasing online marketing budgets of advertisers. I believe that both free and paid models can co-exist, and that the emergence of the free model does not mean the demise of the consumer paid model. Consumers know the difference between the two and will view them differently. They may in fact have different expectations from each. I think it's safe to say that both models will find their place, and as the Internet continues to grow, there will be a greater variety of business models and their hybrids.

There are other trends developing in the online dating industry. We see more performance advertising and brand advertising on online dating sites. I think we will see more sites make a concentrated effort to bring in synergistic brand advertising that may be viewed as adding value to the member experience. 

Another trend is niching. I think the industry is evolving in this direction, and I think all sorts of niche strategies and niche communities will emerge. 

There are opportunities in Mobile dating. I believe the mobile web will grow to be even more important than the PC web. Everything that has to do with mobile will continue to grow exponentially for many years to come. Lavalife has been focusing on mobile and entertainment during the past couple of years and today we market half a dozen mobile-based chat and entertainment products.

What does the future hold for Lavalife?
With our historical product, marketing and technological know-how in all three consumer channels – and with the firmly established convergence of these channels in the market – we are in a great position to use this to our advantage going forward. We are currently working to introduce several exciting new products and services. I'll be back to fill you in and to talk specifics closer to those launches – but stay tuned for exciting new things for Lavalife.

Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Feb 23 -- Kathryn Lord is a romance coach and writes for Yahoo Personals. Example 1,  2,  3.  She has written a book for baby boomer women and a book to help singles expand their social circles by hosting parties. She met her husband on Match in 1997, so she's walked the talk. She knows the ins and outs of online dating and provides great advice to her clients. Here's her story... - Mark Brooks

Kathryn, how did you become a romance coach?
I signed up for Match back in 1997 and met my husband there in 1998. I've been a psychotherapist for almost 30 years and I decided to get training in coaching and settled on romance coaching. I thought that it was something that people really needed. When I was doing online dating, I didn't know anyone who was doing it, nothing had been written about it, and it was pretty scary. So I was convinced that online dating could be better and easier and that I could help. I started in romance coaching in January 2002.

What is a typical client?
I would say my most typical client is a female and over 40. Although I'm having more and more men get in touch with me now, particularly around writing dating profiles. I do profile reviews and work ups for people, and romance coaching. I've worked with people as young as their mid-20's through early 70's.  My average client is between 40 and 60 and female.

What kind of income do they have?
I think that one of the difficulties of that population is that the women do not tend to have as high an income as men. Their earnings are around $40,000 on up. I have some clients who are fairly wealthy.  But, people want to find a partner so badly that they pull together the money that they need to, to be able to afford my services.

How long does a typical client work with you and what sort of hourly rate do you charge?
Almost all my work is done by phone. I have clients everywhere. My fees start at $75 a half hour and people buy them in packages, usually packages of four, so that's $300 up front. I do profile work ups for $99. When people sign up for four sessions of coaching I will do the profile work up as a part of that first package. Some people I've worked with for as long as a year to a year and a half, but sometimes people just need a little profile work or some help figuring out the mechanics of dating. Mostly clients stay with me 6 to 9 months with some intense work at the beginning tapering off as they get their feet under them. I will keep in contact with folks until they've found their partner.

When your clients first approach you, typically what dating services are they using?
I always recommend the big dating sites. My favorites are Match.com and Yahoo Personals. I usually suggest to folks that they pick one of those two and then if they have some other sub interest like they're looking for someone who is Christian or Jewish or vegetarian, maybe one of the smaller sites. E-Harmony as a third and maybe JDate. 

Have you worked with any dating sites?
I think I was the first romance coach that had the experience of marrying through a dating site myself. I have the added experience of 30 years of psychotherapy work and have spent the last 5 years really learning this niche. I've approached Match.com a couple of times, and Yahoo Personals connected with me a year ago. I write for their online magazine.

I have one book already out called, Find a Sweetheart Soon – Your Love Trip Planner For Women which I wrote for those aged 40 to 60. I have another book coming out about how to build a social circle by entertaining.

How can people improve their chances on online dating sites?
I have recommended getting new pictures to every single one of my clients and virtually every single one of them has resisted. I always recommend them to LookBetterOnline.com. I think they do a fabulous job and give a fabulous price. I have a hard time understanding what the resistance is to getting a good picture, but that's the biggest one, bad pictures.

Secondly profile essays are usually poorly written. I did a job for this fellow the other day told him his profile was too sexy. Women understand that sex is part of dating but they don't want to see it in the essay. Men put too much sex in the essays. Women don't want to see that.

Then, the spelling and grammar errors. Frankly. I'm cleaning up their profiles and getting the "I's" out.  People talk about themselves too much and they need to ask questions and engage the reader.

What should dating sites do to make their services easier for matchmakers to use?
I would make them all searchable in the same way. As a romance coach, I find it very difficult to go from one site to another and figure out how to find things. I would like to see a uniform platform. It would make it easier for the coaches. Secondly, weed out the scammers. I think that would be reassuring for daters. How do you spot a scam?  I'm going to do some writing about that. 

Perfect Match CEO, Duane Dahl - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Feb 16 -- To join eHarmony users have to take the personality profiling test. All 436 questions. Only one other (top 20) dating site makes all new members take a personality profile -  PerfectMatch. Here's my interview with Duane Dahl, the CEO. I also interviewed Duane in June 2005. - Mark Brooks

I was floored when I saw Dr. Phil with Perfectmatch.
Last year after Perfectmatch was featured on Dr. Phil, it gave us a unique opportunity to develop our relationship with the Dr. Phil people, and spend some time getting to know them. We were interested in pursuing a partnership arrangement, however, at the end of the day, it didn’t pencil out. Eventually, the Match folks constructed a lucrative deal for him – I’m not sure how that’s penciling out for them at this point.

What new TV and movie placements do you have in the works?
We’re always looking for significant seamless integration in TV and film. It’s an ongoing process. We’re in development on a prime time series we’re very excited about. On the film side, we have a couple of projects, one late summer, and one in the fall that we’ll be announcing shortly. Additionally, we’ve got some ideas for 2007 regarding developing creative partnerships. We had great success with Whirlpool in 2006, with a series of events. Currently, we’re working with the Case Foundation (Steve and Jean Case) participating in a “Get Engaged” volunteer program we’re promoting in February.

Why do you like these placements better then Internet advertising?
I wouldn’t say we like them better. We certainly think there’s a significant value in performance-based online partnerships and well placed online media. Add that to the search mix, our keyword business with the Google folks and Overture, and we like the blend online. It’s an important part of our business.

When we first started looking at television opportunities, we were really trying to be creative and gain as many impressions as possible. We were on a very limited budget, as we were rolling out the site. And, as we experienced with the Lifetime original movie “Perfect Romance” and then the Warner Bros. summer hit, “Must Love Dogs”, the right opportunities with seamless integration can be fantastic. The key with the entertainment integration opportunities is just to be selective and make sure there’s a perfect match.  We feel fortunate we’ve had some great studio partners and noted success.

Have you searched out any newspaper deals?
No, that hasn’t been our focus. We’ve really focused on larger scale online partners, keywords and now television. 

eHarmony said it would never offer instant messaging a while back. Would Perfectmatch ever offer IM?We currently don’t offer instant messaging, but I would never, say never. It’s evaluated on an ongoing basis. We’ve found our membership has embraced the communication system currently in place. We routinely survey our membership to ensure we’re meeting their needs and we continue to provide the best approach to finding a mate online. Our search feature, which of course eHarmony hasn’t cracked, and our communication tools are constantly reviewed.

How about voice and video communications?
I think video is very difficult at this stage. We’ve seen a few people attempt to launch video. Live video gravitates towards sexually explicit material. This medium is something geared for those who’re interested in a quick hook up, and more deviant behavior seems to gravitate towards live video. I would expect to see video more on the younger skewing down-market dating sites rather than the more credible 25+ sites where the members are looking for relationships. There’re a lot of issues with video that are challenging to the consumer. Also, if you’re allowing an individual to upload video, it’s incumbent upon the community to review every second of the video content before approving it onto the site, as people (shockingly enough!) will upload videos that contain inappropriate content. There’s nothing worse on a dating/relationship site to not know what is behind door #3 and being presented with an inappropriate image, video or an email from a spammer. As the Internet and media evolves, we’ll see an appropriate integration. However, I do think it’s going to take some time.

Do you think voice connections can be successful through Internet dating sites?
I think with today’s technology, the ability to simply connect with an individual through voice is something that does have value. It’s only a matter of making it as seamless as possible. We looked at a secure phone service back in 2001. One of the challenges was requiring individuals who had already gone through the sign up process, to go and create completely new accounts. It just needed seamlessly integrating onto one platform. We’ve come a long way here over the past five years, and I think as time goes on, we’ll see more and more people successfully integrating the voice technology that’s available.

How else is Perfectmatch clearly differentiated from eHarmony?
Most online daters haven’t been satisfied in the past. By the time the member comes to Perfectmatch, we recognize they’re serious about finding a relationship. Our approach is significantly different as we offer both highly compatible matches provided AND comprehensive search capabilities. We’re a step above eHarmony with our in-depth member profiles AND our member services team, the most experienced team in the space. This team works behind the scenes proactively dedicating themselves to ensuring the best possible user experience, from log-on though log-out.

Our members leverage the real world experience and expertise of Dr. Pepper Schwartz and benefit from our matching system, Duet®, allowing us to take into account the “whole” member, a 360◦ view of the member, helping us to find a highly compatible match.  We believe the black box approach eHarmony has taken is difficult. However, give them credit – they’ve done a great job ramping up their business through a very aggressive TV spend. We expect to see them loosening the reigns a bit in 2007/2008, continuing to move away from its Christian origins, as they attempt to become more mainstream and more efficient with their member acquisition strategies.

At the end of the day, when faced with the offerings of Perfectmatch vs. eHarmony, we’ve seen members believe we have the best approach to finding real love online.

What are your goals for the year?
You’ll find us working offline more aggressively – both television and radio. We think there continues to be an excellent opportunity with television. In fact, we’re rolling out a new spot within the next two weeks. Online, we’ll continue to work to become more efficient with search, and we look to expand our relationship with our existing partners MSNBC, iVillage and Oxygen, while solidifying a couple of other key performance based partnerships.

Cupid's Coach Founder, Julie Ferman - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Feb 9 -- The online dating industry is working towards offering higher end matchmaking services. Match.com is developing a VIP service. The company that owns Vintacom is buying The Right One/Together Dating. LoveAccess has a matchmaking service. Here’s an interview with Julie Ferman of CupidsCoach.com. She is a crème de la crème, gorgeous, charismatic, A-list, Los Angeles matchmaker. Julie brings the personal touch to the personals business. – Mark Brooks

What’s your background?
I married the guy who sold me my dating service membership at Great Expectations back in 1990. That was 16 years ago and his name was and is Gil Ferman. So first he took my $1,450, maxed out both of my credit cards and then 2 weeks later I asked him out on a date and 5 weeks later we got engaged and 5 months later we were married, and shortly thereafter, 8 months pregnant with our first child, and I started working for my husband.

Gil and I owned and operated two of the Great Expectation video dating services, the ones in St. Louis and Kansas City and I always loved this business. I think I fell in love with the business at the same time that I fell in love with Gil Ferman. I ended up being Jeffery Ullman’s National Director of Events and Promotions for Great Expectations and later I was the Executive Director of the Great Expectations Licensee Association. 

We sold our two Great Expectation centers when we moved to California and then I launched Cupid’s Coach in 2000. It really wasn’t intended initially to be a matchmaking company. I was going to be producing a lot of events and writing a lot of books and doing a lot of media and speaking appearances. But everybody was asking me, “Julie who do you know? Who do you know? Who can you introduce me to?” So my web developer and I began privately inventorying all of my favorite single friends, members, clients, students and I was delighted to discover how inexpensive it was to do so. I also consulted on the Greater Relations project with Jeffery Ullman right before I started Cupid’s Coach. That project was really the first hybrid. People would go into a bricks and mortar office, buy a membership and then they would access the membership online privately.

Greater Relations didn’t make it for the same reason a lot of these companies don’t make it. They typically start out big without thoroughly testing the sales, service, and technology concepts first. So when Greater Relations failed, I launched Cupid’s Coach and it just kept growing organically into what is now the largest and fastest growing personal introduction service probably in the country.

How does your service help singles meet their mates? How do you assess people?
Anybody can register with me, it’s free, it’s private to be registered and nobody can be browsed. I really like working with people who are highly desirable and highly selective. People I can naturally relate to. I know what it feels like to be that great girl who can’t seem to find the right guy. So whereas there are other services which are really good for people who are struggling with dating, they might not have a competitive edge visually, or they might be somewhat challenged from a social skills perspective, the system I’ve developed works particularly well for people who feel they really have a lot to offer, who want to be really selective, and who are uncomfortable posting themselves online for all to see.

How much do you charge?
I inventory my members privately and the people for whom I’m working actively, my clients, pay me fees ranging from $495, for a consultation and one active search, and then $500 increments all the way up to about $6,800. That’s about as much as I like to charge. I only want to work with somebody for 3 to 6 months on an active search. I present the candidates to my clients; I typically refer my top 5 candidates.  We use detailed resumes with current, flattering face and body photos. I spent $27,000 last year on photography. Photos matter a lot. I like to have as few surprises on the first date as possible.

I present the candidates to my clients privately, so they have a log in and they get to see which candidates I personally selected for them to study. A simple search works like Great Expectations where Jack picks Jill, Jill studies Jack, they both decide if they’re interested and attracted. When they are both interested and attracted then the system instantly reveals last name, email address and phone number.

At a higher service level, which costs twice at much, the client lets me know who he or she is interested in. I then pick up the phone and call and say, “Okay Jack, stop everything and run, don’t walk to your computer; there is somebody I want to talk to you about.” It doesn’t guarantee that the secondary person will be interested and attracted but we run two to three times the match rate on that program.

Where do you find people?
Everywhere. I have a big lasso and I use it all the time. This week, I’ll have over 100 new people filter into my system because I’m producing a big Valentine party. I’m teaching a class for the Learning Annex at night and 1 in 10 people from my classes become clients. Rather than roping everybody in for a big appointment and trying to get a credit card out of their wallet, I would rather book them for a small program first; a $495 in person consultation with me and then I’ll up sell the appropriate people.

I turn away a lot of people after $495, they’re just not the right clients for me and my service might not be the best place for them to invest significant dollars. At a higher level I provide concierge service. I run a search for them, and give them five candidates. They tell me who they’re interested in and when they’re available and don’t hear from me again until I call and say, “That lady Jackie that you want to meet, fabulous, she wants to meet you too and she’s free on Tuesday night. I booked your reservation at 7pm at Ivy, and, don’t be late. Wear that good looking blue tie that I like you in.”

Match.com and other dating services are introducing high end matchmaking services. What will be their major challenges?
They’re going to have tons of challenges. One major challenge is that Match.com does not specialize in telemarketing. If you’re going to sell $1,500 programs, you better do some pretty serious telemarketing. Great Expectations, Together Dating, It’s Just Lunch… these folks have been doing this type of sale for a really long time. They’re good at it but they’ve been getting thousands of dollars from people in person, in consultations in an office and it takes an awful lot of telemarketing to make that happen. So that’s the first challenge.

The second challenge is they’re only able to work with the people who the client can already find on their own. Today I met somebody at Starbucks and I think this guy is fabulous. Whether he’s paying me or not I want him in my community so I can introduce him to my clients. Anybody can do a search on Match.com and look for the best candidates within a 20 mile radius of where they live. Getting Jack to say yes to Jill and to do all the right things. I think that every one in the industry underestimates what it takes to not only get both people to say yes to each other, but so many matches fall apart at the email or phone call stage. I deal with that all the time. I have people on my staff who do nothing but make sure people are responding and make sure that Jack knows to pick up the phone and call Jill and not interview her, not grill her to death but invite the woman out on a date. And who should pay for the date and how do you behave and where to you meet, and all that coaching.

It’s Just Lunch clients complain to me all the time that they don’t get any feedback, they don’t get any coaching, and they don’t get any guidance. That’s part of what my clients are paying a lot of money for.  If they have a 3 month program with me or a 6 month program with me, they’re typically getting unlimited email and phone coaching and that’s no small thing.

What are your goals for 2007?
Keep making money, baby!  And also I will continue to evolve my software system. I am really excited about the industry and doing this thing we call converging. I think it’s really exciting that the chasm that existed in previous years between the online dating and offline dating companies is beginning to be bridged. And what excites me more than anything is that it’s being bridged by people who really care about the end user.

The people who are alive and doing well in this industry right now, the Paul Falzones of the world, the Paul Ziters of the world, the reason they’re still healthy and strong, running concepts which really you might have thought as being archaic a couple of years ago, the reason they’re still doing well, and in many cases better then ever, is because these guys actually care about their members having a good experience. They have discovered that it’s good business to let your heart be engaged in the process of selling and serving the customer.

My business is strong and healthy enough and growing that if somebody wanted to have me working side by side with them consulting on their project they would most likely not be able to afford me. I would have to charge an amount of money that would not make any sense for them to pay. Cupid’s Coach is really strong in Los Angeles and this model could be developed throughout the country. That notion, I would entertain, with the right partnership.

Meetic Founder-Chairman, Marc Simoncini - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Jan 8 -- I spoke with Marc Simoncini this afternoon about his pending acquisition of Dating Direct. - Mark Brooks

When will your acquisition of Dating Direct be complete?
We're planning to close the acquisition definitely before the end of January. It's a question of days.

Can you tell me more about your plans once you acquire Dating Direct?
So the plan is to first integrate the software and the application from Dating Direct to Meetic's control and to merge the database. So we will add 4.5 million members from the UK, from Dating Direct, into my database. Then we will provide U.K. users dates with, of course, U.K. citizens but also with millions of European singles. We will launch our new version of Meetic, which is planned to be launched in February in France first and then we will move the platform from Dating Direct to Meetic to join the new version of Meetic. So that's what we're planning for the next few months.

Will you be phasing out the Meetic name in the UK?
Yes. We will keep the Dating Direct brand. We will continue to promote the Dating Direct brand and stop promoting Meetic. So no more Meetic in the UK.

How do you think Match might react to the news of this acquisition?
That's up to Match. Two years ago, I said I wanted to cross the entirety of Europe. The only country where Match was bigger than Meetic was in the UK, so I assume it's not a surprise for them to see Meetic entering the UK market. So maybe they made a mistake to leave this acquisition available for Meetic, I don't know. I'm sure it's not a surprise for them. So now Meetic has, say, two or three times more traffic than Match all over Europe, so the competition will be less intensive in Europe and that's my goal.

The acquisition is to include Chemistry.co.uk which is an events service in the U.K. What's your plans for this events service?
Maybe we will call the technology (personality profiling) dating website in the UK 'Chemistry,' we don't know. We have the domain name, the brand and the company to organize events, so it's a pity for Match that we have the domain name they need in UK to launch Chemistry, but I'm not sure they plan to launch Chemistry outside of the U.S. I don't think it's a problem for Match.

Match.com CEO, Jim Safka - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Dec 27 -- Match.com has a new look, new services and a new ad campaign. I interviewed Jim Safka to find out more. - Mark Brooks

What proportion of your advertising budget will be dedicated toward TV advertising in Q1, 2007?
We have a big advertising mix in store for 2007. We’ll be spending more on advertising in 2007 than we have ever spent in the history of Match.com. It will be a good balance of prime time television, network radio, print advertising in magazines such as People, US and Vanity Fair and the women’s books like Glamour and Vogue. Ultimately, it’s going to be an integrated mix of advertising that will collectively end up being more then we’ve ever done in the history of the company. The majority of the campaign will be on TV followed by an equal split between radio and print. We will also have a great deal of online advertising as well, including of course, our partnerships like MSN and AOL. You can see the ads at http://client.version2.net/06_570_MATCH/.

I love the new ads. Why black and white?
We think that black and white is extremely classy and from an image standpoint it feels even more sophisticated. Cecil B. DeMille once said, “When taking portraits black and whites are more real then color.” With this campaign we are trying to capture the inner spirit of our subscribers and show them in the best possible way. It’s not in the sense of a makeover, but instead we wanted to capture their beauty - their inner beauty - and we think black and white is a great way to do it. We haven’t seen this type of photography or this style used in this category before, so we know it will be different. We think it will be classier and fresh.

Why did you choose these particular people, and which ad is your personal favorite?
We contacted Match.com subscribers throughout the country and found people in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Texas. There was a gentleman from Seattle and several people were from Florida as well.  Match.com flew the 26 people selected out to Los Angeles to do this shoot with a world famous photographer named Peggy Sirota. You can see her other work at www.peggysirota.com. She’s photographed the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Seal and many other famous celebrities for magazine covers. She recently photographed Tiger Woods.

Peggy shot our members for online, print and television. What was fascinating about the process was that we just didn’t line them up for a photo shoot – she really got to know these people and what drives them and what they’re looking for, not just in a relationship, but as a human being. I think you’ll find that she really captured the essence of who these people are.  We didn’t want to change who they are, we really wanted to capture what was special about them.  Each one of our members is just brilliant in their own way.

In terms of a favorite, my favorite just might be the woman with user name DanishBeauty22, and she’s a widow who is on Match.com today. She’s 71 year’s old  and has to be one of the better looking 71-year old on the planet. She’s very full of life with many diverse interests. In the TV ad of her singing, she trips up a little bit and you will see that we’re not just trying to capture people’s perfections, but we’re capturing their imperfections. The part where she messes up a bit makes the whole spot just adorable.  It captures the human element that is representative of the whole campaign. Some of our members are blogging about their experience at www.match.com/okay.

How are you guiding people to take better photographs, which capture them currently and accurately?
People are going to be able to see all 26 members and their photographs not only on our advertising campaign but also on Match.com. We think when other members see how gorgeous these people look, yet how very real they look, they’re going to want to step up their game. I often say there are a lot of people who seem to spend more time getting ready to go to the supermarket on a Sunday, than they do in putting together their profile that ends up on Match.com. 

Being on Match.com is the equivalent of being on a stage at Madison Square Garden where thousands of people will be looking at you. And if anybody were to get up on that stage, they would have the best possible representation of themselves. So part of the idea of this campaign is you can do it yourself.

We’re going to give our members the capabilities to capture themselves in a way they can be really proud of. We worked really hard to find a person that we thought could help us do this and we found a real rising star in a guy by the name of Jay Manuel. He is on the show America’s Next Top Model. Jay is now the Director of Style for Match.com where he helps people with everything from photography to writing a great profile.

With Jay, we created what we call a “Portrait Tool Kit” and you can see this right on the home page of Match.com or at www.match.com/portrait. Jay takes you through the dos and don’ts of what it takes to create a great portrait of yourself through video and text. He’s got advice on what to wear, how to style yourself, how to pick a good headline, how to give great examples of what you like and what you don’t like, and what you’re looking for and what you’re not. We think when people go through the process of really engaging with the Portrait Tool Kit, it’s a major confidence booster and it will give them basic tricks and tips. So you’ll be in a position to create a representation of yourself where when you take a step back and look at it you’ll go, “Wow I’m proud to be that person.”

You’re introducing a VIP service. Can you tell us more about that?
Match.com has a pilot in Dallas called Match Platinum and can be found at http://platinum.match.com. Match Platinum is a breakthrough new service that is geared towards somebody who is an active professional, who is busy, and who loves the idea of Match expanding their possibilities. This person also wants a concierge-like service level and the guidance of a personal matchmaker.

The difference in what we’re doing versus what anyone else has done in the history of this category is our matchmakers have access to the Match.com profile base of 15 million members. They sort through those people and have preferred access to them. The matchmaker will actively screen the potential people to make sure there’s a good fit, validate their identities, and conduct a background check. By the time they go on a date, a Match Platinum member will have a highly qualified candidate. We see this service as appealing for people who are particularly busy or who want a little more privacy.

We also have total transparency around this service. When you go to Match Platinum, you will see the matchmakers who work for us along with a profile for each of them, and a blog about their experience of being a matchmaker for Match Platinum. Our members can see their history, philosophy and get a sense of which matchmaker would work best for them. We really stand behind this product. We’re piloting it in Dallas during the month of January with aggressive expansion plans to follow. We intend to be in the top twenty markets throughout the United States before the year is over. We’ll also be piloting this in several international markets as well, specifically Japan and the UK.

What will people pay for this service and how many dates will they get?
We’re still in a pilot in Dallas, so we’re still working out the exact price points. But I will say this, the initial members that sign up are going to get the most extraordinary service. We want to have great word of mouth around this product. Whoever signs up for this service right out of the gate, in addition to having the matchmaker working on their behalf, will have me personally working on their behalf to make sure they end up with a great result. Our expectation is that we will over deliver on the value and learn how to become great at this service. Once we’ve discovered what it takes to deliver that level of service that customers are going to expect, we’ll have a sense of what it costs our company and we can establish the appropriate price point.

Do you envision that price point would be over $1,000 for a year?
That depends. My goal is to make this service as accessible as possible to a broad as possible audience. Again, we haven’t locked in on a price point and we are likely to have different levels of price points as well.

How is the Match Anonymous Calling Program coming along for you?
matchTalk has been an extraordinary success. Since we’ve launched it nationally the number of people using it has exceeded our original forecasts. I read our suggestions and comments box every day and the feedback from our customers has really been categorically positive. This is another feature that Match.com has delivered that adds value to the overall experience with no additional cost to the customer.

It’s consistent with how we run the overall business – we’ve continually innovating, continually adding new people to the site, and adding new functionalities to the site. It’s what we have to do as the market leader to grow the category. So now we have Dr. Phil, a 6 month guarantee, a new Portrait Toolkit, matchTalk so people can talk on the phone anonymously, and we have more than 60,000 people who are signing up for the service every single day. You start to put all this together and you see the flywheel is not just picking up momentum, the business is going better then ever.

Bharat Matrimony CEO, Muruga - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Dec 1 -- Murugavel Janakiraman is the Founder/CEO of BharatMatrimony which is based in Chennai in Southern India. In India, matrimonials sites are the norm. Matrimonials sites allow users (and their families) to post their profiles and find potential marriage partners. BharatMatrimony charges $10 to $15 per month for its services and provides 40 physical stores for customers without Internet access. Muruga's service recently received funding from Canaan Partners and Yahoo. - Mark Brooks

What is Bharat Matrimony's Founding Story?  Who inspired you?
In 1997, I created a portal in US primarily to cater to the NRI (Non-Resident Indian) community as a platform to stay in touch with their hometown traditions and festivals. The portal was well received by its members and noticed that the matrimony segment of the portal being used widely by the members. This triggered the thought of starting an exclusive matrimonial website. And then I came back to India and started BharatMatrimony.com. Over the years, we developed successful regional portals like hindimatrimony.com, tamilmatrimony.com to serve the select audience. Today, we are the largest matrimonial portal in India with 7.5 million registered users. We have created a world record in marriages by arranging 8 times more marriages than our nearest competitor. Recently we officially entered into Limca Book of Records for highest number of online marriages. Limca Book of Record is equivalent to Guinness Record in India.

How do the offices/agents help members? Where are the members located?
Though an online portal, we as an organization always believed in the brick and mortar model and had 23 offices set across the country. These support offices handled telemarketing, payment collections and also helped customers who walked in for registrations. This interactive model inspired us to start our offline venture – BharatMatrimony centres. Our BharatMatrimony centres are positioned as the network of match making centers that provide easy access people who do not access internet. At BharatMatrimony centres, members can walk into any of our centre, located at 50 centres across 46 cities covering 16 states in India, and access millions of profiles with the help of our associates.

We have also tied-up with Department of Post, Government of India, to provide a unique service called "Pay at Post Office", which allows members to purchase BharatMatrimony membership cards from any of the Head Post offices across 18 states to upgrade or renew memberships. This new service has strengthened our brick and mortar model. We aim to have about 300 BharatMatrimony centres by 2008 across India and in select markets around the world. So, we are looking at over 4500 BharatMatrimony footprints across India through 3500 sify i-ways, 160 payment associates and 700 post offices thus becoming the largest networked service provider in matrimony.

How is Bharat Matrimony different from Shaadi?
BharatMatrimony is perceived as a most trusted and successful marriage portal because of its unique features. Marriage itself is a very serious concept in India and by understanding the market so well, we have consciously developed this brand identity. We are the largest player in the market today. This is a result of long list of innovations that we have initiated since inception. We are the only portal to provide Verified Profiles, Verification Services, 15 region specific portals, free horoscope generation in 9 languages, real time horoscope matching in 6 languages, Multi-lingual interface, Matrimony Reference and Mobile Alerts to name a few. The number of marriages we have arranged is far higher than any other site in the world and created a world record. Agencies like JuxtConsult and Alexa have ranked us as the most visited and the best recalled brand name in India. Click on this link to check for more details.

What have been your biggest challenges with Bharat Matrimony?
The biggest challenge for any online portal in India was the level of internet and PC penetration. And initially people were not really looking at internet as an option to find their life partners. So, the challenge was to build trust on online marriages with the members.

What are your top three goals for 2007?  What business deals are you seeking?
With global leaders like Yahoo and Canaan partners investing in our group, we have plans of expanding our network in parts of UK and South East Asia to cater to the Indian Diaspora.

We have plans to significantly expand our presence on-ground and will also invest in the global personals space. We are looking at increasing our offline initiative, BharatMatrimony centres from 50 to over 300 across the country by 2008.

We also have plans to foray in to mobile services and launch new matrimony services, which will make us stronger in the industry.

Vumber President & CEO, Cliff Wener and Jodd Readick

OPW INTERVIEW -- Nov 17 -- Do singles really want to spend their evenings tapping on a keyboard in front of their computers or would they rather be talking on the phone or in front of each other, to see if they have chemistry?  Match just launched matchTalk which is powered by Jangl.  I’m advising a new service, Vumber, which is designed specifically for dating sites to help their customers connect by phone (any phone, any where), without divulging their real phone number.  Here’s my interview with the President and CEO of Vumber, which is due for launch shortly - Mark Brooks

What are your backgrounds?
Jodd: I founded several telecom companies, common carriers for Hispanic and niche marketplaces, and have been a consultant on very large telecom projects for companies like Wells Fargo, CompuServe, and AT & T. I live both in the technical world and the marketing world.

Cliff: I founded and headed up the Computer Telephony Integration Lab for Williams Communications.  We developed software applications that are used by many of the industry’s largest call centers.

What is a Vumber?
Cliff: A Vumber is an anonymous, disposable phone number that can be associated with any phone that you have. It could be your cell phone, your land line or even your fax! It’s completely anonymous and disposable. You can manage it via the internet or through the phone.

Who uses a Vumber?
Cliff: A Vumber can be used by any person needing to protect their identity. What makes our service unique is that not only can you receive calls on your new number but that you can call them from that same number. So, say if someone calls you on your Vumber;. You’ll actually receive the call at your number. But, you’ll also be able to dial out and show the on the caller-id display of whoever you’re calling. Vumber is a true, two way anonymous calling service. This is the only solution that works in both directions on any phone.

How does it work for internet dating companies?
Jodd: Email is somewhat anonymous but being able to talk to someone, in an anonymous fashion, is very important to people at the beginning of a dating relationship. A lot of people would like to be able to use their regular phone to talk with people they’re interested in dating. Especially women. Women, particularly, prefer to connect by phone to hear someone’s voice, before going on a date. 

We expect to be able to use this as a driver for new revenues for internet dating services. The Vumber service offerings will be designed specifically for internet daters. We will partner with internet dating sites by offering them CPA based distribution or, if they prefer, their own white label offering. So, they’ll be able to brand the Vumber service as fully their own, and create member packages that will give their users their own unique Vumbers, under their own preferred brand.

So Vumber is essentially a throw-away number for singles?
Jodd: It can be a throw away number or you can keep it for a long period. It doesn’t have to be used just for dating. It can be used any time or any place when you would want a secondary number. It can be disposed of at will and you can have multiple numbers. You can also change those numbers if you wish. You may change how each call is treated in real time, so if you want all calls to go to voice mail or given a busy tone, you can do that too.

The major use is protecting identity and being secure. In the beginning of a relationship, singles shouldn’t give out personally identifying information like their home number or cell number. Once they’ve given out their number to someone it can lead to a lot of discomfort and insecurity if a person they’re interested in turns out later to be someone they’re actually not interested in at all. This can turn people off their whole internet dating experience. 

Who’s your competition?
Cliff: We have not seen any company offer a similar product in which you can get an anonymous, two way, disposable number that works on any phone. Some companies offer complex anonymous scenarios that require either a special cell phone or the use of sign-in codes  No-one offers a two way anonymous phone number like Vumber.

Tell me more about your patent..
Jodd: We filed a complex technology patent which covers the basis of the Vumber operation. We’ve been told after a significant amount of work that this is may be a landmark patent in the telephony arena and we feel quite comfortable that other people, while they may have various pieces of what we’re doing, won’t be able to offer a total solution for inbound and outbound calling and telephone number management.

What are your plans for 2006 and 2007?
Jodd: We’ll complete the Vumber system for Q4 and show it to selective potential partners. We’re currently talking to users and beginning beta trials. All the feedback so far has been very positive. We want to start to show it to selected companies and then partner with them to make it work for their specific needs and niches.

Spark Networks CEO, David Siminoff - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Oct 20 -- Spark Networks owns American Singles, JDate, and acquired the MingleMatch group of niche dating sites last year. I had the pleasure of speaking with the CEO, David Siminoff, in person in Palo Alto. - Mark Brooks

What's your background David?
I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I grew up here. I went to Stanford, and I majored in English and math/computer science. After graduating, I attended film school at USC but quickly recognized my lack of talent in this area and instead went to work for Drexel Burnham, which is an old investment bank. Then, I ended up going to business school at Stanford. Around the same time, I founded a company called EastNet that became the largest trader of bartered media properties in Eastern Europe. We would go to an American company that had libraries of TV shows which hadn’t been seen in Russia and Eastern Europe. We would trade them for ad time and sell it back to Coca-Cola and others. I cashed out and tried to make it on the pro golf tour, but failed miserably. I went on to spend nine years plus at Capital Group, which is now the largest money manager in the world. I was sitting on a number of boards, and in 2004, I got a call from the founder of JDate, and he said, “Hey we’re going to do a U.S. listing. We need to expand our finance committee and want a bean counter kind of guy to sit on the board.” That was me, so I said, “Sure that’d be great.” 

I got here and the company had a number of problems. After just a few months, the new CEO stepped down, and they said, “Okay Dave, you go fix this.” So I stepped in as CEO. It’s been two years of very, very hard lifting. But I’m a nice Jewish boy, so it has been a great honor to be able to help turn around and grow JDate and the other Spark Networks properties. Now, in my third year, it’s become a very nice story. I love the team we’ve put together and our numbers speak for themselves. You can see the progress in our financial results. 

What’s been your biggest challenge?
The company had been a damn-the-torpedoes, grow-at-any-price, let’s-just-go company. And that was the right strategy in 2000 and then in ’01, ’02 and ’03. Then things changed dramatically in the middle of ’04 when the cost of online marketing started to skyrocket. All of a sudden, we were paying a lot more for a subscriber than we were earning. You don’t have to be an all-star Wall Street guy to know that is bad business. And so, we had to right-size the company. And that’s what happened.

Why focus on niche dating sites now?
The company was founded in 1997 with the launch of JDate for the Jewish single market. Now, I can arrogantly say that JDate is the best niche dating site in the world, by far. There hasn’t been a great niche vertical yet, that I can think of, other then JDate. And I think there’s room for others.

You can’t share little, personal, intimate granules of detail with someone unless you’re in an environment that you trust and you feel relaxed and you feel kind of protected. JDate accomplishes that clean, well-lit feeling by virtue of being “owned” by the community. We change features on JDate and members will track me personally on my cell phone to yell at me for moving a button three inches to the left. It’s a wonderful feeling that way, and what we’ve learned is that the communities “own” these sites, we don’t. 

How’s the MingleMatch acquisition working out for you?
Revenue from our Other Businesses Segment, which largely consists of the properties acquired through MingleMatch, grew by 118% in the second quarter of this year. This segment was the largest contributor to our revenue growth. We’ve rebranded, renamed and redesigned a number of those properties and have increased the marketing efforts, and they are delivering solid growth.

People are more likely to remember niche dating sites. Do you find they’re more efficient?
Yeah! Word-of-mouth travels fast through small communities. Eighty percent of our traffic on JDate comes from people bookmarking it. They didn’t click a banner ad. No one sent them an email. We didn’t have to pay them to come. They just showed up at our front door. They knew the name, like eBay and Yahoo and Google. I wouldn’t put us in those leagues, but in the Jewish dating community, JDate has that kind of brand attribution.

Why did you rename ChristianMingle.com as Relationships.com?
Relationships are about trends and moods and periods of your life. Relationships imply movement. Relationships aren’t static. Everything is relative to everything else. So there’s kind of a natural dynamism there and a voice that speaks to how people really want to connect. We have a very high hurdle to build to in order to fulfill that vision, but that’s what we’re hoping to do.

What will become of AmericanSingles.com?
For a long time, AmericanSingles had been poorly financially managed more than anything else. Now, the vision for AmericanSingles is to manage it in a financially disciplined manner.

Will you be expanding into Europe?
I don’t think so. You know, Europe for us right now would add little value. We add value by understanding and focusing on a number of targeted communities in the United States. So we probably won’t be expanding into Europe.

I love some of the European sites, but I have 184 to-do list items just to get all our current plans launched and properly managed. It falls off the edge of our plate, in the grand scheme of things.

Match is very active in Asia. Any thoughts on Asia?
We add no value there. We do Hebrew well. In Israel, we’re dominant, but beyond that, if you’re going to try and go into Japan, it’s over, too late. Match can go play in that field. They are a huge company with tremendous resources to do all that stuff. We’re tiny. Our whole company could fit in this restaurant [Palo Alto Golf Club restaurant and conference area].

How many people work for Spark Networks now?
At the end of last year, worldwide there were about 190 employees. We have a bunch of call center folks. The executive team is approximately 20 people.

I’m looking forward to reporting a summary of the quarterly and annual financial reports at the Miami internet dating convention in January. What are your revenue and profit goals?
I think you’ll see ad sales become a little more meaningful for us. But we want to be careful with advertising because the actual ad has to be relevant and has to add value to the site. I don’t want to sell things that are annoying to users.

We’ve gone from “oh my God, are we going bankrupt” to “okay, no more water is coming in the boat now” to “hey, we’re growing and generating a lot of free cash.” 

Meetic Founder-Chairman, Marc Simoncini - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Oct 9 -- Meetic is the second largest internet dating company in the world, next to IAC’s Match.com. Here’s my first interview with the founder. - Mark Brooks

How did you get started with Meetic? What is the founding story?
I created a portal in Europe called iFrance in ’97 which was sold to Vivendi Universal in 2000 for $200 million dollars. Then I worked for Vivendi for 18 months. I looked for new ideas and wanted to launch a subscription based business. I spent a lot of time analyzing many business models and the dating business was the best one for me. Firstly, because it was subscription based and secondly, there were no serious competitors in Europe. So I launched Meetic in July ’02.

Why did you follow up with the launch of Ulteem? How is it better than Parship?
Ulteem was launched in its final version this summer, three months ago. We wanted to create a new kind of product and decided to analyze eHarmony or Parship. Ulteem is more modern. For one thing we are offering video on Ulteem. Users can record a three part video profile which is really important to know people better. Another key difference is that we don’t need to invest heavily in marketing across Europe as  Meetic is already launched in 13 countries in Europe and according to comscore we’ve 8 millions UV, we have also 90 distribution partners including Yahoo in France, Italy and Spain, Wanadoo in France and Spain, Libero in Italy or AOL in Germany. So, to launch Ulteem, we just have to advertise on the Meetic pages, and ask our partners to plug it on their portals. That’s why after few months of activity in France, Ulteem is already bigger than Match.com and Parship! That’s how Ulteem is growing pretty fast.

Talking about Parship, it only really exists in Germany. They say they have 1.x million users but we estimate only one third of these users are outside of Germany. So for now we don’t see any serious competitors for Ulteem at the European level. In Germany, of course it is more complicated for us because of Parship, but outside of Germany, Ulteem will be probably the leading relationship website thanks to our Meetic audience and 90 partners network in Europe.

How does the pricing of Parship compare to Ulteem?
It’s close. The main difference is that on Ulteem you can initiate contact for free. If you want to read the message you have to become a VIP member, a Premium user. So you can send messages for free but if you want to read a message or, of course, to answer you have to subscribe. That’s the difference in term of model but in term of pricing, it’s close.

And you have a social networking service also?
Meetic has three brands. The first one is Meetic, of course, the second one is Ulteem and third one is Superlov. We launched it in France in its first version at the beginning of the year, and it will be launched in its final version shortly all over Europe. The model is based on mobile revenues, and you can use it both by web and by mobile. We have 19 partnerships with mobile carriers in Europe, you can access Meetic too through mobile carriers all over Europe. It took us three years to be able to sign these 19 deals.

How do you view Match.com’s recent announcement that they are spending 4 millions Euros to enter the market?
Meetic is dominant in Europe according Nielsen or Comscore. Meetic is #1 in France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Netherlands. A huge part of Match.com’s traffic comes from MSN. So, in fact, the Match brand doesn’t really exist, 32% of French people know Meetic and only 3% know match.com, according IFOP. The pride of Meetic is, Match was 26 times bigger than Meetic in 03, and this year Match worldwide is only 3 times bigger than Meetic. But Match is worldwide and Meetic is still only in Europe. So now Meetic is probably the second biggest casual dating website in the world in terms of revenues. Meetic has become a problem for Match because we are growing so fast.

So the answer for Match is to try to compete with Meetic in France as a substantial part of my revenues still come from our domestic market. Match already tried to take the French market in 04 and they decide now to invest 4 millions Euros on a brand nobody knows. And they say they will invest three times more than Meetic in France but they are making a mistake. Meetic invested close to 40 millions Euros in France over the last 4 years. So I don’t know why and how they could be able to take the French market with only 4 millions Euros. They say, “we want to add 7 million profiles”; to do that in one year, they have to invest between €50 and €60 million, it seems quite ambitious …. I think their strategy is to try to hurt our stock price to make our life more difficult if we decide to make a significant acquisition, which could be localized in a significant market …

The problem with Match is they had a deal with MSN worldwide, but the deal was ending, and Meetic was able to make an offer to MSN. With MSN, Meetic would be the dominant player forever in Europe, and without the MSN deal, Match would disappear from Europe. So they had to keep the deal, even if they had to pay a lot to keep it because they can’t lose the business. They certainly had to make a better offer than we did to secure the deal, and this could be seen on their 06 figures.

Some US companies were very successful in building internet business models, and we are really admirative about their success. But as for dating, we think we have developed a good, or maybe even better model.

Have you considered entering the USA market? 
We’ve considered entering every market in which we think we have a chance. So we could enter the U.S. from scratch, or by acquisition as we made in China or Brazil. We never say never. We look for the right timing and the right way to enter each market, even in the U.S. We think we could propose a new kind of dating website in the US, as we have done in Europe, with a brand and spirit that could be fresher and younger.

Would you be disappointed if you didn’t have a presence in the US within the next 12 months?
No, we have to invest first in Europe, and then we will see if it’s possible, or not, to invest or to make an acquisition in the US. There are few US companies that are for sale.

What is your goal for the next 12 months?
The strategy is to become number one in Europe with Ulteem and to launch successfully our new Meetic product (V3) all over Europe.

Parship CEO, Dr Arndt Roller - OPW Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Sep 30 -- Parship is Western Europe’s ‘eHarmony.’ It’s the leading internet dating site focused on long term relationships and currently operates in 10 Western European countries. Parship started out in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands and more recently extended into Italy, France, Spain, and now into the UK in 2005 and Sweden in January 2006.  Here’s my interview with CEO, Dr Arndt Roller. - Mark Brooks

What is Parship’s founding story?
Parship.com was founded in 2001 by two managers of holtzbrinck networxs, the venture capital arm of Verlagsgruppe Holtzbrinck, a very quality minded publishing house (they own e.g. Macmillan Publishing) publish “Nature”) with roots in Germany. Holtzbrinck demanded a quality minded approach to the online dating classifieds. When they looked at the market they saw a lot of services that were oriented towards flirting. That’s when they met Professor Schmale, the scientific mastermind behind the Parship concept, and we started our service. From day one, Parship was oriented towards long term relationships. Parship is based on a mandatory, scientific matchmaking process, plus integration of personal preferences. We do things very different from the industry norm. For example, you won’t see “picture galleries”, not even pictures on profile pages until the time that the other person allows exactly that to happen.. This might look very odd when you look at the entire industry where pictures are everything.

Who are your competitors?
In the premium or long-term segment, Parship enjoys a very dominant market share. Havng said that, across Europe there are about 10 copies of the Parship service from small players. Some of them are former employees of Parship that have just set up their own service. But they have shown limited growth. One is a service called, Elite Partner, which was started by a former Parship marketing manager, and one is called be2, launched by a former Managing Director of Parship, who had to leave after very short time in the job. They all try to look very similar to Parship and are basically imitations.

How do you market Parship?
Many online dating companies seem to rely on keyword advertising predominately. For us, we’ve traditionally always worked very heavily with quality-newspapers and -magazine brands. Parship is integrated into their online-sites. We have 190 different corporate partners across Europe. Parship has a very good reputation in the B2B community, it´s been been built over 5 years and that helps us now as we approach more and more potential partners. In addition to that, we have significantly increased our brand marketing.

How did the UK launch go for you?
The UK market is probably the most expensive to enter, together with the German market. The big advantage we have is that we’re basically competition free in the long term relationships segment in the UK market. From what I can see, eHarmony has little impact in the UK and Europe. 

Could you give a couple of examples of how the UK and German markets are different from each other?
There are many elements. One obvious area of difference is the different use of payment methods. In the UK there’s a significant amount of people using credit cards. In Germany there’s much lower credit card usage. In many European countries credit cards are either not accepted in general or they might be accepted but not over the Internet. Second, the big media portals behave in very different ways. So, striking deals with them can be difficult and expensive. 

How does Parship pricing vary across Europe?
It depends on market pricing sensitivities. Price points vary as the result of our marketing experiences in each market. The same goes for many of our European competitors. In Germany we have membership choices, based on monthly pricing;, a 3 month membership costs 120 Euros, 40 Euros a month. A 6 month membership, which most of our subscribers use, costs 179 Euros, 29 Euros per month.  The 12 month costs 263 Euros, 22 Euros per month.

What advice would you give to the CEO’s of U.S. corporations interested in entering the European dating market?
Spend a lot of time in Europe first and don’t look at Europe as one market or as one big country. I mean, most Americans I’ve met apart from those that have lived in Europe for a long time can’t help but look at Europe as one country.  As long as you have that mindset, don’t go to Europe.

From what I’ve heard about China and India that is also not ‘one’ country. The same with the U.S.A. actually. New York is not ‘just like’ San Francisco. Baltimore is not Little Rock, Arkansas. I’ve got tremendous respect for people entering the U.S.market from the outside because I think that’s a very, very difficult thing to do successfully. The same applies for companies from the US or Asia trying to enter Europe with its 10 -15 relevant local country markets.

When we look back at the last 10 years, there must be a reason that so many American online companies that decided to enter the European market have failed.

So what would you say would be the biggest market investment that you learned in the last couple of years with Parship?
Quality might take a little longer but will definitely reap much bigger rewards than a quick and dirty approach that many people follow. That’s a lesson across Europe. 

What do you mean by quick and dirty?
Going into a market not really caring about the quality. For example, taking money from day one. Not looking after user complaints. That kind of approach is what I mean. That sometimes seems to work for some of our competitors but we’ve learned that e.g. waiting longer before asking people to pay and investing more time before you launch a service pays off.

Does Parship’s matchmaking profiling really work?
Yes, definitely. And we are continuously improving the matchmaking process. For the first half of 2006, 38% of our subscribers tell us they left the service because they found the love of their life. Cynics tell us that with such strong success rate we might destroy our future market chances. That´s of course completely wrong. Such success leads to a very high customer satisfaction level, which is important in many industries but is absolutely the most important key metric in our business, since it builds trust, confidence and positive word-of-mouth. As long as a user is really looking for a long-term relationship, in Europe, Parship is the best way to find the right partner. If they are looking for casual date we are just not right.

How fast will Parship grow over the coming year and what are your goals?
We will grow between 50% and 70% over the coming year, faster than market growth and despite increasing competition.

First of all, internationalization is an ongoing process for us. Launching a country doesn’t mean there is no further work to do. So, developing and growing all our Western European services is our goal. Then there’s a commitment from all of us at Parship that we will focus only on long term relationships. Like I said, we have no interest whatsoever in going into flirting and dating. We’ll leave that to the experts in that field. That leaves us with some interesting opportunities around the quality and premium approach.  We are currently working on new business developments that we’ll talk about once they’re launched. I don’t want to talk about things we haven’t really done yet.

Are there any countries outside of Europe that you have your eye on?
Yes.

USA, per chance?
First and foremost, we consider ourselves a European company, with roots in Germany.. We are the number one premium service in Europe. To maintain that and benefit from the fantastic growth opportunities will keep us very busy. But if there is an interesting and compelling opportunity outside of Europe, we will definitely go for it.

OPW Interview - e-Cyrano CEO, Evan Marc Katz

OPW INTERVIEW -- Sep 22 -- Evan Marc Katz is the author of “I Can’t Believe I’m Buying This Book - The Common Sense Guide to Successful Internet Dating” and has been the CEO of profile makeover service e-Cyrano for 3 years.  His candid, no b.s. approach is refreshing and hits home with his audience. - His audience is YOUR audience, online dating users.

What are the top 3 mistakes users make when they’re putting their profile together?
I think online dating users undervalue their profile. The perception that nobody reads these things is simply not true, especially when you’re talking about people who are looking for relationships. Just the perception that the profile doesn’t matter leads people to doing a half-assed job and then wondering why things aren’t working for them.

Secondly, most people write generic profiles. The only way to have success online is to have a profile that doesn’t sound like anybody else in the world could possibly write it. Yet the vast majority uses lists of adjectives and activities that you’ve seen in a million other profiles – none of which has any currency if everybody lists the same things.

Finally, people don’t consider their audience. They use their profile for personal statements or confessionals and either write about their philosophy of life, write about how they want someone tall and rich and good looking, or write about how they’ve been burned by people in the past. People say all these things that are just not appropriate for personal ads. They should be aware that profiles are just advertisements. And if they’re writing for an audience, it’s in their best interests to think of what people want to hear.

If you had the power to change one thing in the online dating industry, what would it be?
If I were running one of these sites I would devote myself fully to enhancing the customers’ chances of success by giving users the tools they need to succeed. Unfortunately, because this is ‘online dating’ and technology is involved, companies focus on the shiny new toys. Text messaging, avatar chat, all these other things that are not really the core of online dating. The core is a vast database of people, all of whom are single and looking for connection…and have no idea why this isn’t working for them. Dating sites need to listen to their users and give them what they’re requesting. There is such a tremendous state of user dissatisfaction within our industry. You want to run a top-notch online dating site? Work on giving your members the tools they need, and help them feel good about the online dating process. This is what I do for a living.

Basically, I’m the ultimate online dating optimist. I help people believe that they have control in making online dating work for them, no matter who they are and no matter what their circumstances. I show my clients how to use these sites and I provide them with photos, essays and coaching. Just imagine if a leading dating site would provide all of those things to their users; they’d raise the tide for their entire population and have a site that’s genuinely different from other sites because everybody there would ‘get it.’

Evan, you’re on the front line. You’re talking to online dating customers every day who are prepared to spend significantly more then $20 or $30 a month. You’re talking to the premium customers. What are you hearing from them that they’re dissatisfied about? What should the industry do to make them satisfied?
Dating sites actually can provide services to people that make them feel taken care of, instead of making their online daters feel like just another number. And, truthfully, you could charge whatever you want for such services. People will pay anything for results. This is their love life - the most important thing in the world, okay? You don’t need critical masses of people. If 1,000 people pay you $1,000 for premium services, you just made a million dollars.

I often entertain the idea of teaching a whole bunch of other people to do what I do. I’ve got training manuals, I’ve got employees, I’ve taught other people how to do this kind of stuff. But for an online dating site, it requires a little bit of investment and a bit of a push. But the more sites that offer tools to help their members succeed, the more people will succeed and feel brand loyalty to the companies that are providing those tools. Users just want to know that a site is committed to seeing them fall in love. And when they do, you can be sure they’ll tell their friends and then the site gets great word-of-mouth. There are millions of lonely people out there who are looking for relationships and assistance, who have no idea that there are services designed to help them fall in love. If you can convince them that online dating CAN work for them, it WILL work for them.

Do you advise many clients that are listing their profiles not only online dating sites but on social networks?
Very few. Ultimately you get what you pay for. Can you fall in love on MySpace? Yeah, of course you can, but in most places where you meet for free, people aren’t that serious. And that’s why I don’t think online dating is going to die as social networking sites become more popular. There’s always going to be a need, and a massive need, for online dating.

But the bloom is off the rose and people are pretty disillusioned with the process, the frustration, the people who don’t represent themselves properly. Online dating sites should empower people to represent themselves properly. This is what e-Cyrano does. We get them to talk to us and we put it together in such a way that it’s an accurate representation of the person, in their own words. We get them to talk to us, we take what they’re saying and we put it together in such a way that it’s really a great and accurate representation of the person, in their own words. So the whole thing has integrity. And just imagine, you have a whole site of people who are differentiated and interesting and have integrity. Doesn’t everybody look better? Doesn’t that seem like a site you would want to be a part of?

How do you want to work with online dating sites? How does the business relationship work?
We create a skin that looks like your dating site. Your color scheme, your brand and your logo. So it’s jdate.ecyrano.com or cupid.e-cyrano.com. Your company gets 20% of the take or a 20% discount off our retail prices. But since 20% of $129 is not going to make people rich, again, it’s really not about money, it’s about customer satisfaction. By actively integrating our services onto your website – putting links in the profile section, sending out blast emails, putting up banner ads – you’re helping people who would otherwise quit in a couple of months. Those people then stick around for as long as it takes to fall in love, whether that’s a year, or two years. That’s a lot of added revenue.  So it’s not so much about the revenue sharing as much as it is about the long-term customer satisfaction. 

Mark Brooks: If you’re interested in offering internet dating profile improvement services, email me and I’ll send you contacts for Evan at e-Cyrano.com, Merav and Dave at LookBetterOnline.com, Eric at ProfileHelper.com and Dr John Gray’s business development manager.  mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com

OPW Interview - AnastasiaWeb - General Director, Alexei Negin

OPW INTERVIEW -- Sep 15 -- Alexei Negin is the General Director of AnastasiaWeb, a top three Russian internet dating site. I was curious how his service works and how it's different from other dating sites. Here's my interview with Alexei. Please comment with your questions for Alexei. - Mark Brooks

What is Anastasia?
It's the fastest way to meet Russian women via the internet. It's an online dating website that allows people from Russia, North America, Europe and other parts of the world to connect and correspond with each other. People from different countries can write letters to each other in their native language and the letters are delivered and translated. We have a network of over 200 agents in the former Soviet Union who make sure the messages get delivered.

Who are your target customers?
Most of our male customers are based in the U.S. or Canada. We also have some male customers from the EU, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. We have female customers from all over the former USSR. We have slightly more women on the site then men, which is actually a part of why the site is successful. We currently have more than 10,000 active women profiles on AnastasiaWeb; however our overall database is much larger. We only display the profiles of women who are actively using the site.

We don't allow every applicant to become a member. We verify profiles and personal information and allow only those individuals that pass the verification process. We do everything we can to protect our customers.

What is the age range?
We don't allow men or women under 18 and I would say that the average female age would be about 24 or 25 years old. So these are rather young women. The male audience is older in general. The average age would be between 34 and 40, in that range. In Russia and Ukraine it's very common that women date and marry men that are older.

What's AnastasiaWeb's founding story?
We were founded in 1993 by a Russian/American couple, Elena and David Besuden. Elena and David met through an introduction service in 1992 and were married the same year. Initially, Anastasia used catalogs to introduce profiles to men in the US. This format was used at first, because the internet wasn't so well developed. The first AW web site was launched on Jan 21, 1997. Also, in 1997, Anastasia International formed a partnership with IT Online, to handle its business operations in Russia and the CIS. There are now more than 90 employees working in the US and Russian offices, handling web development, maintenance, marketing, customer service, verification and other administrative services.  Elena and David grasped the idea of online dating rather early and succeeded.

How do you make money?
We make money on the correspondence. Each letter being delivered is translated. Most of the women do not have a computer or regular access to the Internet, so we formed a network of agents that could deliver and translate messages. We charge for a letter but we actually provide more than just a delivery service. We provide additional services that go along with the letter itself. One of the services is a direct telephone communication service, which allows clients to speak to each other with the help of a professional translator. It's like a conference call. Women don't pay at all. The cheapest correspondence service level is $3.99 per letter and the most is $8, but membership to the site is free. They can use a lot of other additional free services.

How do you protect the users from potential scammers?
There are many companies who used to say, "We don't have fraud. We're fighting fraud and 100% scam free." We can't say that, we are not 100% fraud free. But we realize the problems and we make every single effort to protect our customers. We have initiated a fraud fighting campaign and have invested heavily on investigation, protection and different ways of tracking fraud. We can protect the correspondence; we can make sure that the message is delivered and that it is translated in the proper way.

A women coming to an agency provides her personal ID that will be scanned and entered into the database. We verify that she's not under age and we also verify that she's not married. We verify information about her kids and other information. Then the agency will estimate the language ability of the women. It's a rough estimate but we like to provide this information to our members. The agency tries to verify that the photograph is definitely her photograph and that it's not an outdated photograph.  Then they enter her profile on the AnastasiaWeb site. Our verification agents in the Moscow office will call her within three days. They will review all the information. We have a call center that is devoted to calling the women and further verifying that they're legitimate clients. They will verify identity, ask if the woman wants to participate, and verify other important information. The profile is then considered a checked profile and will be activated when our system updates in two or three days. 

What are your goals for AnastasiaWeb for 2006 through 2007? What kind of partnerships are you seeking?
One of our goals over the next year is to expand our "offline" activities. To provide more organized opportunities for members to meet in-person. Regarding partners, we are looking for companies that provide great traffic. We have a good affiliate program with hundreds of affiliates. We are looking to expand that. We're also interested in speaking with other western online dating companies that would like access to our large database of verified profiles from throughout the former Soviet Union. Finally, we're looking to cooperate with companies that have know-how with mobile communications and video.  Mobile phone dating will be a benefit for our customers, because it should speed-up the communications process. We want to take every step possible to help our clients really find someone special.

OPW Interview - Together Dating/The Right One co-CEO Paul Falzone

Paul Falzone is co-CEO of Together Dating/The Right One, one of the countries top offline dating agencies. They also run e-love.com.

How were Together Dating and  The Right One started?
Together Dating started in 1974 by Chester Chase in upstate New York. As time went on the assets of that service were sold to another gentleman who grew the company. In 1989, I personally got involved in the industry and ran some of the offices. In 1997, it was a very large, built out organization with about 150 locations worldwide…with a less than sterling reputation. It was a huge mistake of the old franchise not to address PR and customer service issues. Anyway, as time went on, I broke away from the chain.  I had 14 locations in the Midwest and New England and I founded The Right One on September 4th, 1997,  and started to franchise the company. I invented the company from the ground up and put everything on the line. 

In November 1997, the CEO of the Together Dating organization, the old franchiser, threw the company into bankruptcy. He had so many complaints, and issues with his franchisees. The creditors eventually (January 1999) awarded the assets of the reorganization to my business partner, Brad Megahan, and his business partner. They got on the phone with me and said, “How would you like to merge with us? We need you.” Any good franchise needs an infrastructure and I didn’t have much of an infrastructure with 14 locations. Brad was a friend and mentor, as one of the most successful franchisees in the chain. He knew how to run a good operation, ethically. Brad and I are now 50/50 partners on Together Dating/The Right One and e-love.com, which is the most recent acquisition that we made. 

How many owners are there?
Two owners represent half of all our franchises and there’s a dozen franchisees total. Brad and I know it takes a certain type of person to run a business like this and franchising really isn’t the best way to go.  We kept the strongest people in our chain and pruned the rest to make it a stronger organization. We stopped selling franchises and started opening company stores or taking back under-performing franchises. That has proven to be a very smart move because of the strategies we have in place for the future. 

How large is The Right One and Together Dating now?
The Right One and Together will do about $45 million gross sales in 2006. We’re at 60 locations. We feel it’s very important and critical to grow slowly with the right management in place. We used to primarily market by direct mail but we’ve switched over, in the last 18 months, to Internet marketing. We have vendors who are doing online marketing for us. We generate leads at $5 to $25 each. Our average direct mail lead cost was around $250 after 9/11. People were afraid to open envelopes because of the anthrax scares.
 
Just our own corporate stores are generating 15,000 leads a month and we used to get maybe a tenth of that when we were doing direct mail. So we’ve really increased our lead flow. We’ve got three good sized telemarketing facilities in the country now.

How much are memberships?
I can’t dictate what my franchisees charge but everybody is basically in the same ballpark. Smaller towns in the Midwest may not charge as much, but the programs start at around $2,000 to $3,000 and go up to $6,000 to $7,000.

What is e-love?
We recently acquired a company called e-love, which was the old Perfect Match product, out of a bankruptcy. We acquired some great technology. We’re the dinosaurs in the (dating) business, remember. We’ve been around for over 20 years and technology…, no it’s not our strong suit, but I strongly feel that if some of these online dating experts sat with us, and we could take what was in our heads and give it to them, and they took what they were strong in and gave it to us, it would be very dangerous. 

I think they need to reach out and touch their clients more than just emailing them. We call potential clients, set an appointment and have them come into our office and spend about 90 minutes with them, going over all the details of what they want in a relationship. We’ll do a criminal background check, verify their identity and, if they’re divorced, check the divorce decree, and then once we feel that they’re going to be great for the membership, we plug them into the system. 

The difference with e-love is that the consumer can go home, log in, and type in all the preferences they’re looking for in a person. Up pops nine people per screen and they can click on each person and look at their picture, that we took. It’s not a 20 year old picture. It’s something we just took. They can also click on an icon and check out their video. About 80% of all our members are choosing to do add video.  hey can look at all the different aspects of the personality profile that they took with the company and see two bar graphs, one with each persons responses. They can see a visual of how the personalities match up. Users can hear a person, and see what things they have in common with that person. It’s very powerful. So that’s e-love.   

What are your plans for 2006 through 2007?
We’ll continue to run a profitable and successful service. We’ll focus on giving great high-touch service, and get even more efficient at converting our online leads into members. You said it well when you gave your keynote speech in February at the Internet Dating Convention, Mark. You said, the offline people have the quality, we have the high-touch service. The online dating companies have the quantity. If only there was a way that offline and online companies could find common ground and grow together.

Our services are all about making people happy. Giving people the relationships they deserve. We have had, over the last 32 years, a profound, a very profound effect on many, many singles across this country and internationally. This company has helped a lot of people over the years and that’s where I really enjoy doing my job. Getting an email from somebody saying, you know, I’ve been divorced for five years and I finally got the guts to join your service. Thank you. 

OPW Interview - Great Expectations co-CEO - Robert Fisher

OPW INTERVIEW -- Aug 11 -- Great Expectations has been around 30 years and charges thousands of dollars a year for it’s offline, high-touch, high service offerings. I spoke with Robert Fisher, CEO of the Valentine Management Group, one of the owners of a group of Great Expectations locations. - Mark Brooks

How was Great Expectations started?
It was started about 30 years ago in California as a franchise operation and was acquired in ’95 by a group from the Advanta Corporation. When they acquired it they started buying up locations and after a couple of years they divested and it became license based instead of franchise based. Today we have multiple owners but most locations are owned by four main groups of owners who are also the licensing arm of the company.

How large is Great Expectations today?
There are over 50 locations nationwide. I would say there’s between 100,000 and 200,000 members nationwide. Each of the locations are individually owned and operated. From a revenue point of view, we’re somewhere between $50 million  to $75 million a year now. Memberships are ~$3,000 each.

What does Great Expectations do differently compared to internet dating companies and why does it work so well?
Online dating's economic appeal was that you would drive traffic to a site and capture customers by providing a no-touch service allowing you to keep expenses down. Unfortunately, customer acquisition costs have risen to a point that many in the industry are struggling to maintain profitability. Along with this, online is so commoditized that prices cannot be raised without significantly changing the offering. Many online executives have told me they tried raising prices and it cost them signups.

We offer the personal touch. Offline dating companies are all about service and touch. So, that’s the biggest difference. Most of the time, the clients are the same, with the exception of those in their early twenties. We don’t typically handle that demographic very well. We have some clients in their early twenties, but not a lot. But, the same people that internet dating companies are selling a $30 a month membership to, we’re selling them a $3,000 membership. The difference is the amount of service the client gets. Also, of the top three offline dating companies, I believe most of their locations offer identity verification and background checks.

By virtue of us having the higher price point, we’re able to deliver a different service. It’s very difficult from an online perspective to truly get to know the client. For example, at Great Expectations, in our locations, we talk to each of our clients once every 60 days. When a client is a brand new client, we make sure, before we put them fully into the system, that we hold their hand with their first few selections.  Everybody in the industry has some people who are more difficult to match than others and you can either say, okay I’m not going to worry about that person, or you can say, what can I do to help them?  Maybe I’m a bit naive, but I believe that everybody can get out on a date. I believe that if you’re not guiding some people, their fear will keep them from taking the initial actions that will help them be successful. I’ve heard only a small proportion of the people that use an online dating service ever go on a date. Well last month in my locations over 70% of the people went on a date – yes, we measure it. So that’s a big difference, in my opinion, between offline and online dating services.

How are your online marketing efforts working out?
Our online efforts work very, very well. We started marketing online in 1998 and we’ve become really strong with our affiliate marketing. 

We have an online dating site, GreatDatingSite.com, that does quite well for us. We offer it through Relationship Exchange and our conversion rates are above the standard at around 11 to 13%. I’m hearing other sites typically convert registered members to paid members at 8% to 10%. I don’t know what brings about that difference.

How has online dating helped your business?  How might it help in the future?
We really didn’t get into online dating until 3 years ago. We should have gotten into it much earlier, so that was a strategic mistake on our part. What we have done well is use web marketing to drive traffic to our online sites. I think online dating has helped our service a lot because 10 years ago there was still a stigma attached to dating services. Today there’s not, and I don’t think that offline can take credit for that. I think it’s truly online dating that’s caused the shift. The question becomes today, what is the ultimate dating service going to look like? My opinion is that we’re going to be merged down the road.  There is going to be a marriage between offline and online, and I think it will happen sooner rather than later.

Another place that online truly helped us is that it drove some of the competitors in the offline space closer together and as the result we have learned from one another. Today, I count Brad Megahan at Together and Paul Falzone at The Right One as real friends. We talk regularly and Paul's son calls me "Fisherman." That might not have happened had there not been a first IDate Conference. I actually think you will see the offline companies working together to improve their offering and their marketing over the next few years. All of us are working more with some onlines as well. And here is a hint to the others: "Call us, let's talk!"

What should the online personals industry learn from Great Expectations?
Whether it’s offline or online, the thing everybody needs to understand is that if you want to have sustainability in a business model, you’re going to have to deliver something the customer truly wants.  We can no longer get by, and in the offline world for years we actually did get by, with not delivering a good service.  We were terrible at service. I believe that today you have to deliver a very high quality of service. I think you have to talk to your customer on a regular basis and find out what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong? How are your customers doing? What can you do to assist? We’ve looked at customers, whether online or offline, as revenue numbers too many times. I think that we’ve made a big switch in the last two years. As a result of us really getting strong in customer service over the last two years Great Expectations has seen a tremendous increase in the number of referrals. Our clients are happy. We touch our clients more often, we ask them how they’re doing, and we follow up with them. I think that’s where we’re making big inroads today.

One place onlines and offlines could serve each other is through joint lead acquisition strategies. We have some of these in place with online companies and they are quite profitable for both parties. Unfortunately, some online and offline companies still refuse to even get into a dialogue out of some sense of competition or fear of revealing some presumed trade secret. That is a pity.

What are your plans for 2006 through 2007?
We’ve been working on a marriage between offline and online that will go live fairly shortly. I truly believe that there is a mid-tier space that can be served that’s not currently being served right now. I think both sides, online and offline, are looking for a way to bring all this together. I’ve had enough conversation with enough people in the last 180 days to know that it will happen.

OPW Interview – Plentyoffish CEO, Markus Frind

OPW INTERVIEW -- June 30 -- I met Markus at iDate2005 and barely gave him the time of day; a hokey little site called Plentyoffish. I have a lot more respect for him these days. Plentyoffish is free and has snuck up on the Canadian market and has now established itself in the American market. It's #5 on the Hitwise USA rankings for May 2006, no less. (See OnlinePersonalsRankings.com for official international online personals site rankings courtesy of Hitwise, Comscore and Nielsen). Time for another chat with Markus… - Mark Brooks

Why is Plentyoffish a Web 2.0 site?
Because, like other Web 2.0 sites, Plentyoffish is driven by the community. There are one million people who have moderating powers in the Plentyoffish forum and there's several thousand people attending parties all over the country every week. And it's all organized and done by users. So unlike the paid sites, Plentyoffish is run by the users. 

I read that you had a check for $900K from Google for two months Ad Sense sales. What sort of pay-per-click (PPC) spend does it take to generate this?
I don't spend more then 10% of my monthly income on advertising. Pretty much the entire thing is viral.  I never did any pay-per-click at the start, not in the first two years and then after that it was just a growing. The community was really built by word of mouth. There was a need for a free site and because no one else was providing it, it just grew like a weed. A lot of people just don't want to pay for dating sites. I'm providing a service for millions of people and it's costing me barely anything. These other sites, they're all just out for people's money. 

Does Plentyoffish.com really represent a threat to the dating industry?  Are many of your members also members of paid dating sites?
Well I think it really depends on the market. On cities where there's a lot of wealth and a lot of money, I don't think Plentyoffish will have that deep of a market penetration but in other areas, for instance in Canada, Plentyoffish is by far the largest dating site.  And Lava Life if you look at all the rankings, it's lost about 50% of its traffic in the last year.

People are using three dating sites on average. So right now they're probably using Plentyoffish and two paid dating sites. We won't know until there are two or three other huge free dating sites if the paid dating industry is in trouble.

How many employees do you have? How many uniques a month do you get and how many servers does Plentyoffish.com run on? 
Just me, myself and I. Google says it's over 3.4 or 3.5 million uniques a month. I run Google analytics which records all my traffic.

I have five or six servers; one database server, one web server, an image server, a mail server…it's a dating site; it's not rocket science. You don't need thousands of servers.

I have highly optimized the database and the site, so I guess normally everyone else is using two to three hundred servers and I'm doing what they are doing with more complexity on top of it. I've invented stuff like multi-dimensional wheel sieve. I create very advanced algorithms. The more you search and the more you use the site, the more it limits your view of the people you see. So if you only message smokers, then it doesn't matter what pages you're on, you're only going to see smokers. It generates a database on the site that's built around your preferences, which is something that no other dating site is capable of doing yet. It's technically not feasible for them at least using known algorithms. I invented algorithms that no one else thought were feasible. 

What you say you want and what you actually want are two different things. It hardly ever corresponds on a dating site. So I just track a user and see what they're actually doing on the site and then show them matches based on their actual surfing preferences. My site is deceptively simple but no one knows just how complex it is under the surface.

Let's go on to the final question. What's your advice for other Web 2.0 start up web entrepreneur's about making money?
Build something useful, simple in ways that people will use. Explore things like Ad Sense, affiliate programs, and just explore ways of making money. Most 2.0 companies will never make a dime and they're not built to make a dime. So I would start looking at how to make money before you even design or think about starting a business. 

So what are your goals for 2006 through 2007?
I really don't plan more then three months ahead. Everything always changes constantly but I suppose it would be to incorporate social networking features and to stop Myspace and Facebook from taking over the dating industry. Myspace has 15 million unique log in's a day. The entire dating industry in this space has maybe a million to a million and a half.  And from the polls I've taken on my site, something like 30% of the people use Myspace…the same people who are using the paid dating sites.  User psychology is very weird. People on Myspace say they're not just there to date but actually that's what most of them are there looking for. 

OPW Interview - Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales

OPW INTERVIEW -- June 25 -- Strange things happen when you empower people. Myspace allowed users to create freeform profiles…85 million users later, Fox has their arms wrapped around them. Linux asked for a little help with a new OS. Jimmy Wales pondered on the wealth of the worlds encyclopedias, and set the framework for a new, open encyclopedia. Here's the story of Wikipedia. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. How can you empower YOUR online personals site users more?  Have faith, step back, you might be surprised what happens. – Mark Brooks

What's  your personal story?
One of the interesting things, I guess, is when I was growing up, I had a fairly unusual education. My mother and grandmother had a small private school and there were four kids in my grade, 1st through 8th grade. In fact, what they did was they grouped us into two groups, so 1st through 4th grade, and 5th through 8th grade. There were about 16 kids in the classroom but at different levels. So that enabled us to work at whatever different levels we were interested in. We had a very open-ended time schedule and we were able to just study and learn whatever we wanted. I spent a lot of time pawing over the encyclopedia. Self-directed learning has always been a part of my upbringing.

I was in grad school studying financial economics and did PHD coursework, but I never did finish the PHD. I got an interesting job in Chicago as a trader. When I was in grad school I started looking at the Internet and looking at free licensing software. I was watching the growth of the free software movement. At first I was skeptical but then we saw that very high quality software was being created. All the software that really runs the Internet is Apache, Linux, PHP, it's all free licensed software that's written primarily by volunteers, programmers just working together collaboratively. So that was really the genesis of the idea for a free encyclopedia, to get a bunch of people together to collaborate on something useful. We've seen them do it in the software world and it works so, let's do the same thing with encyclopedias.

Was there one particular turning point for you?  When was Wikipedia started?
Wikipedia was started in January 2001. Before this, for two years, I had the previous project Newpedia. Newpedia was a completely different social model. It was very top down, very structured, very hierarchical – seven stage review process for articles, academic committees and so forth. And it was also a failure. It was a failure because it wasn't very fun for the volunteers. It was way too heavy in terms of controls and mechanisms and that's actually one of the things, as you said, Wikipedia was intuitive but it was born out of really a reaction against that.

In the Newpedia days we engaged in a lot of thinking about how to control things, how to make sure nothing bad got in. Wikipedia goes in totally the opposite way. So I said, "Let's just be as open as possible. Let's rely on accountability rather then gate keeping." By that I mean, every edit is visible, every edit is trackable to your account, people can see what you're doing, so there's that public oversight of the work that the community does. Wikipedia is really a reaction against the gatekeeper approach, which was to say, "we'll just make sure that only good people are involved and that people know what they're talking about before they get started." That was the gatekeeper model, which didn't work.

Did the information drastically improve on Wikipedia at a certain point, once you had a critical mass of contributors?
It's not about the number of people, it's about the quality of the individuals who are working on Wikipedia. We had more work done in two weeks on Wikipedia than we had done in two years on Newpedia. Even in the very early days, there was some pretty good articles, within a couple of weeks, where people got excited and edited together and kept adding information and rewriting and smoothing out, and then it just kept growing from there. I can't really point to any particular point and say, "Once we had this, then we were that." It grows and improves over time.

Is what you've created at Wikipedia magic, or is it reproducible?
I think the core principles are reproducible. You've got to think really hard about being in a social environment that's friendly and polite and helpful. Of course, with humans it's never perfect,there's always some fighting and things going on. There's always some sort of drama going on in the community.

Craigslist is a fine example. It's a community of friendly, helpful people who help each other out. And then, of course, I now have my company Wikia and people are building communities there using the same software (hosted) that Wikipedia is built on, but it isn't encyclopedias. It can be anything, political, fan sites, whatever, and those communities are also seeming to be very successful. I think it is reproducible.

I think that what we're going through right now is a period of learning about how to design software that let's people interact in friendly ways online. A lot of behaviors online, bad behaviors, come from incentives that are implicitly in the software that people don't necessarily notice. So a lot of my thinking about these kinds of issues is how do we keep the software in a state that encourages good work and gives a means of deflecting negative energy.

How do you make money?  Why did you go non-profit with Wikipedia?
So Wikipedia started sort of on the side as a hobby and it just became bigger and bigger and there was a real demand from the volunteers that it be a non-profit. The idea of a free, neutral, high quality encyclopedia as a reference standard, written by a community…it just seemed to make sense as a charitable project.

I now get a salary from my work at Wikia, so that's how I make money. And then the foundation gets money primarily from small donations. So the bulk of the money that we get is $50 to $100, or 50 to 100 Euro. It's basically thousands of small donations that pay the bills and keep us going.

You're building an incredible reference to a world of information. Are you friends with Google?
Yeah, I mean I talk to people at Google. Of course, there are tons of people at Google who are fans of Wikipedia. We don't have any kind of formal business relationship or anything like that with Google.

What does the future hold for Wikipedia? What partnerships are you looking for in 2006 through 2007?
We just announced that we hired an Executive Director for the foundation. We're trying to mature the organization. Our organization is very small and a little chaotic because we're swamped all the time with all the crazy stuff that's going on with Wikipedia growing so fast. The main kinds of partnerships we're pursuing are around helping people to reuse our content commercially or non-commercially, so that involves us taking a careful look at how it can be used that are consistent with our community values. You should take a look at http://personals.wikia.com. It's not very active but it's kind of interesting. There's a few people working on. It's very limited at the moment but they're basically thinking about how to do personals in a community way.  An open ended system. It's a neat experiment.

Mark Brooks: Wikipedia is modeled on the ancient campfire; the wise sharing information with the community around them. Jimmy knows open learning. He grew up in an open learning environment. It took that immersion in freeform thinking to drive the creation of the radical, rather counterintuitive Wikipedia. Web 2.0 will model (and improve on) many of the social dynamics that we experience in the real world. At the core of some of the best rising star web sites are two common themes. Trust and empowerment. (Wikia, Jotspot and Wetpaint are the top hosted wiki services available to the public).

OPW Interview - Peter Ward, Co-founder WAYN

OPW INTERVIEW -- June 16 -- WAYN.com is unique as a social network. They are successful and are making money with a paid VIP membership. Here’s my recent interview with WAYN.com Director/co-founder Peter Ward. - Mark Brooks   

How is WAYN different from other social networks?
WAYN has always been aimed at trying to differentiate itself from its competitors. We are based on locations, travel and people's whereabouts. Second, we are a premium social networking website service.  We offer a premium paid membership; 7 pounds 50 a month through 60 pounds a year for the VIP membership offering. Whether a user chooses to upgrade or not there is still a justifiable reason for using the service, which means we get the best of both worlds where we can trade a lot of traffic. 

How did you start WAYN?
WAYN was the vision of my colleague and good friend Jerome Touze, who came up with the initial idea when he was traveling on the Pacific Highway on the West Coast of the U.S. with some friends.  He just had a brain wave. Given that you meet so many fantastic people on your travels, wouldn't it be great to have a website where you can see where all your friends are at any given time. Jerome mulled over the idea and when he came back to the U.K., after we both had our year out to travel, he finally upped and told me about the initial idea. Of course, I'd just been vacationing around the world for one year, so I immediately related to that and suggested that we meet up over a beer to discuss it in more detail. We met up in Poland and in Marseille to brainstorm and brought it to one of my good friends, Mike Lines, who at the time, was the Systems Manager for Friends Reunited. We obviously needed somebody to build the website. We developed the proposition to a point where we could pitch it to Stephen Pankhurst, founder of Friends Reunited. He immediately fell in love with the idea and agreed to give us initial investment capital. We incorporated in September 2002 and went live in May, 2003. We then spent the next year and a half or so tweaking, testing, customizing, and improving the overall customer experience. 

WAYN has a paid membership level. What was the thinking behind this?
On the basis of advice received from Steve, we decided to implement a paying membership service offering. He felt that this was something that was crucial in order to ensure that we have a profitable and viable business model. We tailored the service around how we could differentiate ourselves from our competitors by setting up a premium service. It wasn't until March 2005 that we really hit the point of critical mass. In March 2005, we had 45,000 registered. Now we have almost 5 million members. We grew by over 400,000 last month alone.

How did the site grow so quickly?
First of all, the idea was to set up the service which allows you to keep track of your friends from around the world based on where you've been, where you are now and where you're going. We realized that the real value was to combine that with the ability to make new friends. Different people from different places. And, of course, if you plan a trip in the future wouldn't it be great to see who else is going to be in the same place as you. Say, if you're going to San Francisco in two months time, you could actually make some friends who are also from say London and hang out with them while you're there.

Does advertising work for growing social networks?
I think actually that it probably does if you have a good visibility over your customer acquisition costs.  There is also an argument that says it can work in terms of developing a brand. One of the most important things in business is to create a trusting and well recognized brand and advertising can help play a part in that. 

How is the membership program working out?
The membership program is working well for us. We are seeing membership numbers rise and we see a huge opportunity to increase that number over time by providing more payment mechanisms as well as more services which can be added on top of the existing membership platform.

Users can SMS each other through WAYN.  How is the SMS option working out?
SMS as you know has been very popular in Europe and is a very well understood method of interacting.   But interestingly, in the last few months we've seen an increase in the U.S. I think there's a lot of interesting talk about mobile content, a lot of investment, and a lot of hype. I think clearly the future is there. We're seeing a lot of the new handheld devices coming out, which are going to support access to the Internet. The key is to provide customers with a service that's useful and relevant. SMS has a lot more opportunity to grow before we even reach for web enabled or download-able outlets.

What's the future of social networking?
I think the social networking space is at a point of critical mass already. There are so many providers trying to take a piece of the action. Some of the traditional ways that social networks have grown to popularity are becoming diminished in value. Everyone has received an invitation from their friend inviting them to join one site or another. People are quite familiar with the services that are out there today and are trying to just understand what the best type of service for them is. The next wave of social networks will be very focused networks on target audiences, whether it'd be farmers or people who are interested in flying planes.

What are your plans for 2006 through 2007?
As you know in the Web 2.0 world things move at the speed of light and we're always trying to keep ahead of the game. One of the things that we're looking into is how we can set up a closed social network, which is secure, for the teenage market. The service will be only for those between the ages of 13 and 19, will be by invitation only and only existing contacts will be able to contact each other by default. So watch out for that one. Also, we're developing more advanced tagging for photos and we will provide our members with the ability to show streaming video, and to customize their profiles, with a focus on travel and lifestyle. We're doing a number of other things to strengthen our brand position in the travel and lifestyle sector and are looking to partner with some of the leading players in that space. We want to be the number one online membership community for those interested in travel and lifestyle. Social networking is a very exciting industry to be involved in and we couldn't have been in it at a better time. Good luck to all the people who are trying to be winners in this space.

OPW Interview - Nate Elliott, Jupiter Research

OPW INTERVIEW -- June 9 -- You’ll often see Nate Elliott (and David Card) cited in the press. Nate works for Jupiter Research and is a leading analyst for the online personals industry (internet dating and social networking). Here’s my interview with Nate…  -  Mark Brooks

Who’s numbers does Jupiter Research use these days?  Do you use ComScore?
No, it’s generally all of our own numbers.  A lot of those numbers come from consumer surveys both in the U.S. and in Europe. In the U.S., we run more then a dozen consumer surveys every year and in Europe we run several per year as well covering the six major European markets. In addition, we have access to ComScore data that we sometimes use supplementally. But typically, we just use that data to double check what we get back from our surveys. In addition, based upon our survey data and executive interviews, as well as, publicly available information, we craft forecasts for the online dating industry in the U.S. and 17 European countries for the next five years.

How does the European online dating market look?
It’s doing very well. It’s still growing pretty strongly and we see it continuing to get stronger over the next several years. Similar to the U.S. market, the European market is starting to slow down. The good news is we don’t see the sudden slow down happening in Europe that happened in the U.S. In the U.S., we went from nearly 80% growth to less then 10% growth over the course of two years. In Europe, the transition will be much more gradual in large part due to the fact that we’re dealing with several markets instead of one single market and the fact that there are several markets across Europe that are maturing at different rates. That will help insulate the industry from the kind of sudden slowdown that the U.S. industry has seen.

What is the fastest growing market in Europe?
Well we look at Southern Europe as the fastest growing region within the online dating market. In particular the Italian market will more then triple between 2005 and 2009. It will be the fastest growing market in Europe over that period of time. The Portuguese market is also going to grow very quickly.  Overall, we see the online dating market in Europe more then doubling between 2005 and 2009.

Which services do you think will be most successful in the future?
The ones that are successful today in terms of revenue and users, and I respect that they’ll continue to be very successful, are Match.com and Meetic. They appear to be just about neck and neck in terms of revenues. Having spoken with them, I think they both have intelligent strategies to try and grow their business as this market starts to slow down a little bit. So certainly those two would be the most notable and they would be the ones that everyone has to keep their eye on.

Are there any notable and fast growing social networks in Europe?
There are a handful but I think it’s important to distinguish between social networks and online dating sites. We have more data out of the U.S. than we do in Europe because the social networking phenomenon is stronger in the U.S. then it is in Europe. But generally speaking, our surveys indicate that online consumers are not interested in using social networks to find a date. We’ve also found that online daters don’t leave dating sites for social networks. When we ask online consumers what functions of a social network are interesting to them and what functions they’re using, finding date’s scores very low?  Most people, in fact, like to communicate with their existing friends on social networking sites.  It’s more about people talking to the folks they already know, than going out and meeting new people. 

Where do you see mobile dating going in Europe and the USA?
Well, mobile dating is really interesting. I’m as interested as anyone else to see if any of the online dating sites can turn mobile dating into a serious stream of revenue. One of the slightly disturbing things we’ve seen from Meetic’s public statements is that their mobile dating revenues have actually declined as a percentage of their overall revenues over the past couple of years.  Now, in part, that’s because their overall revenues have grown very aggressively and their mobile dating revenues have been growing less quickly. I’m not sure the dating sites can count on it as a serious revenue driver over the next several years but I absolutely encourage the sites to look at the mobile platform and be well positioned in the future, if it does turn into a revenue stream. In the mean time, it certainly is an interesting way to drive people back to their website, which is where they make their money. 

How about video dating? Is there a future?
We don’t have a lot of data on people who are interested in video dating. The last time we asked that question in a survey was about two years ago and we saw very low interest at that point in time. It stands to reason that interest would have gone up just a little bit over the last couple of years but speaking from personal opinion, I can’t see video becoming a very important part of online dating over the next several years. If you remove a level of control from online daters about what their appearance is, I think a lot daters will be cautious about using webcams. For that reason alone, I think the uptake might not be significant for video dating, but again, we don’t have a lot of recent data on it.

What overarching trends are you seeing? What’s hot?
All the prices have gone up at the dating sites over the last year and a half. It’s more of an issue in the U.S. where user growth has slowed to a crawl.  To continue growing revenues they have to raise prices.  Yahoo Personals went from $20 to $25 to $40 depending on which service you take. These prices aren’t high but they’re higher then they used to be and I think in some cases they’ve become a bit too high.  As a result, you see fewer users who browse online personals. So, certainly raising prices is one way to generate more revenue from the consumers and it does increase the average revenue per user but if it comes at the expense of growing your main user base, then that’s a concern. I think there is an opportunity right now for some companies to come in and undercut the leaders. Dating sites that are sort of on the second or third tier, that are looking to challenge the leaders, may take advantage of the high prices that the leaders are currently charging, either by permanently undercutting the leaders or offering more creative pricing. 

One of the things that we’ve seen out of the U.K. that we like is the short term subscription. At Dating Direct you can subscribe for just a couple of days for a reduced price. It gives you a chance to communicate with someone; it gives you a chance to reach out to someone if you like a profile without making a large financial commitment.  But by registering for just a couple of days, for about the price of a drink or two in a bar, you’re potentially widening the number of people who would be willing to pay for your services.

What message would you like to leave the executives with?
The good news is, the industry is growing. Even at this stage where we’re seeing a few bombs in terms of use, it’s a big industry, it keeps on growing, and largely the services are doing things right. It’s just a question of defining strategies and growing the paid user base. I look forward to watching the leading data sites refine their strategies and seeing their continued growth as an industry.

OPW Interview - Adam Small, CMO of Sexsearch

OPW INTERVIEW -- May 28 -- Sexsearch is different. It's glossy, sexy and growing gangbusters. The casual dating and, at the other end of the spectrum, serious/relationship dating segments are growing ever stronger. Sexsearch has been barreling along for a couple of years now. Now they are second only to AdultFriendFinder in the casual/adult segment. I interviewed (ex-Yahoo) Adam Small who is CMO of Sexsearch. - Mark Brooks

What’s your story Adam?
After school I moved to New York City and I worked as a financial manager for Prudential. From there I decided I wanted to run my own company and I started a website for college students which was called CollegeU and we ran a discount card program for students and local businesses. I had a friend who was working at Yahoo, and he convinced me to join Yahoo in New York, where I worked for a number of years. I worked with clients such as Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, American Express. I met Damian, the owner of my current company through some of my Yahoo friends and decided to move to Toronto to start building SexSearch.

What's the Sexsearch story?
Sexsearch took us one and half year s to build...and we launched it in January a little over two years ago. We knew how well dating did, we had worked with Adult Friend Finder and we actually approach them to see if we could do more marketing for them but they weren‘t interested in allowing us to have a private label site at the time. So, we decided to build our own dating site with an adult twist to it. We liked certain aspects of what they had and we added all our own bells and whistles and gave the site a unique design with a more straight-to-the-point focus.   

Who is your target market?
Our target market is anyone over the age of 21 who is interested in sex...which is almost everybody. Other personals sites beat around the bush. We get straight to the point. We know that there‘s lot of people out there who are interested in sex.

How many members do you have now?
We have a little over 6.5 million registered users...and it’s growing fast! 

Are online personal users moving more towards casual dating sites or towards relationship dating sites?
I think online personals users are moving towards lot of different niche dating sites and I think they are definitely moving more towards casual dating sites. We‘ve seen a big increase in the number of members and I know there’s been a decline with some of our main stream competitors. So, I definitely see a trend of users moving more towards casual dating sites like SexSearch. 

What do you have in store for SexSearch?
Towards the end of the summer we will be launching private labels capability, which will allow us to launch more sites for ourselves, such as a mainstream dating site with an edge, of course. We will also launch a gay dating site. Offering private label sites will give us the ability to do deals with other companies who are interested in using our very established database and back-end to offer their own dating site.

Online Personals Watch Interview - Craigslist Founder, Craig Newmark

OPW INTERVIEW -- Apr 21 -- Craig Newmark is the founder of Craigslist.  He has built a powerhouse of a site on sheer utility, pure goodwill, and a groundswell of viral word-of mouth.  Craigslist is a phenomonen and Craig is one of my personal heroes. 

Why did you start Craigslist?
In 1994, I was at Charles Schwab; I was evangelizing the net for the brokerage industry.  I saw a lot of people helping each other out and I figured I should do some of that.  So, in early 1995, I started a simple 'cc' list telling friends about arts and technology events, and that was the beginning of Craigslist.  People asked for more stuff on the list and I did that and I got more feedback and I did that, and that's how it is today.  We talk to people, we find out what's needed, what's useful, and we do it.

Just how popular is it now?
We seem to be getting about 4 billion page views a month and we're in a little over 200 cities, in five countries with 8 million posts per month.

How is the international growth coming along?
It's slow but steady.  We are not where we want to be in terms of multiple language support.  But, word of mouth works and we're growing.

Why not charge for personals?
Five or so years ago, I asked people what it was they'd like us to charge for. The answer was to charge those people who would otherwise be paying more, for less effective advertising.  The consensus was to specifically charge for real estate and job postings.  So we charge brokers and recruiters and soon will charge apartment brokers for rental listings in NYC; although they specifically asked us to charge them to improve quality by reducing redundancy.  People have suggested we charge for personals as a way to improve quality; but there's no consensus.

What prompted the creation of the casual encounters, more racy personals section?
People saw that racy ads were being posted in the more conventional sections and people suggested we trade an alternative to get the racy ads focused in one or two places.  And that's been effective.

Have you been surprised by some of the posts?
These days, after about 13 years in San Francisco and going to the Fulsom Street Fair; not much surprises me.

What do you have in store for Craigslist and for the personals section in 2006?
We do need to improve customer service by giving more power to the people who use our site.  People can help us out by flagging inappropriate ads for removal.  We are driven by the culture of trust we've developed with our communities and that's another reason why I personally do full time customer service and I intend to do substantial customer service only as long as I live, after that, it's over !!

Online Personals Watch Interview - FriendFinder Founder, Dr. Andrew Conru

OPW INTERVIEW -- Apr 17 -- The FriendFinder network is huge.  The biggest sites in the network are AdultFriendFinder, AsiaFriendFinder, Amigos and FriendFinder and Alt.  I interview the founder, Dr Andrew Conru, whom I used to work for back in 2003. - Mark Brooks

What's your background Andrew?
Back in the Midwest, where I'm from, I was into computers since the early '80s. I kind of devoured degree programs for a while -- I studied for twin B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Economics at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and went straight on through the M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. After that I went to Stanford, which is where, in 1993, the internet got into my blood. I started a number of internet companies on the way to finishing my Ph.D. (1997) in Mechanical Engineering Design.

What inspired you to start Friendfinder?
In 1994, I started the first online dating site, WebPersonals.com. It did well, but with all the new technologies that were around, I felt I could do it again in a better way. It took me till 1996 to start FriendFinder.  I wanted a sophisticated site, more of an online community, where dating was just one of many options (hence the name FriendFinder).  But it quickly became obvious that dating was the prime motivation for our members, and so we evolved into a site that zeroed in on dating objectives.

...And Adultfriendfinder?
Shortly after we went online with FriendFinder, people started posting explicit photos that pushed the envelope of a friendly dating site. Our first response was simply to delete profiles with explicit photos in them. Later on, instead of fighting the persistent trend, we decided to go with it, and we created a new site called AdultFriendFinder. It started out as a kind of release valve for the more erotic adventurers. But it was so well received, it just grew like kudzu from there. 

What will the online dating industry look like in 5 years time?
We've seen a huge transition in the last 10 years about what online dating means.  When it first came out, it served the same function as print ads -- and unfortunately it carried the same stigma. Since then it has really blossomed into an accepted way of interacting and meeting other people. I think that groundwork really helped set us up for the next 5 years growth in which the online dating site will enhance the sense of community by offering member interactions over a wider variety of media, and of course on a more instantaneous basis. 

Spark Networks recently acquired the Minglematch group of niche dating sites and are pursuing a similar model to Friendfinder.  What challenges will they face?
Initially, they would probably expect to leverage software development across all their sites, but they will be faced with having to be an expert on their different communities.  Without that specialized expertise, the communities face dwindling odds for success.  And that creates the first major challenge. They have to become experts in each "culture" and also experts in the ways to advertise and brand and market to each of the different niches. Since each of our new sites was a response to some demand by our members, we've sort of grown up with our communities over the past ten years.  I think that's partly why we do well in each niche community.

Do you plan to embrace voice on the net in your communities?
I think there is a general trend for online community and dating sites to be much more immediate, i.e. real time communication between people.  We have, for the last year or so, offered two-way communication with both video and audio between our members.  We have investigated a number of software technologies from service providers that would enable us to offer anonymous phone communications.  But, we find that people are still a bit hesitant to give out phone numbers over the internet.

What are your views on background checks, and background checks legislation?
We've always promoted our members' ability to validate their information. Many years ago, we came out with a site called ComfirmID.  It was the first time ever that an online dating site integrated a third party info-verification system, and it's 100% voluntary. This gives members the maximum choice as to how they handle security issues. As for requiring someone to disclose personally identifiable information simply to participate in an open forum, that goes against the philosophy of internet encounters, both in terms of privacy and in terms of an open door policy in which anyone can participate. It would be like requiring background checks before being admitted to a local dance or a popular mall. In short, we feel background checks are totally inappropriate for online communities.   

What kind of business development opportunities are you looking for now?
Mobile technology. We're working to put our sites ahead of the curve and deliver our members a cutting edge user experience. Of course, we're always looking for possible dating site acquisitions, and for partnerships with companies that have other community websites that might not be related to online dating.

What does 2006 hold for FriendFinder
Last year we spent our time primarily integrating a number of acquisitions that we completed last year.  Our chief focus this year, in addition to looking for additional acquisitions, is to improve our offerings across the FriendFinder network and improve the effectiveness of our interface.

Online Personals Watch Interview, Michael Birch, CEO Bebo.com

OPW INTERVIEW -- Mar 31 -- Michael Birch is the driving force and chief architect behind six community Web sites over the last decade. He launched his latest venture, Bebo.com, with his wife and brother in 2005. In seven months it attracted 22 million members and ranked as the largest social networking site for students in the U.K. Prior to Bebo he started Ringo.com, one of the first social networking sites, which was sold to Tickle.com. Birch earned his BS degree in Physics from Imperial College, London.  Now he has his sites on the U.S.!  Here's BEBOs story... - Mark Brooks

What is  BEBO's founding story?
BEBO was started in January, 2005 as a photo sharing - contact sharing website and we re-launched it in June 2005 as a social network.  I met my wife, Xochi, at the original site, a bar, in the UK when she was studying abroad and I was in college in the UK.  We thought it would be cool to create a social networking site around a global community of students in English speaking countries, and so that led to Bebo.  It proved very early on to be very popular with universities, colleges and schools, particularly in the UK, Ireland,  US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.   

How big is BEBO now and how did you get it to grow so quickly?
BEBO has a total of 23 million registered members.  We're turning about 60 million page views a day and it's growing purely through word of mouth. We're growing incredibly quickly, setting new page view records every week now.  We've never done any marketing. The key to the success has really been creating a product that has proven to be popular. We spent a lot of time thinking before we started developing a product, how it should work and how to make it popular and what features to include and as importantly, what features to exclude from the finished product.  All the sites we've worked on in the past have always been focused on word of mouth marketing so that's kind of been our specialty.  We initially took that approach simply because we had no money to spend on marketing and word of mouth marketing is a
matter of time rather than money to get it right.

What other sites have you worked on in the past ?
We worked on a number of them since 1999.  It's been a matter of learning through trial and error.  So, we did 3 sites in the early days which had a mixed degree of success but never had the kind of exponential growth that's so critical.  The first one that actually took off was BirthdayAlarm.com, which is the web's largest birthday reminder service with eCards.  We monetized it, and with reminders as well as eCards it seemed to be very viable.  The second site that was successful was Ringo.com in 2003; Birthday Alarm was 2001.  Ringo was a very early social network.  We actually launched it 13 days following the day we heard about Friendster.  We started negotiating to sell the website 3 months later .  It was 6-months from launch to closing the sale-a very stressful time.  It took off very quickly, and after 2 months we had over 400,000 members.  At the time, Friendster had a million members.  We were second largest in the market at the time.  The reason we sold it, was that it was growing so quickly that we either had to get a VC or we had to sell it.  We couldn't afford to scale it.  We weren't profitable with Birthday Alarm at that time, the way we are now.

Why is BEBO better than MySpace or Friendster ?
The advantage of being late in the market is you have the benefit of hindsight.  So we managed to apply everything we learned from Ringo and analyzed what was and wasn't successful on Myspace.  So it was really just getting the product right and the subtle details of the product that make it work.  One of the major distinguishing factors is that from the start we've focused on schools and universities in 6 key English speaking countries-US, UK, IE, CA, AU & NZ.  Also. we offered, from the very beginning, unlimited
photo uploads.  I think we were the first social network to actually have no limitations on photos.   The other thing is that we offer the 'White Board,' where you can actually draw directly onto your home page.  The third is that we allow customizations through skins, rather than people having to write their own HTML to customize their page.  They can select new skins and their page can be updated through a click of a mouse.  We've struck the right balance between customization and personalization, without allowing members to break pages and create a bad user experience.   Bebo is fundamentally different from anything else that's come before it.

How do you see social networking evolving and where is the money to be made?
We're still in the relatively early days of social networking and if you look at the rate at which social networks are growing today, they are growing faster than they ever have.  Friendster was considered in the early days to be a fad, and now social networks are a huge order of magnitude larger than they were 3 years ago.  I think they still have a long way to go.  They are becoming much more, and will continue to be much more of a utility over time rather than being a pure gimmick, they're actually providing a genuine benefit.  For example, Bebo is a cultural phenomenon in Ireland, and a Beboer contacted us from Ireland and told us that before Bebo, the folks in his small town in Ireland were not getting along, and then everyone independently joined BEBO, and thanks to Bebo, they got to know each other and their friend's friends, and now there's a community spirit in the town pub that wasn't there before BEBO. 

In terms of making money, the leaders in the social networking space, to date, have been rather uncreative.  It's very early in this process and social networking creates a new advertising mechanism for brands to reach the tough to reach 13 to 30 year old demographic who are spending more time online and skipping TV commercials with TIVO.  Also, major brands will be able to do amazing word of mouth marketing campaigns on social networking sites that are only possible to do on social networking sites because influencers are already connected to all their friends.which makes the word of mouth that much easier.  But, you've got to engage this audience which means doing much more than the traditional banner advertising that's still the common form of advertising on SN sites.   

So, I think the income breakthrough hasn't happened with social networks yet, but it will happen in time.  The likely direction that will take will be with product sponsorships and product placements rather than traditional banner advertising.  The advertising and promotion needs to be more integrated into the social network itself, and targeted.  And, we're beginning to go in that direction with Bebo.

How is the partnership with Skype working out and was it the uptake like?
Skype is proving to be very popular on BEBO. We faced the option of developing that feature in-house, which is by no means a trivial application to develop, or to do it in partnership with someone else, so we chose Skype. Since we launched this co-branded partnership with Skype 3 months ago, 360,000 Beboers have added the Skype/Bebo co-brand to their homepage; and we're seeing 6,000 new Skype/Bebo registrations each day now.. 

What do you have in store for 2006-2007?
That's a long way ahead in terms of social networking.  The product road map is very aggressive.  We are aiming to making an improvement every week; which may be just a small feature or a major release.  We're doing this very carefully because we don't want to add features which are not popular.   One of the major features coming up is a music product.  We've been taking time to do this because we want to do this the right way and make sure we have the very best of breed. 

We're growing phenomenally quickly in the UK and Ireland.  I haven't actually seen the official figures, but the internal figures show that we're the largest single website in Ireland.  I'm doing radio interviews literally every day with radio stations in Ireland about the phenomenal growth of BEBO.  In the UK, we are probably ranked 25th in terms of overall websites, but we're growing at about 10% a week.  In the U.S. we are growing at a similar rate.   Our focus has been on the UK and Irish markets, and we're now just turning our attention to the US market as well.

Online Personals Watch Interview, Mike Jones, CEO of Userplane

OPW INTERVIEW -- Mar 24 -- Mike Jones is a regular at the internet dating conventions and has the respect of the online personals industry as a pioneer, and inimitably likable fellow.  I interviewed him to find out more about Userplane and what he has in store. - Mark Brooks

What does Userplane do?
Userplane provides software communication tools focusing on audio and video for online communities with a specific focus in online dating.

When and how was the company started?
Userplane was founded 5 ½ years ago.  We originally did custom software development for Fortune 500 brands and then migrated into building our own software development platform, 2 years in.  We focused on developing instant messaging systems, multi-user chat and audio/video profiling component.   When those operations were initially released, we experimented with a few of our market places and found that online communities were a particular sweet spot for what we had developed.  There is a huge importance for anonymity and privacy control and dating sites at that point didn’t really have any good live communication applications that were working well.  Our applications were driven to solve that problem.

What are the most popular products/services for online personals companies?
Our instant messaging applications.  If you’re a relatively small site or medium sized site and don’t have too many people online at one given time, instant messaging is a nice way to give a smaller userbase more presence.  If you’re using chat, you really need to focus chat around times or events.  Instant messaging is more flexible to work with either small or large communities.  We have also found that instant messaging becomes such a key component on the progression of a relationship.  Someone might initially start on browsing profiles, then emailing, then jump into an anonymous instant messaging session and then go to an anonymous call feature, which is something we’re about to release.  Then, after the anonymous call, they’d actually progress to a real world date.  So, we’ve formulated all of our tools to assist users with these intermediary steps between browsing profiles online and actually meeting someone in the real world.

Why would an online personals company want to use Userplane rather than develop their own in-house solution?
I think typically, the instant messaging, chat and video profile systems are sophisticated enough applications, that it requires some dedicated developers.  And if you look at Userplane’s pricing structure, even the extremely large client is not paying Userplane that much money.  So, there’s rarely a time when a bill with one of our clients is larger than hiring an internal developer and maintaining the IT infrastructure needed.  We definitely will save companies money if they utilize our tool as opposed to developing in-house.  Beyond that, we’re building stronger products than can be built in-house.  We’re leveraging knowledge across a whole wide variety of different websites and a huge volume of users ranging from MySpace all the way down to a start up dating site.  We are applying all that knowledge into our applications.  Our customers are receiving a dedicated development team, which is developing more and more communication tools for them without them even having to worry about it.  We are releasing a desktop component that is a whole new system for a dating site. 

Where do you expect to see the biggest growth in the online personals industry over the coming year?
We’ve been splitting our focus between two worlds; online dating and the Web 2.0 community world.  I think those two worlds will drastically collide.  You’re going to see a huge influx of intelligence in search engine friendly and  Web 2.0 websites that will basically add on online dating to their already existing communities and will do that for free.  They will be monetized from advertising, micro transactions and premium features.  I have a feeling that whether it is this year or next year, it will be something that affects the online dating market place in a good way and bad way.  More ‘interest’ based niches will begin as opposed to religious or ethnic based niches, such as fitnesssingles.com versus JDate.  We are also seeing an increase in premium rate features and memberships.  Sites are typically not doing anything that has tiers of memberships where you have a junior level member or a senior level member with access to some better features.  We believe a lot of free sites will be introducing these multi-tiered premium memberships into the marketplace.  I believe that when that comes out it will affect online dating dramatically and will increase the market size.  Just as people are finding with mobile dating, cell phone manufacturers have been the masters of charging incremental amounts for small volumes of communications and there’s quite a few dating sites and online communities, in general that are thinking the same way… i.e. if I want instant messaging, I’ll have to pay ‘X’ and if I want access to video profiles, I’ll have to pay ‘Y’.  Our tools are set up to enhance that model, but we haven’t seen a lot of companies in the past that embraced that.  Recently we have had a wave of new interest.

What are your plans for Userplane through 2007?
We have a lot of product we are putting out, and we are dealing quite a bit with interoperability between different instant messaging networks, which will make a lot of sense to certain dating sites.  We’re doing it in a very different way…it will actually be a real ‘aha’ for dating sites.  We are working very hard on a new desktop piece, which should be out in the next month or two.  Again, I think this will be another big ‘aha’; we’re going to be giving a lot of functions and features to dating sites at a very low cost.  The goal is that everything we do is enhancing their community, enhancing the user communication, allowing our clients to drive more revenue.

Online Personals Watch Interview, CEO of Webdate, Abe Smilowitz

OPW INTERVIEW -- Mar 15 -- Webdate is blazing a trail with it's webcam based dating and mobile dating platform.  It's taking a futuristic position.  I caught up with Abe Smilowitz, CEO of Webdate...

What is webdating?
Webdating is the new safe and secure way to date where two individuals can go on their first date online using our patented video chat. They have the ability to meet each other and get a feel for each other’s personality and get to know each other a little better before they take it offline.With ‘webdating,’ you get a feel for chemistry and the ability to pinpoint each other’s personality and character; you can see them, see how they smile, see how they move and this gives you insight into what that person is really like as opposed to just reading a typed profile or chat with them on IM which is less personal.

What proportion of your membership is actively using webcams for webdating these days?
80% of our users have used videochat. At any given time, there are abut 1000 - 1500 people using webcams at one point or another. Webcams are inexpensive and easy to purchase these days. They usually run about $30.

Webdate is channel agnostic? What's that mean?
Users are able to meet in a variety of ways and methods. They are able to communicate and interact with each other online as well as through their mobile phones. Actually, they are able to interact from their mobile phones with people online as well. So, a user that is on their mobile phone can interact with people online at any given time. We allow users to interact with a variety of different methods and communicate regardless of what type of technology they have whether it be mobile or internet.

What cell phone carriers are you on deck with now?
We use Sprint, Nextel, US Cellular and Boost. We also are about to add Cricket and will launch with a major/top 3 carrier; but I’m not at liberty to announce that just yet.

Do you think mobile dating will overtake online dating one day?
No – I think they will work together. One won’t take over the other. I think there will definitely be more growth in mobile dating than the online stage. The online stage is more of a mature market place. The mobile area is starting to grow and hasn’t met its maturity level. It’s still a virgin market.

What are your estimates for the 2006 mobile dating market size?
It’s such an emerging market place…and it really depends on what deck placement you get and and what kind of compatibility you get with handsets. It’s difficult to estimate the market revenue for 2006; however, in the near future, I feel it will be in the billions of dollars in the mobile Space. Everyone has a mobile phone and not everyone has a computer or internet access. Cell Phone companies are giving out internet ready phones now, so as more people are renewing their contracts and time goes by, everyone is potentially a customer. Online is a different experience; you need a computer, high speed internet access…or dial-up. The cell phone market potentially has far more reach than online does.

What are you plans for webdate in 2006?
We will expand our global and online reach and work on some other projects that I cannot mention at this time.

Online Personals Watch Interview, General Manager of Research, Hitwise

OPW Interview -- Mar 8 -- The online personals market analysis companies that are quoted most often in the press are Comscore, Jupiter, Nielsen and Hitwise.  (I list the top 15 online personals site rankings from Comscore, Nielsen//Netratings and Hitwise on Online Personals Watch each month.  See the left bar.)  Hitwise has grown agressively over the last couple of years in the US.  You'll see Bill Tancer quoted in the press as GM Research for Hitwise.  Here's a more in depth interview with him on Hitwise and the online personals market. -Mark Brooks

What's your background Bill?
I've been at Hitwise for two years and I'm the General Manager of the Global Research Group.  Before that I was the Director of Research at Looksmart. Prior to that, I headed up various market research groups at NBC internet, SNAP and Zaplet.  I also was a consultant for the Gartner Group covering the internet space before the dotcom boom.  Before that I was a trial lawyer in the US Navy.  I was always fascinated with technology.  In the Navy I was one of the first lawyers who used MILNET for email.  It was a one day round trip for a message.  The response would come into the communications department where an MP would take the response and put it on floppy disk and drive it to me. It was in 1995, after I moved to California and had finished my Navy commitment that I decided I wanted to work in the internet space.

Tell me more about your role at Hitwise?
I'm the GM of Global Research Group and head a team of analysts in Australia, UK and the U.S.  We have a couple of primary objectives for the research group.  Our first objective is to raise awareness for the company and for the concept of online competitive intelligence.  We do that by developing interesting applications for our data, writing about those applications, talking to the press and through speaking engagements.  We also work with our existing clients to help them find new ways to apply our data to make better, more informed business decisions.   

What are the top three ways Hitwise helps CEO's make better decisions and make more money?
The first thing is just in understanding what your competitors are doing online.  There's a ton of tools at any trade show floor that will help you analyze internal data, but not much out there to help you put all of your internal data in perspective.  That's the #1 thing.  A close second would be our massive database of search terms that drive traffic to specific sites and categories, like the dating category.  With that data we can help our clients intercept their competitors' traffic and drive it to their own websites.  #3 would be getting a high level overview of your space and the rest of the internet and using our data to make strategic decisions about the direction of your company. 

What do you think of the online dating space?
Online dating is a fascinating space and a great space for us to talk about. There has been an explosion in the number of sites in the dating category. We're looking at 846 sites in the category.  At the same time we see the visits and market share of visits to the category is flat.  There's a necessity to become more competitive.  Our data allows our clients to see where competitors are getting their traffic from and what kind of search strategy they have.  Also, the demographics and psychographics of visitors to competitors sites.  All of that together allows you to compete more effectively. 

What's the state of the online dating market? 
If we take the category as a whole, it's in the decline.  It's interesting because I've been following the market since January 2004.  We were tracking 611 sites back then.  Now it's the zenith.  In early to mid 2005 there were 918 sites.  Now, we're down to 846.  There appears to be a bit of a shake out as well as a decline in market share of visits to the category as a whole.  So let's take those 846 sites today.  If I take all visits, the online personals market will take 0.847% of all internet visits.  If I go back to the markets zenith in July 2005 it was at 1.2%.  We're looking at how much the internet dating sector has grown in relation to the entire internet audience, which may also have grown.  If we take the top three dating sites, Yahoo! Personals has increased market share and Match and eHarmony are relatively flat.  The leaders in the space are increasing market share while the other sites shares are declining. The peak was due to the influx of all the niche dating sites.  As the major dating sites refine their search categories it negates the business models of the niche players.  The challenge for smaller players is to provide some kind of value-add in terms of content or user experience.  The other thing that I think we need to factor into dating is the 'competitive substitute.' The big one is social networking.  I need to mention Myspace.  This site is geared towards a younger audience and they use it for a number of purposes. Just looking at the rankings, Myspace is the 4th largest site on the internet.  It was getting 2.8% of internet visits.  In terms of market share it's three times the size of the rest of the internet dating segment in terms of market share of visits. 

Where are the growth areas?
There's two growth areas.  The younger and the older audience.  Online dating sites have a 25-34 demographic focus.  Myspace is strongly skewed to 18-24 year old visitors and represents a new paradigm in dating. We saw Friendster pick up and decline.  Myspace has picked up where Friendster left off.  This model caters to the younger audience.  All online dating players should be taking note of Myspace.  The 18-24 sector can be a predictor of what will happen for the rest of the online dating space.  Facebook has 0.15% of all internet visits so it's more than a degree of magnitude smaller.  It's also growing.  It's had very steep growth from Nov 2004 to present. 

What are the latest developments with Hitwise?
We just launched a new search capability so our clients are now able to search for search terms by industry category and even by site.  I can tell you what site got what traffic on a particular keyword and dissect a competitive search category.  We're coming out with a gap analysis tool within our search term intelligence service.  So, I can take another dating site and use this tool to compare search terms 'gaps'.terms they are getting traffic on that I'm not.  I can compare with a custom category and get an optimized list.  We now cover 162 industry categories and we're constantly refining and adding more functionality. 

Online Personals Watch Interview-CEO of Plentyoffish.com, Markus Frind

OPW Interview -- Feb 21 -- I met Markus at iDate2005 and barely gave him the time of day; a hokey little site called Plentyoffish. I have a lot more respect for him these days.  Plentyoffish is free and has snuck up on the Canadian market and now he is sneaking up on the American market.

 

 

What's your background Markus?

Computer programming. I went to a Technical Institute for a few years and then worked for a few dot com companies. Every one of them went under after 6 months. I was a developer of websites and databases; nothing glamorous. I was really good at making things efficient. They threw me from project to project making things super efficient. 

 

Why did you decide to offer plentyoffish for free?

I originally created the site because I had to learn asp.net and I didn’t want to buy a book, so I created the site and I just kept adding things to it that I liked. I had to continue to learn new things and it just kind of became a dating center; it wasn’t meant to be an actual site. Then I wanted to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so then I read up on SEO and I integrated that into the site and taught myself. Then it just kept growing and every time I wanted to learn something, I would add that to the site. Eventually it just became a huge thing. 

 

How do you make money?

I make money off the ads upselling to other sites. It doesn’t need much money to run. The site does about 13 million pages views a day, making it one of the top 5 sites in Canada of any site and in the top 60 or so in the region according to Hitwise.  I started this in March, 2003 and I haven’t kept track of the registrants, but my traffic has grown 12 fold in 12 months overall in both markets.

How can you afford to do radio and TV advertising?

My costs are next to nill Look at American Singles. According to their quarterly reports they spend a million dollars a month just handling servers. I spend about $15K a month tops.  It is cheap to advertise on radio if you have none of those other costs.

 

Who do you regard as your top competitors?

I’m really competing with Match.com.  In Canada, I started at 3% last year and I’m sitting at over 50% market share and in the next 6 months I will double the size of the dating industry in Canada. 

 

Are you at all worried about other major players or new entrants starting up with free sites?

Not really. A lot of VC’s are throwing around a lot of money and probably have funded some of the other free sites, but I have so much of a head start that I don’t think there’s much they can do.  Google and Yahoo would only affect me little if they went free, in fact I think they would help me rather than hurt me. If the average dater is using 3 dating sites, they are probably currently using Plentyoffish and Match and Yahoo. If Google comes in and offered a free site, most of the paid dating sites like Match and Yahoo would get pushed out of the market. I took a poll today that says that over 55% of my members are paying members on other sites or have been in the past. 

 

What's next for plentyoffish in 2006?

Plentyoffish is already blazing the trail. All the other dating sites are attempting to go niche, whereas plentyoffish is the only site that segregates the database on the spot, so no individual user has access to whole database. When they login and create their profile, the database is refined and they only access to a limited subset. So basically, as soon as you sign up, a niche is created around you. You only have access to that specific niche. Currently, no other site is doing this. This is like creating a niche site on the fly. If you logon and you don’t want to see ‘smokers’; every person on there that is a smoker will get filtered out of the search results and no smoker will ever be able to message you. This is specifically the reason why people leave the big sites or the niche sites, because a lot of the people that they don’t want to message them are messaging them. If you filter them in real time, the brand power of a large site will blow away a billion niche sites. No one will remember a tiny niche site and they won’t have the brand to be able to compete. 2006 is setting the stage for a show down with Match.com.

   

Online Personals Watch Interview - President Phone Matrix, Andy Siks

OPW Interview -- Feb 8 -- Why are we abandoning users on online personals sites when they want to talk on the phone? They subscribe for email, IM, chat...and then they disappear from your revenue stream when they pick up the phone.  Anonymous calling services connect online personals sites with users, and satisfy their need for a safe anonymous means of communication.  Phone Matrix has the most implementations and the slickest service I've seen.  They've been at it longer, had more experience than anyone else, and darn if it isn't available today, not tomorrow ... they have an app. available now.

What does Phone Matrix do?
Phone Matrix has one very focused mission - delivering state-of-the-art anonymous phone contact services on personals sites.  It's our only business Mark - and it's what our PrivateCall product sets the standard of excellence for.  The people on our management team have unique backgrounds combining web development, telephony, dating and creative design.  We've pioneered phone introduction services since before the Internet was commercialized and also been long-time customers of the major dating sites. Anyone watching the industry closely over the last couple of years has seen the proof that you don't get the personals phone formula right by asking some engineer or a product manager to "build me a personals phone service please".  It's important to realize that from the moment that a fellow first lands on a site, then gets a gleam in his eye from spotting a great girl, to the time that we get them talking on the phone, involves dozens of very key elements of design, and if any are screwed up, you're going to lose a whole heap of potential business.  The formula for our PrivateCall service was born from our unique experience to maximize member participation and site
revenues.

Why do online dating users need to be connected anonymously?
Before daters arrange to meet face to face, they need to talk on the phone to get to know each other better.  But a lot of them, particularly the women, don't want to take chances with their safety.  After all, giving out your phone number, or having it show up on someone's call-display, can instantly expose your name and address to a total stranger.  So. there often needs to be a whole lot of back-and-forth messaging before a cautious dater will finally get on the phone and move ahead. But then you have a lot of busy guys out there, without propellers on their heads and with testosterone in their veins, who just don't feel they have the time to mess with all the keyboard courtship needed to finally get the ladies on the phone.  The guys just want to get to first base fast, and will do what it takes - and PrivateCall lets them play their field of opportunities much faster by eliminating the perceived telephone safety risk. That risk, by the way, is a lot greater than most folks realize.  Did you know Mark, that anyone can just call forward a regular phone to a toll-free service to see your number - even if you used call block?  Now that's a scary piece of stalker trivia.

Why should online personals companies care?
It's all about increasing market share and revenue. With the average personals customer registered on a couple of sites, there aren't any market gorillas out there that can act as if they have a captive audience.  The audience migrates to where they're being served most effectively.  And PrivateCall can play a key roll in that effective service. And obviously, why not tap into the revenue opportunity of those thousands of "first calls" between members that are happening every day?  When you consider that the install time of our PrivateCall service is measured in days, it's a no-brainer to move forward and quickly pick up on that revenue opportunity.

What kind of revenue increments should online personals companies expect from adding such services?
The amount of direct new revenue from PrivateCall is going to depend on the culture, demographics, size, and business model of each site.  As a rough rule of thumb, for most personals sites with reach ranks in the top twenty, you can figure that, on average, each premium male that's active in a week will generate roughly a dollar of net revenue for the site that week.  And since Phone Matrix's share of revenue typically covers all aspects of service delivery, including customer support and billing inquiries, payment processing, and chargeback responsibility, that dollar pretty much goes straight to the bottom line.

Do you have any new products in the pipeline?
Sure do!  Our product plan is mapped out to the 4th quarter.  But there are things that we all need to keep under our hats, and I'm sorry to say that you'll just have to have to wait for each launch Mark.

Online Personals Watch Interview - CEO of Community Connect, Ben Sun

OPW INTERVIEW -- Jan 17 -- Ben Sun is Founder and CEO of Community Connect which operates niche online dating leaders Blackplanet, Asian Avenue, and Migente.  I met up with Ben at his New York offices.

What inspired you to start Community Connect?
In my former life I was an investment banker for Merill Lynch working with technology companies.  I was working on a deal with a company called Firefly, which was started by folks out of MIT and Harvard.  They built a collaborative filtering technology that compared similar interests of people in order to provide recommendations thereby harnessing the power of word of mouth.  They were showcasing their technology on a website, Firefly.com, that was an online community for music and movie afficionados.  It was my first experience with online community and I fell in love with it.  It was 1996 and there weren't many experiences out there on the Web like what they were doing.  I remember creating a profile mentioning that I liked U2 and I was contacted by other users interested in U2.  I was blown away that I was meeting complete strangers but building friendships based on similar interests.  I then realized that the Internet was not only this "Information Superhighway" but maybe even more importantly a platform to easily connect people.  One night, I was talking with some friends over drinks and we were talking about online community/social networking and felt that it was a great application for other real world communities. As an Asian American that grew up in New York I feel that communities based on race or ethnicity have incredibe affinities and are be perfect for online community services. After talking with the cofounders, we wrote the business plan for Community Connect in our apartment and started building the first website, AsianAvenue.com. 

How long did it take to get to your first million users?
We didn't get to our first million until 2.5 years in.  Not until we launched BlackPlanet.com.  Once we launched BlackPlanet.com, we were soon generating  over a million page views a day with no marketing budget.  This took a lot of companies $15 to $20 million to do.

Do you regard the Community Connect sites as social networks or dating sites?
Both, I think it's an online community where we try to replicate what happens in real world communities.  People come online to find friends, jobs, dates and learn and share new/information that affect their community. All the things that happen in real world communities reflects what happens online.  We probably skew more towards social networking because a large portion of our users come on to the site to meet new friends.  This is the most popular activity.  Making friends and helping people express themselves.  Also, we help our users share opinions and ideas with other folks in their community.

What do you think of Myspace?
It's a good site.  They've done similar things to what we've done in terms of going after certain niche groups.  Something we've been doing for 9 yrs now.  They focus on the youth market with a strong emphasis on music.

How have you grown the sites up until now?
Completely by word of mouth.  That's how our userbase has grown.  Even when we launched Black Planet, we earmarked million dollars for marketing but 2 to 3 weeks after the launch we realised we shouldn't spend it on marketing as we needed the money for hardware and software to support the natural growth.  Our philosophy is towards providing a really strong product and targeting real world communities with incredible affinity offline.  Then people talk about it, online and offline.  That's what happened with us.
However, we recently hired a new VP of Marketing and will be implementing a number of online marketing efforts.  We are excited to see that further our growth.

Will you be adding more verticals in the future?
We plan to.  Probably sometime next year.  We're still trying to figure out which ones we want to go after next. 

I understand you're working on some considerable site improvements.  What can we expect to see in 2006?
A lot of enhancements across the board.  We're ramping up more features on the social networking side and the dating side.  We're expanding the amount of content, especially in terms of entertainment content, also health and news.  We'll expand into some mobile services as well.  So we have a lot on
our plate to say the least.  Our core demographic is 16 to 34 year olds, and they tend to be more mobile oriented.  We believe mobile services should be less about replicating features.  We're interested in taking features people wish they had access to on a more frequent basis via a mobile device.  One
of our most popular applications is messaging via our "notes" system.  We've discovered there's a high amount of interest in accessing notes via SMS. 

What advice would you give to other industry executives?
At end of the day it's about knowing exactly what customer needs you're trying to serve and distilling your services down to the essentials of what people are trying to do to benefit their lives.  This mindset would be the easiest approach for delivering the best product out there.  Overall, I feel the online personals business has really evolved over the last year or two and are innovating and offering terrific new services. 

What kind of partnerships are you seeking?
The companies we work with are those that bring value to our users that we can't easily bring.  So, our partnership with Monster gave us much stronger relationships with employers, and companies that are reaching a diverse candidate pool.  Through the Monster partnership, we now have relationships
with over 30,000 corporate clients.  We reach 5 to 6 million of color in the US every month so that kind of partnership works out well given that we connect our millions of members to the corporate world through Monster. These kind of partnerships are needed in order to bring value. 

What's next?
We've invested a lot over the last 12 to 18 months on really rebuilding existing infrastructure and adding more senior personnel.  Our goal is to take our three existing properties to a new level, and then target new verticals and communities to grow into.  So we expect 2006 to be a very big year for us. 

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview - Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus Author, Dr John Gray

OPW INTERVIEW -- Nov 3 -- One name stands preeminent in the world of relationship experts and authors.  Dr John Gray has authored fourteen books and is a world renowned speaker on the subject of relationships and understanding the marked differences between the sexes.  Here is the first of two exclusive OPW interviews with Dr Gray - Mark Brooks

What inspired the planet analogy to describe women and men?
As a marriage councilor I found it effective to understand the differences between the sexes in a playful way.  I found, 25 yrs ago, one of the biggest problems couples had was in misinterpreting what they were saying and how they were reacting to situations differently.  So by teaching people to understand their differences they could then work together rather against each other.  I developed the Mars Venus metaphor to make it more playful and easy to apply. 

How is internet dating different from off-line dating?
Online dating is the opposite of offline.  Online dating first explores mental and emotional compatibility.  When people finally meet in person they then discover if physical chemistry exists.  In offline dating, they discover the physical attraction/chemistry and then take time to discover mental and emotional chemistry.  For relationships to be lasting you need all three. The fourth level is soul compatibility, which is the feeling you want to share a life with this person...for marriage.  In terms of meeting a person when offline and meeting a person online, when online you don't get the opportunity to experience physical chemistry.  Gender differences are present here also because men feel physical chemistry right away whereas women may feel it immediately or it may develop over time.  Because men tend to feel it right away,  if it's not happening they will move on.  With good communication skills men can increase women’s physical chemistry and attraction towards them.  Women can sustain the attraction a man feels towards them in the beginning with good communication skills and nurturing habits.

In designing the ultimate online dating site, what factors would you focus on for making good matches?
A benefit of online dating is that users sometimes have a greater chance of a long term relationship because they have first explored the mental and emotional compatibility before the physical. Offline couples often rush too quickly into physical connection and don't give enough of a chance to discover mental and emotional compatibility.  Quite typically for men, after a quick sexual encounter, they temporarily lose interest during which time they can become interested in another woman.  With online dating there's already a mental and emotional bond so this tendency to lose interest will lessen.  The flip side of that is that if a woman has established a mental and emotional interest in a man before physical intimacy there tends to be less “neediness” because they are more secure in the relationship not being just physical.  Often, after a sudden physical encounter the woman, without knowing the man mentally and emotionally, will feel more emotionally needy which can push the man away. 

In an ideal world offline couples would take a little longer before they have sex.  Online dating provides that time of introduction in getting to know each other before the first physical encounter.  The chances of a long term relationship are greater from online dating, but the chances of rejection at the first meeting, when people physically meet each other are also greater with online dating.  A common experience of online daters is they meet online and mentally and emotionally they connect but within a moment of physical meeting they can sense there's no physical chemistry, and that can be very disappointing and hurtful to someone.  This possibility of rejection can be cushioned by making sure that before they meet physically they've shared accurate photos of each other.  This is important because if they experience rejection after meeting in person they don't make the conclusion they're being rejected because of looks, rather that there's just not enough physical chemistry.  There's no way to accurately predict if chemistry will be there.  They may think they feel it but once they meet in person, then that's the test. 

Webdate.com allows users to have their first date online using webcams, hence the name webdate  Does that help?
I think that would be helpful along the way but users still won't truly know until they are in each other's physical presence.  90% of communication is from visual cues with a real in-person meeting.  You can have emotional chemistry with someone on the phone or internet.  You can have mental stimulation but physical chemistry...you have to be there in person.  But web cameras can be a good thing.  They can see each other online and then when they meet they won’t take it personally if there's no physical chemistry, in respect to 'I'm not good enough.' 

Can personality tests really predict romantic attraction?  How?
Nothing can predict physical chemistry.  What they can do is sometimes assist people in finding someone they have greater emotional and mental compatibility with.  The most beneficial aspect is simply in having the opportunity to explore who you are and who they are.  Just like having a conversation with someone.  If done correctly compatibility testing can also assist people in making wise choices regarding their willingness to get involved, based on preferences and past experiences.  For example, if they've been in a relationship in the past where the partner was dominant or controlling, compatibility testing can tell if this new person might be like the people in their past.  I think after one does a compatibility test then it's very helpful to get assistance from a relationship coach to interpret findings, to help learn from past experiences and based on that, what they want in new relationships.

These tests can be done on one's own but are better with a relationship coach who can provide guidance on how to overcome challenges.  All relationships have built in challenges. For a couple to have attraction, they have to have differences.  Differences create attraction and mean the possibility of problems and challenges.  So, if you find someone 'just like me' you probably won't have physical attraction.  Often people have a hard time finding a lasting relationship because they don't have the relationship skills they need, as opposed to having found the right person.  The easy answer is, ‘I found the wrong person.’ Or, “the wrong dating service”  It's often the only answer they can come up with if they don't have the training and relationship skills.  We have the ability to bring out the best or worst in our partners. 

As a PhD and Certified Family Therapist, how do you feel compatability testing should be used on online dating sites? 
As mentioned before, compatibility tests are at best introductions.  They're more about self exploration.  To take a test you have to explore who you are and define what you want in a relationship.  For someone to say you are or are not compatible is not possible, particularly in the case of physical chemistry.  People should look at testing as a tool to assist them in the education process regarding having a good relationship.  Compatibility tests, in a very simple way, can hone in your focus and bring you into a smaller group of people compatible to your basic beliefs and needs.  They help lessen the field of people to focus in on.  But, they can't determine physical chemistry.  You simply have to go through the process of meeting people.  But instead of going through a thousand people, you only need to go through perhaps 25 people.   

Unfortunately the most accurate personality tests can take an entire afternoon to complete. The average user does not have that kind of commitment to the process. So the challenge for the industry is to create something accurate but still engaging enough for the consumer. Also the average user may not know how to best use a personality test to determine who they are most compatible with. The most admired personality traits may not mix well with your personality. The key is to provide the proper guidance to help the user know what’s best for them.

What are your plans for working with the online personals industry?
I’m very excited to work with the online personals industry.  I think it’s an industry that tackles a very humanistic challenge. What has been missing is that people have an inherent need to talk about their experiences. Rejection is ten times more painful when you have to face it alone. Also fear is one of the primary feelings that keeps us from trying. Fear of the unknown, fear of judgment, fear of failure and very often fear of success…’am I ready?’

We provide a program of phone-based relationship coaching where people can explore these feelings, as well as help them determine compatibility with a person and improve their relationship skills.  This is what I see missing from all the services; ongoing coaching to provide people with the understanding they need to make a relationship work.  People tend to go on a few dates and leap from one online dating service to another, just as they go from one partner to another.  They need to realize that their relationship skills in fact need improving. 

There are so many ways that men and women unknowingly send the wrong signals to the opposite sex.  They are not aware of how the words they use or their behaviors may be a complete turn off, which is why coaching has been so effective for people.  Lack of knowledge causes a big rift between the sexes.  Once people understand the differences it's so much easier to pull the best from our partners and relationships.  At  Ask MarsVenus.com we provide coaching and hope to daters on an ongoing basis through the different stages of dating.

Relationship coaches can help explain why dates don't turn out well, and help people understand what's going on and how to get better results. This way they don’t blame themselves or their dating site and give up all together.   For example, men need to understand that it's normal to feel attracted and then less attracted to someone, ”Rubberbanding” is a normal part of the attraction process. If they are patient the attraction can come back stronger than ever. Women need to understand that they should allow a certain amount of space while not abandoning their own needs.  In the old days matchmakers not only provided matchmaking services but also coached people through every date and helped them understand what happened.  They gave them instructions so they could form better bonds.  We help build the hope and skills to keep them dating.

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview - Match.com's CEO, Jim Safka

OPW INTERVIEW - Oct. 14 - Jim Safka just celebrated his first year as CEO of Match.com. Jim came to Match.com from AT&T Wireless, where he served as VP and GM of E-commerce.  Prior to that he spent five years at E*TRADE, most recently as VP Marketing, growing the customer base from 200,000 accounts to over four million. He held brand and product management positions at Intuit (Quicken), Warner Bros, and Paramount Pictures, and he has an MBA from Northwestern University and a B.S. Accounting from U.S.C.

Nielsen and Hitwise show Yahoo as being the top online personals site? Is there anything you'd like to say about this?

I believe Yahoo does a terrific job in the category of traffic.  However, I think of the online dating category as a subscription business measured in terms of subscribers.  If measurement is based on traffic and unique users alone, I don't think that is a clear indicator of who has the most market share.  Yahoo! has the #1 site for direct traffic in the U.S (Match.com is #1 globally).  However, Match.com has unparalleled distribution through partner sites that also bring people to Match.com; such as AOL and MSN. Here at Match.com we consider such things as:  How many paid subscriptions do we have?  How many new subscriptions are coming in?  How much is each subscriber paying?  How many people are visiting and subscribing?  Measuring traffic is a great metric if you're running an advertising business.  If you look at the number of subscriptions, we have twice as many subscriptions as our competitiors and to me that's the true mark of leadership.

Jupiter Research ran a survey this January and found 35% of online daters were somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with personals sites.

We're constantly doing things to improve our site and to make the member experience more meaningful and successful.  In terms of satisfaction, when you take a step back and look at relationships in general and you consider that people have been dating or courting , forever, you'll see that dissatisfaction levels with dating and relationship experiences have always been high throughout history.  As the Internet has become part of our daily lives, it expands peoples' possibilities.  Now, a lot of people know someone who has met their spouse through Match.com.  It's terrific in that respect. At the end of the day, though, people are people, and relationships are relationships. The new medium is a wonderful, fundamentally different way to meet, but it doesn't change the human dynamics.

What kind of paradigm and technology shifts will Match.com and the industry go through in the next 5 to 10 years?   

The main thing happening is that online dating is becoming a mainstream way in which people meet people in this generation.  It is just the way things work, so there won't be a real adoption curve future generations have to jump over.  It will be completely natural for them.  Online platforms will be a completely normal experience.  It will be much more romantic when integrated voice and video are added.  That will make it more natural and exciting.  We're looking at location- based services as part of our wireless product, Match.com Mobile.  It's interesting when we talk to our customers about these services, but they're not clamoring for it.  So we'll see how it goes.

How will Chemistry.com stand distinguished from the likes of eHarmony and TRUE and PerfectMatch?

Chemistry is a breakthrough new product.   We have been working at this business and helping people find love for 10 years at Match.  It was the original company that started the online dating category, and we've studied single people in great depth.  We commissioned what's considered to be the most extensive research identifying the relationship needs, attitudes and behaviors of single people in America, and we've gained important insights from the hundreds of thousands of Match success couples.  We worked on Chemistry.com with a world reknowned anthropologist, Helen Fisher, to combine the best of real world interactions with online services.  Take the Chemistry Profile.  This profile very quickly figures out the types of people we should match you with - people you're most likely to have chemistry with.  Users then go through our 1-2-3 Meet process.  We do our best to facilitate a face-to-face meeting, because that's the true test of chemistry between two people.  After the first meeting, users tell us how it went.  We put this feedback back into the matching system, and Chemistry.com takes it into account to help deliver even better matches.  We're reinventing this category the way we first did when we started Match.com 10 years ago...

Does a personality profiling system for an online personals site really need to be validated?

I think the personality profiling products need to be evaluated by the market and validated through successful customer experiences.  We ask the questions that really matter to consumers. Is it delivering value?  Is it facilitating the right kinds of relationships?  Are our customers ending up in enduring relationships?  For our products, we have a lot of proprietary data and patented technology that our customers tell us is working for them. This information isn't something we would feel comfortable turning over to a third party given the competitive nature of our industry.

What will be Match.com's position on singles events in 2006?  You learned a lot from matchlive I'm sure - is there some potential to bring it back to life?

We're very interested in events.  We still do events in the UK and as part of broader marketing partnerships.  Events have been a terrific learning experience.  I know for certain at Match, we're a company that really knows how to get people together, and we are terrific at building software!  When it comes to a live events, we need to find the right partner.  We would love to pursue singles events in 2006 and beyond!  We're all about connecting people, and events are just one more way to do that. Events can also introduce people to online dating that may not otherwise consider it. As the category leader, we have a vested interest in growing the category, because we grow when our category grows.

When a man meets a woman he's interested in for the first time, he has to communicate two things to her, 1. he's interested, 2. he's safe.  What is match's position on safety going to be in 2006?

The privacy and security of our members is our #1 priority at Match, and safety has been built into the site from day one. Since 1995, Match.com has used a patented, double-blind email system to help members communicate without revealing their personal contact information until they're ready. We have dating safety tips and advice right on our home page.  The online dating category is becoming a part of how America operates -- how they meet. People also meet at the office, through family and friends, at restaurants, bars, and so on.  No matter how you meet someone or how you were introduced, there are risks.  And we believe that a bit of caution and skepticism is appropriate until someone proves themselves trustworthy.  The most important thing is common sense and trusting your instincts.  The same caution should be used wherever people meet.  They should do that online just like any other environment.

Match.com is 10 years old, what would you like to achieve in 2006; or, what does the future hold for match.com?

This is a growth category.  Jupiter predicted the online dating category would grow by 9% this year...and yet Match.com grew by 26% in the second quarter (year over year).  We're the category leader.  We have to continue to innovate.  If you stall or trip as the leader of the band, you end up back in the tuba section.  We will continue to grow this category by doing 3 things:  1.  We will be the #1 player in the online dating category by continuing to innovate; and help build the category to more than $1 billion globally.  2.  We believe the customer has all the answers, so we'll keep listening to them.  Something that I do and every employee at Match.com does is stay close to the customer.  Every person is trained on the customer service system.  We're all involved in reviewing profiles, approving photos, and providing customer service.  It's a requirement for everyone here at Match, from our receptionist all the way to me, as the CEO.  We're all listening to our customers.  3. Continue providing a superior customer experience; we want to open up new possibilities for people and give them the tools they need to connect and build loving, lasting relationships. I get emails from literally hundreds of Match customers every month sharing their success stories; I even get invited to their weddings! We also stay in touch with Match couples that met years ago and are now sharing their baby stories with us. At the end of the day, that's what it's really all about, helping people find someone that they can build a life with.

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #13 - Yahoo Personals General Manager, Lorna Borenstein

OPW INTERVIEW -- Oct 4 -- Lorna Borenstein is the General Manager for Yahoo Personals, the single most trafficed online personals site in existence today (per Hitwise, Nielsen//Netratings).  Prior to joining Yahoo Personals Lorna was VP and General Manager for eBay Canada.

What did you learn from eBay that most significantly affected your approach to running Yahoo! Personals?
The most important thing I learned there was that a site is only as good as its community . If you’re constantly taking care of the needs of the community, then it has a sustaining value proposition and you can develop revenue for the business. 

Do you think personality profiling has a future?  How has Yahoo! Personals Premier worked out for Yahoo? 
Singles are looking for help in making better choices for their happiness and dating.  When you think about the needs of singles, you have to think about their overall relationship needs. From what we hear, both from Yahoo! research and secondary research, singles want to be better understood and want a more personalized experience.  Our extensive market research identified a clear opportunity to better deliver what singles want: customized services and features that meet their diverse needs. We were actually the first online dating company to offer singles a customized approach to dating based on their varying relationship goals. 

To do that requires greater customization and personalization. It can’t be just photo personals, we have to help people to identify the criteria that are most important for them and find others with those matching criteria.  Also, we need to help people understand themselves better and enable them to take advantage of the screening tools available for online daters.  Then we let chemistry take over.  Anything to help people do a better job of understanding themselves is a great advantage to the consumer.  We believe that this level of personalization gives Yahoo! Personals Premier a brilliant future. 

Yahoo! Personals drives a lot of its users from Yahoo!.  Now that the online ad market is booming, how has this affected internal promotion and is Yahoo! Personals pushing for more external promotion now?
We are blessed to be part of the Yahoo! network.  Yahoo! has more than 380 million unique visitors a month.  External advertising is increasing the extent of our reach.  We're very efficient at acquiring customers off the Yahoo! network and we're working to diversify our order sources all the time.  The other thing that's great is that we have a search business, so we're really be able to take advantage of search engine optimization, search engine marketing and the like, which engage new users with Yahoo! Personals. 

Do you think Yahoo! personals could ever extend beyond the web into singles events and mobile phone personals?
I think Yahoo! Personals will absolutely extend onto different devices as the industry moves increasingly beyond the desktop.  Singles are looking for more of a 360 degree dating life and don't really separate online and offline and all their different activities, so we are continuing to build and extend beyond the PC.  It's amazing what is happening in Asia.  They're so far ahead of the U.S. in terms of embracing mobility as a way of life.   Some of the technologies are very compelling.  You can give virtual flowers on mobile devices to someone you're dating.  We're very excited about all of the possibilities and are looking into the opportunities that make sense to our users with great enthusiasm. 

When a man meets a woman he's interested in for the first time, he has to communicate two things to her, 1. he's interested, 2. he's safe.  What is Yahoo! Personals position on safety going to be in 2006?
We continue to have the same perspective; just as in life in the real world and in offline dating you have to use common sense when using online dating.  Yahoo! is the most trusted of online brands and Yahoo! Personals is a safe community to be part of, but you still have to use common sense.  We hope all users will be aware and leery of any approach to screening that is out of their hands and that might offer a false sense of security. Common sense and the same approaches people have taken in dating for ages are still the most solid.  We encourage users to continue to use their common sense, whether online or in the real world. 

Jupiter Research ran a survey this January and found 35% of online daters were somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with personals sites.  Only 29% were somewhat satisfied or very satisfied.  Yahoo! Personals taglines and text under promise...so Yahoo! Personals can over deliver.  What are the key areas Yahoo! Personals is focusing on to improve satisfaction levels? 
It's quite purposeful that we choose to under promise and over deliver.  This helps us build credibility and trust, which is exactly what we're focused on.  Online personals are a way to make better choices and have more variety in dating.  We're working on being able to incorporate user feedback in real time.  We actually just conducted our 3rd annual Singles Voice Survey that shows more than 75% of singles are looking for long term relationships.  Many of these are in the 45+ age group.  Yahoo! Personals is focused on helping people find great dates that have potential for the future.  Singles might also come out of a relationship or marriage and be looking for a more casual relationship.  We serve that audience as well.  As mentioned earlier, we were the first online dating site to offer customized options for daters looking for different kinds of relationships.

Online personals users send each other emails then they send instant messages, then they're out on a coffee date.  That's a big jump!  Where do video/webcam dating and the mobile phone fit in? 
It depends on the market we're playing in and the age of the person.  The phone fits in more with 18 to 24 year olds than with those aged 49+.  Just like there’s no single answer as to what someone is looking for in a mate, there's no one answer to how our users want to connect with that person inside and outside the online world.  We believe that the dating experience on a PC is not the same as on a mobile device.  We don't think the market is there yet for video dating.  We do believe there will be a strong future in video overall, however.  Mobile personals will eventually become part of the online personals experience.  Users will set up their profiles and matching preferences, and those profiles and requirements from the PC will also be in the mobile environment.  When that user happens to be out in the evening and another user happens to be at the same club, the phone will beep with an alert that they're there.  There are some really fun applications for mobile devices which are really going to make the online dating experience even more enjoyable.  Users will be able to share profiles with friends over coffee.  Mobile applications will extend online dating and take it out into the real world.

What does the future hold for Yahoo Personals?
We're expanding the community and enhancing offerings for the betterment of all online daters.  We will continue to keep our genuine, authentic voice. At the end of the day, just as we say at the site, we’re deeply focused on helping people have better first dates and more second dates.    

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #12 - Jupiter Research Online Personals Analyst, Nate Elliott

OPW INTERVIEW -- Sep 19 -- Nate covers the online personals industry for Jupiter Research.  Before joining Jupiter he spent the internet boom years working for Doubleclick (4 years) and with Macromedia.  He took a break and then decided that being an analyst would be an interesting way to satisfy his curiosity. 

Why do you work from England? 
I worked in Jupiter’s New York office for 2 years.  I wanted to move to Berlin but Jupiter doesn’t have an office there.  We did have an office in London, so they said I could move here. I got here February 1st.  I live in Clapham and work in Soho.

What other areas do you cover?
My primary area of research is European digital home technology, which includes consumer electronics and entertainment technology.  I cover HDTV, DVR's, home cinema, game consoles, home networks, portable media players and a range of other devices and technology focused around home entertainment.  Online dating and social networking and other online media are a smaller part of my job.  I get to play with iPods and Playstations and TV sets and I get to talk about online dating. I'm traveling a lot for work and fun...I was on the road 20 days last month.

Where is the industry headed?
The U.S. online dating market is headed for slower growth and a harder slog. Fewer consumers are showing up at the sites, and fewer are posting profiles. To keep growing revenues sites have to do a better job of converting visitors to paid subscribers. The good news is, they are getting better at that. We've seen the number of visitors to dating sites drop by about a third in the last year. But the number of paying subscribers is still rising marginally, which is interesting – it’s proof that conversion rates are improving. Online personals sites are also getting better at taking more money from each subscriber.  Sites with a focus on serious dating are able to charge higher monthly fees. Sites are also focusing more on 3-6-12 month memberships that extend the lifespan of a user.  I see sites getting more creative in terms of turning browsers into subscribers, because they have to.

Why is the number of unique users falling? 
The market is reaching maturity.  Two things have happened. First, people have already gone through online personals sites for the first time.  Some subscribe, and then about half of them come back for a second go. And some visit but don’t subscribe. It gets to a point where so many people have visited these sites and decided whether they want to use them, so there are fewer consumers ‘just curious’ to have a look.  It's no longer the 'new thing’. That’s probably why we are seeing higher conversion rates now – there are fewer window shoppers. Second, the satisfaction ratings on most dating sites aren’t fantastic.  We did a survey this January, and 35% of online daters were somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the sites.  Only 29% were somewhat satisfied or very satisfied.  If you have more dissatisfied users than satisfied ones, eventually it's going to lead to fewer users.  I think that over time, you’ll see more sites focus on just casual daters or just serious daters. The services that focus have a better chance of attracting a good audience and making that audience happy.  Users self select by choosing a site – does the site market itself as a serious dating site or a casual dating site? Most of that comes down to marketing because the sites themselves are not that different. The technology and features are fundamentally the same. Their differentiation is more a factor of which audience they’re targeting. By targeting one audience or the other, and building a user base with common goals, they may be able to improve those satisfaction scores.

What are the differences with the European audience?
The European online personals market is growing pretty aggressively, which differentiates it from the U.S. industry.  The U.S. dating industry will continue to grow over the next 5 years, but it’s not growing like it used to. The US market grew 72% in 2002, and 77% in 2003, but will only grow 9% in 2005. Still, we’re forecasting it’ll grow to $516 million this year, and reach $623 million in 2009. (These numbers do include adult dating).  Europe is still seeing that impressive growth. The European industry brought in 88 million Euros last year, and we’re forecasting it’ll reach 160 million Euros in 2005 and 352 million Euros in 2009. That’s 82% growth from 2004 to 2005. So the growth is a lot faster in Europe than in the US, but it’s on a smaller base. Over time, the European market will follow the same curve as the US market, and will shown this same pattern of maturation. The population is larger in Europe, but the market differs in a couple of ways.  European online content and services tends to lag a couple of years behind what we see in the U.S.  It's also a more difficult market; dealing with a couple dozen countries, different languages and national borders – which matters more then some of the U.S. companies might think.  There are also different media preferences to consider.  In Europe, you can’t cut one or two portal deals and cover the entire market. Each country has different portals, and even the multinational portals sometimes cut separate deals in each country. It’s all a much more fragmented landscape than you see in the US.

What are your thoughts on the relationship sites and personality profiling?
It seems like eHarmony is  doing a great job helping to grow the industry as a whole with their TV advertising?
They are.  But I wonder how much it has to do with personality profiling and how much with media spend.   I think serious dating would have been a growth area anyway, but it's certainly growing more because of the money they're spending and the attention they're getting. And that has fed back into industry growth.  I think personality profiling is interesting but clearly not necessary.  Self-selection is the more important piece.  The relationship personals sites are marketing themselves to serious daters.  That marketing focus is the biggest piece of the puzzle.  Users go to those sites because they’re looking for serious relationships, and they find other people looking for the same thing, and so you’ve got a database of like-minded individuals. The actual profiling becomes almost secondary. But, the problem is, the serious dating sites have created high expectations. They say “we’re going to find you the love of your life,” and that’s really hard to actually do, and so their satisfaction scores tend to be lower. There are also examples of profiling being used in casual dating, like at Tickle, and there are basic efforts from Match and Yahoo.  But, if the idea is to have fun and do introductions for casual relationships then profiling is not a necessary part of the strategy.  For serious daters however, personality profiling is the kind of marketing message that resonates. 

How will online personals sites extend beyond the web in the future, in 5 to 10 years time?
I don't think anyone has done a good job extending their brand beyond the internet.  There have been some interesting attempts.  Comcast (cable operator) teamed up with Hurrydate (speed dating and personals) to provide personals on cable.  There have been some efforts in the mobile dating space. They're all interesting ideas, and in theory they all should work, but none of them have. I think the offline singles services are the only other format that can compete. Events have advantages – they’re fun, social activities, and there’s no substitute for meeting someone in person. However, online services have something that offline can't offer; a combination of depth and anonymity. That sets them apart from event services, mobile services, classified ads in the newspaper, and introduction services.  No other format offers the level of depth – lots of details and photos and forms to fill out and chances to interact – combined with anonymity. That’s why online personals work so well.  $500 million a year is a pretty big industry.  It's twice as large as any other category of paid content online.  This is a big industry.  The reason it's gotten to this point is that the internet really is the ideal medium for searching for singles.  Lots of companies think they can take their user-base and extend to other media, but they’ve had some real difficulties.  It's not that they are doing it wrong.  It's just that the users understand they are already in the best medium: online. Even when we get to a point where mobile dating offers a better experience, I don’t think it’s ever going to be massive. Mobile dating is good for some things; for people who are bored in line at the post office and college students who would rather look for profiles on their phones than pay attention to class. It's not as good an experience as online but it is useful for anyone with spare time away from their computer. At the end of the day, though, online is always going to be the biggest piece of the puzzle.

What observations would you like to share with the CEO's of the industry?
A lot of the smaller players look for bells and whistles to add to their sites.  They're looking for angles they can use to differentiate on, and market their sites.  It's got to be hard to compete with a couple of monsters like Match and Yahoo. Those two, plus eHarmony and Spark Networks, take up so much of the mindshare and the money in this industry that other companies are dwarfed.  But at the end of the day consumers don't seem to care about the bells and whistles.  They want a critical mass of users in their local area with lots of photos and deep profiles.  Deliver that and you have a good product.  Most users just want online personals sites to do the basics well. All the rest is superfluous. 

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #11 - Senator Cropsey

Senator Cropsey - Senate sponsor of the Michigan background checks legislation

Why do we need legislation for background checks on online dating sites?
As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee I'm always concerned about people being victimized by criminals, especially women and children are being violated by rapists and pedophiles.  The United States Department of Justice reports that sexual assaults are the most under-reported crime in our nation.  When vulnerable women and children are violated, the state prosecutes the sexual predator.  The best situation is for women and children not to be victimized in the first place.  At the very least online dating companies need to let their clientele know the risks that they face.  If an online dating company is doing background checks, the company should state the limitations of the background checks.  If the online dating company refuses to do a background check, then the company should clearly warn their clientele of the risks that they face.  If more people become better informed and take proper precautions, then fewer women and children are victimized.

Rape is a terrible crime.  A lady contacted my office who was raped 8 years ago. Just a few months ago she realized while she was sitting on her patio that she hadn't thought about the rape for 15 minutes...and that was a tremendous victory.  Rape is a life sentence for the victim.

What is the likelihood of success for the legislation?
Legislation will eventually pass.  Once the first state passes legislation several other states will follow.  It's just a matter of time.  In this case more victims are coming forward and saying that more protection is needed.  One of the things the online dating companies cannot afford to happen is for them to appear that they are not doing all they can to protect women and children.  My offer to online dating companies is, come sit down and help write legislation that gives additional safety to your clientele.

What are the next steps for the legislation?
This summer we are working on this issue to see if we can reach an agreement with the online dating companies on background check notices that would help to protect and educate their clients.

How can online dating companies help?
Online dating companies need to help find a solution and thereby reduce victimization, to let us know their ideas and work with us.  At the very least they can send me an email with their ideas.  Eventually the online dating companies can get together with me in Lansing to help craft this legislation.  We need law enforcement, victims, and online dating companies to sit down and figure out how to address this issue.  You can expect this to happen within the next couple of months.   

It would be helpful if the online dating companies had a leadership team that can speak for their industry.  It is impractical to have 50 online dating services show up and want to sit down with the victims and law enforcement organizations.  Virtually every other organization realizes the benefit of having a representative group; such as doctors, lawyers, insurance agencies.  Most groups realize they need someone to speak for them for the benefit of their industries.   

At this point, legislation is in the conceptual stage.  The online dating companies can have a maximum impact at this early stage to shape the legislation.  When the online dating companies understand the concerns of the legislature, they can work to meet that concern.  Do not wait for a bad incident to happen and have the legislature stampede a law through that does not take everything into consideration. Online dating companies need someone who has the authority to speak for the industry. 

Are there other areas that you are thinking of applying such legislation?   
Whenever the government sees a significant problem it will try to remedy that problem through law.  This is not the first time that an internet business would be subject to government regulation.  Michigan had spam legislation signed a year ago.  Background checks are being performed in other areas of life, such as in public schools and daycare centers.

What happened with the Michigan legislation this time around?
The only holdup is that it didn't get past the state senate.  I was initially responsible for delaying the legislation.  My position has changed.  I now believe that legislation is needed.   The House of Representatives has already overwhelmingly passed legislation.  If legislation passes the senate, it will pass the house.
A year ago I did not see a need for legislation until a bad incident happened near my district.  A stalker killed himself as he was planting explosives in a woman's house that he met online.  This was an epiphany for me.  It made me realize that there is danger here.  That the legislature needs to address the issue; what are we doing to protect vulnerable women and children from sexual predators that are using the internet? 

What did you think of the mobile internet dating convention?
The meeting we had was very productive.  I learned a lot from the discussion and thoroughly enjoyed the forum.  I want to thank iDate for inviting me. 

Mark Brooks: The Michigan legislation passed the Michigan House by a 74-14 margin in the last legislative session.  The bill made it to the Senate at the end of the session where Cropsey held the bill up (as Chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee) and the session came to a close.  At the start of this session, Cropsey decided to champion the bill.  The bill passed out of his committee, but the full Senate wanted the Sex Offender language (a change so significant, it had to go back to Committee before full Senate consideration).

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #10 - Webdate's New SVP, Joe Brennan Jr

OPW INTERVIEW -- Aug 2 -- Joe Brennan Jr joined Webdate's team in April as SVP Marketing and Strategy.  He was formerly the Director of Interactive Strategy at AOL. Mark Brooks, Editor of Online Personals Watch, interviewed Joe after the Mobile Internet Dating Convention at which Joe shared the keynote address.

Why is Webdate driving mobile/cell phone based dating?
Our strategy for Webdate is focused on wireless as a complimentary piece of our entire offerings.  Webdate is not focused on ‘online dating,’ we're focused on ‘dating.’  Our wireless services are every bit as important as the internet services and are totally integrated.  So the philosophy is 'Webdate anytime, anywhere.'  Users may come through the online channel but then decide it's more convenient for them to use us through wireless.  We're connection channel agnostic.  We believe our members should be able to use our services through any connection, so they can Webdate, anytime, anywhere. 

Are location-based services the future?
I think so.  But, one of the challenges is that the technology is available right now but the carriers are concerned about the liability of offering location-based services to their members.  We have to show that such services can produce good revenue streams, address the liability concerns, and demonstrate to the wireless carriers why this technology really is necessary in serving their wireless customers in the future.  The market and technology are moving in the direction of location-based services.  I would not bet against it right now. 

Why are you also leading with video based services? 
We’ve placed our bets on using technology that creates more intimacy for our members.  I mean, with most online dating services you make this hard leap from profile, email and instant messenger over to face-to-face meetings.  We want to create more interactivity and give users a better opportunity to learn and get to know dating partners through the online medium before they meet.  We’re creating interactive experiences that allow potential daters to get to know each other better so that when that first meeting happens, it isn't a shock.  So, the best way to do this is to approximate some of the real world dating experience.  We've started down that path with video dating.  We call it ‘webdating.’  I think that by fully integrating both the online and wireless products we're able to drive a better user experience whilst also reaching underserved markets.  Certain demographics index low on PC ownership and high on cell phone ownership.  By using wireless technology and combining this with our efforts to improve the dating experience, we think our service will be much more valuable than services merely listing personals ads and allowing email introductions. 

Will you eventually combine video based webdating into a mobile/cell phone based service?
Right now the bandwidth is not available on the mobile networks.  The handset technology is not quite available either.  But it will be.  If we look at South Korea with their live streaming video broadcasts we can see the shape of things to come.  That technology will come to America along with the ability to do video dating on the phone.  It’s inevitable and something we are pursuing. 

We need to create more dating opportunities for our users and we have chosen to use technology to create those opportunities…in a real world, live way.  Picture if you will…you’re headed out for the evening and you’re able to broadcast that you are going to be at a certain club, in a certain area and are interested in meeting singles who are also interested in meeting other singles.  We can use the mobile application as a way of facilitating this.  When you walk through the door of the club you will know who you can socialize with and who is available, rather than it being a guessing game.  You can know who's looking for new friends, who’s looking for a relationship.  We want to use mobile applications to facilitate meetings in real time and real space but we need the cooperation of the carriers to facilitate that. 

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #9 - Friendster's New CEO, Taek Kwon

OPW INTERVIEW -- July 18 -- Taek Kwon joined Friendster last month as President and CEO.  He was formerly the EVP Product Management at Citysearch and VP Engineering and Operations at Hotwire.  Mark Brooks, Editor of Online Personals Watch, interviewed Taek to get his take on the future of Friendster.   

Friendster invented online social networking, as we know it.  How did they lose ground to Myspace, and how do you intend to regain it?
Social networking is very different from when it was invented.  I wouldn’t say Friendster invented social networking; Friendster popularized social networking.  When we first launched, we were the only game in town.  Friendster was, and is, a great way for people to connect with new friends and reengage with old friends. Friendster didn’t have a strong secondary call to action for its users beyond finding and connecting with people. Many people used it as a dating tool.  Now, many of the initial uses of Friendster have become commoditized.  Myspace, Hi5 and the Facebook are all growing.  The idea of ‘connecting’ is no longer a differentiator.  It never really was.  We have the ‘platform’ for adding value to users.  But we haven't determined the applications that will sit on top of this platform to make it valuable, sticky, and we no longer have the cachet we did earlier.  Myspace is focused heavily on music.  They have a different approach to networking; I think of a lot of their interactions more as incidental social collisions than what we have on our platform.  They provided users the ability to express themselves with a high degree of customizability and their ability to upload and integrate media is unparalleled.  It’s a freeform experience and a vehicle for self-expression.  It’s proven successful.  Friendster needs to also add context to the site’s friendships.  We don't really have a theme or context to drive activity.  That’s the challenge, which we hope to meet soon. 

What are incidental social collisions?
People are usually invited into Friendster.  They join through invitations.  A lot of people join to meet new people and socialize.  The types of activity and the conversations people have on Friendster are usually based on people you knew before they joined; our networks are generally a little more closed, whereas Myspace is more open.  On Friendster, a higher percentage knows their ‘friends’ offline than on Myspace.  There’s value in both approaches.  Myspace has proven their approach is wildly popular and they have figure out a way to monetize this.  Friendster is focused more on maintaining the networks’ integrity and I feel we will also figure out a compelling approach to monetization.

What is Friendster's target clientele? 
Our demographic skews young.  I’d say the average age of our most frequent users is between 21 to 29 predominantly.  But we have younger and a lot older too. Looking out further ahead our clientele is really anyone who has friends. 

You commented in a prior interview your intention to combine business networking and social networking on Friendster.  Could you expand on that comment?
I believe people, especially young people, are looking for four things.  One, finding a date/mate.  Two, finding a job.  Three, finding a home to live in or a house to buy.  And four, social interaction.  i.e. they want to know what people are doing.  Those four things are what life revolves around for those in their 20's to 30's. I could imagine a world where Friendster acts as a catalyst but doesn't focus on any one. 

Are you interested in events?
We have a very qualified network.  The majority of relationships on Friendster are real live offline friendships.  We are exploring opportunities to facilitate offline interactions.

How will Friendster be making money in one year from now?
We currently make money, a fair amount, from traditional sponsored CPM advertising.  We have a relationship with Google for contextual, text link advertising.  There are other sources that we will experiment with.  Two that may have a role are premium services and lead generation.  We have a relationship with sixapart for blogs where we share revenue on upgrades.  Users can sign up for a blog and pay for more storage and more UI flexibility.  We might introduce more premium services like that.  As you think about possibilities, you’ll not that a fair amount of commerce occurs from social interaction in our daily lives.  Friendster could become a clearinghouse for some of this commerce online through its platform.  One example might be birthday’s alerts.  We could implement a birthday alert and offer users a coupon on hot birthday presents.  I tend to think those types of leads will be more qualified than even sponsored link clicks. 

What lessons learned from your time at Citysearch do you intend to apply at Friendster?
Citysearch was a struggling business.  It was not making money when I joined and had a lot of problems.  Some of their brand equity had been damaged.  They were in a fairly new category.  Others had an interest in local search.  Yahoo and Google were entering the market.  Friendster is in some ways a similar situation. Yahoo 360, MSN, Google and Orkut and even international companies such as Nate.com in Korea have identified social networking as an interesting category they want a piece of and have invested.  The explosion in interest parallels what was happening in local search.  For me, one key lesson learned is how to think strategically in that sort of environment of rapid change, a heated competitive landscape, and investment and M&A activity.  When I left Citysearch they were profitable and growing profits at the fastest rate in our 9-year history.  Unlike local search when it first started, the social networking category already has two of its leading properties in the black and it’s such a new category.  Thefacebook has said it was cash flow positive since Q1.  Also Myspace has said they are profitable.  It’s a very new category.  So, to have two of the top properties in the black is very exciting. 

Who do you regard as the most noteworthy online dating competitors right now?  Are online dating companies really direct competitors?
I don't consider Friendster a dating site although online dating is one  utility provided for many users.  Friendster is a platform that hasn’t committed to any vertical yet, and perhaps never will. The fact is, users use it for dating but there’s a lot more we can and will do in the future.  We don't consider any of the online dating companies direct competitors.  I find eharmony fascinating.  They have a model for building an emotional tie with users during their interview/signup process, taking them through a highly committed screening process and then pushing qualified content to them.  That strategy is something that is not only applicable to dating.  In many ways users are open to pushed content as long as it’s from trusted sources.  Friends are trusted sources.  I could see similar functionality on Friendster.  The idea of pushing content to the user in a qualified way is very interesting. 

What are your thoughts on a mobile Friendster service?
We recently met with some of the folks from Nate.com and Cyworld.com.  Cyworld is a social networking site for Nate, a Korean portal.  SK Telecom owns them.  Mobile internet is fascinating to me.  They offer a tight integration between their IM client, social network, blogging, and profile page submission.  They’ve enabled content access, submission, and editing on any device.  The billing process revolves around the monthly phone bill.  It’s an interesting phenomenon, which we’re not going to be able to duplicate here because the telecom industry is more fragmented here, but the idea of monetizing social networks through micropayments on a phone bill is interesting.  The Koreans have more adoption of mobile internet usage.  There are some interesting lessons to be learned. 

What might Friendster look like in 3 years from now?
We will have more tools built on top of the Friendster platform.  Blogging has had great adoption.  I can imagine a heavy media component to Friendster.  I can also imagine there might be tools and applications that help in organizing friendships offline.  In any event we definitely will move in the direction of adding value beyond being the personal face-book we are today. 

Mark Brooks: Taek is just the medicine for Friendster.  MySpace has stolen some of Friendster's thunder but I think Friendster will find it's way under Taek Kwon (and Jonathan Abrams).   

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #8 - True.com's Chief Psychologist

OPW INTERVIEW -- July 13 -- Eric Straus of Cupid.com thinks matching based on personality profiling is B.S.  Online dating upstart, True.com, would beg to differ.  Mark Brooks interviewed True.com's Chief Psychologist, Dr James Houran, to get a second opinion on personality profiling for online dating.   

Tell me about your background Jim?
I’m first and foremost a researcher, but I worked as a mental health counselor with both adults and children in a hospital setting for 6 years. That experience motivated me  to complete my masters in clinical psychology. My focus was how attitudes influenced behaviors, as well as the interplay among imagination, cognition, and personality. After my M,A., I was hired as faculty at the SIU School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry  There, my principal clinical and research interests involved advanced psychological testing, gender differences, mental health and wellness, as well as relationship quality.  I worked with couples as well as families in both platonic and romantic contexts.  I completed my Ph.D. became known for my work on the validity of psychological testing.  Unfortunately, many test methodologies used today are outdated.  As a result, much of what we think we know in the social sciences is probably skewed or downright wrong. 

Why did you join True?
True.com gave me opportunity to do what I was already doing – a combination of research, clinical work, and public education – but on a scale that psychologists can only dream of.  Usually in the academic community we worry about funding and finding large samples of research participants.  Now I can conduct state-of-the-art online testing where funding is not a problem and which can make a difference in people’s lives on a topic that touches us all.  So, I could not imagine a better job. Also, I’m able to help lead and pioneer the next era of online testing technology.  Very exciting!

How can you be sure True.com’s tests are true and correct?
Luckily we don’t have to rely on opinion.  There are professional standards for testing, which are outlined in a manual authored by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, along with the National Council on Measurement and Education.  One key element in test creation is in providing the test rationale. It’s also important to create and validate tests in the context they are to be used, that is, online tests can’t be created and tested offline as a pencil and paper measure and then transferred online.  True.com uses Item Response Theory based measures.  This is the same approach used by the GRE, MCAT and LSAT.  We’ve known since 1960 that it’s superior to Classical Test Theory methods.  All good tests have a test manual to show their basis, construction and validation… and preferably the research should be published in a peer-reviewed journal or at least independently audited by an expert in modern psychometrics.  To my knowledge True.com is the only company that has done this.  And, that angers me, because I hear people on TV saying, “Trust me, I have a test based in science, trust me.”  Ask to see that science and you don’t get a response back. 

Eric Straus, the CEO of Cupid, says personality profiling for online dating context is B.S.  What do you think?
I would agree to some extent. The public should be skeptical!  Public exposure to professional testing is limited.  The public is more familiar with fun little quizzes in Cosmo or on entertainment websites.  These tests are fun diversions but they are not the real thing.  But, can we identify the variables that are associated with long-term compatibility?  Yes, we can.  Can we measure these variables in a reliable and valid way?  Yes, we can.  Can we use and apply these variables?  Yes, we can.  Published research has already shown this.  However, what we’ve learned from advanced statistics is that things we thought we knew often turn out to be skewed or wrong.  For example, eHarmony’s test says ‘birds of a feather flock together.’  The more similar a couple is the happier they will be in the relationship. That’s incorrect. “Similarity” is a relationship principle that academics have long known from research to be oversimplified.

I can’t make sense of eHarmony. They claim their test is based on an impressive study of 5,000 married couples.  I can’t find that study anywhere.  Last February, eHarmony published a general description of their services in a psychology magazine. Several ‘Letters to the Editor’ came in from professionals criticizing the company for unsubstantiated claims of scientific testing. eHarmony has yet to show the public anything of substance.  The only attempt I’ve ever seen is a paper presented a year ago at a psychology conference. This paper reported research on two sets of married couples. One sample of marrieds met on eHarmony, while the other sample met in the real world.  The conclusion was the eHarmony couples had higher levels of relationship satisfaction.  As we reviewed their research it was apparent that the study and its conclusions were wrong.  A rebuttal was published in the North American Journal of Psychology. This rebuttal showed that eHarmony’s own data contradicted the idea that similarity is the best predictor of relationship satisfaction.  The media is also now starting to question the legitimacy of eHarmony’s testing. Test manuals or any proof of testing research are also absent from Perfectmatch, Tickle, and Yahoo Personals.  Personality profiling tests can indeed be harmful if they are not based in legitimate research.  Many people take these test results to heart and they influence life-changing decisions.  If a company says they use tests based in science they have a legal and moral responsibility to consumers need to back that claim up. 

How can a company give out enough information on these tests to win confidence, without giving away their secrets?
Independent auditors who are established experts in modern test construction and validation can review the tests and certify that they meet professional testing standards. Data can be reported to the public without divulging the specifics of matching algorithms. Take drug companies, for example, you don’t see the specific recipe for the chemical makeup of drugs or detailed explanations of how those drugs work exactly. Yet, drug companies routinely sponsor and publish research on their efficacy of their products.

So what can you tell me about True.com’s matching algorithm?
True matches people based on research concerning similar as well as complementary  relationship variables. We take into account factors well beyond mere personality. Some of those variables include lifestyle preferences, world-views, sense of humor, social life, money management, and readiness to commit. Companies are free to use their preferred methods to pair individuals. Perfect Match uses a test derived from the popular Myers Briggs Type Indicator.   We use what’s known as the ‘big five model.’

eHarmony and Perfectmatch make all their users take their profiling tests.  Why doesn’t True.com?
Not all users want to take a compatibility test for many reasons. Users may be skeptical or just not want to spend the time.  If people are antagonistic about being forced to take a test they won’t give accurate responses.  Compatibility testing implies long-term relationships, and True.com realizes that not everyone is looking for that exclusively. Our research indicates that the bulk of the online daters do not want exclusively short-term or long-term relationships. We’re offer tools to help them find the relationship that is right for them. Our vision is to reduce the divorce rate by pairing people up for good relationships and marriages, as well as by preventing bad marriages in the first place by not prematurely pushing people down a path they’re not comfortable with. 

How is True.com planning to help move the industry forward over the next 6 months?
You’ll see more of a push towards educating people on the power and value of good science-based products.  True.com is committed to the safety and security of all our members and to give them the right tools so they can find the right person.  We’re also working towards answering the second half of the problem.  Once we pair people up… then what?  We’re developing even more tools like supplemental tests and relationship guides to help people maintain and nurture relationships. Basically you’ll see more of a hand-holding approach.  We’re uniquely positioned to help people with other aspects of their life.  We haven’t painted ourselves into a corner to be simply an online dating site. Our tagline is “Live, Love, Learn”’ for a reason.  Love is one element of a person’s life.  We’ll also branch out to help people with self-growth and platonic relationships.  So, you’re going to see us increase in scope.

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #7 - Cupid.com's CEO

OPW CEO INTERVIEW -- July 1 -- Cupid.com probably has the best dating domain in the industry.  Who else can claim 2,000 years of branding history?  Cupid offers a fast track sign up process, does a great job of displaying real pictures of real users on their home page, and has successfully integrated Predating (the world's largest speed dating company) into Cupid.com.  Mark Brooks, Editor of Online Personals Watch, interviews Eric Straus, Cupid.com’s CEO and co-founder. 

What lessons from your radio station owner days have you applied to your time as Cupid's CEO?
Our advertising is done almost exclusively through our partner radio stations so I have used a lot of the radio knowledge I have when I’ve pitched them on Cupid.com.  Beyond that, running a business is running a business and personnel issues are personnel issues, regardless of whether you’re running a radio group or an internet company.

What would you have done differently had you known better?
I would have gotten the Cupid.com domain a lot earlier so I didn’t have to pay through the nose for it.  We would have started our localization campaign and we would have gone into the events business earlier as well.  I think our radio and our local focus are very related.  Localism is our niche so having local events in our markets is our competitive and branding advantage over other dating sites.   

How do events help?
If you go to Cupid.com and type in your zip code, in addition to finding local singles you also find all these local events that are near you.  And we're rolling out more coordinators in more cities.  They will become our singles experts in those markets.  Our ability to do local events and have local experts is our advantage.  The singles experts will provide additional local content; local advice, places to go on dates etc.   This speaks to our localism.

Are you still glad you acquired Predating?
Yes.  We feel our whole selling proposition is localism.  Match.com has mass.  eharmony has scientific matching.  We have localism.  The acquisition of Predating really helped in those efforts.   We have 70 people on the ground and well soon have 100 on the ground, and that’s not something any other dating site has.  There will be other opportunities down the road for other events such as lock and key parties.  Well offer larger singles events, which we think would be especially attractive to our radio station partners. 

Cupid is built on radio affiliate marketing, how did you get away with that?   
While I was still owner and manager of my radio stations in upstate New York many of my radio advertising clients said they were having trouble recruiting people. I thought a local job site promoted by my radio stations could help them fill their openings.  I approached Steve Bywater (now CTO) and Bob Chieffo (now COO) and we built RegionalHelpWanted.com.  We had 1,800 radio stations on the Regional Help Wanted side, and many asked for a second product. We thought radio was the perfect marketing medium for a dating site.   I mean, what medium reaches single adults more consistently than radio? The internet space is crowded enough as you can see when buying keywords and online advertising.  It made sense as a business model for our radio partners.  This is where my experience as a radio station owner comes into play.  I’m able to talk the talk with these guys.

Cupid is typically around the 12th largest online dating site according to Hitwise.  What are your goals for growth?
We would love to be in the top five.  We’re looking at possible acquisitions right now and doing some online marketing.   Well do more work with radio stations and further improve our conversion rates, even though they’re very good right now.   

What do you think of True background checks legislation?
I think this legislation is totally bogus.  A brilliant play to get PR.  It probably won’t pass.  It shouldn’t, but if it does, more power to them.  As a businessman I have a lot of respect for what they are trying to do.  I respect them for giving it the old college try.  A lot of guys (other dating companies) think how could they do such a thing?  They have to worry about their own business.  If this legislation passes it puts them in a great situation.   I don’t think it will, but more power to the guys at True.com for thinking this up.

What do you think of eharmony?
The concept is total b.s. and the marketing plan is brilliant, and I wish I’d thought of it first.  Scientific matching is total unadulterated b.s., but I think it is brilliant mktg.  Dr Warren is a marketing genius.  I don’t think he does any better job at matching than Cupid.com or any other dating site.  He just came up with a great marketing ploy.  He designed a great way to solve the problem of women being inundated and guys being ignored that you (Mark Brooks) highlighted for us.  Also, because of the perceived value of this scientific matching hocus pocus, they’re able to charge double.  I can tell you from the emails we get from customers, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction.  They complain its a pain in the ass to do.  Users have told us they like to quickly be able to get, do searches and open communication.  I don’t think you can scientifically decide the best matches.  There are 10,000 women out there that are right for you and its up to timing and circumstance to get together with them.  I can't emphasize enough I think its a genius marketing ploy.   If you asked me if I'd consider dating a Republican female, I'd say no.  I’m a liberal, Jewish and a democrat.  However under the right circumstances I might.  Just take James Carville, Clinton's campaign manager and Mary Matilin who was campaign manager for Bush.  They were arch rivals but  they fell in love and got married.   

We work with a professor at MIT who explained to us something very interesting.  If you look at relationships as a continuum, with the far left end representing never having met someone before, or talked, and the right end representing getting married, how far along the line do you thing online dating gets you?   eharmony proposes they get you  much further along.  I would argue neither eharmony or Cupid get you far along.  Meeting face to face is what gets you further along.  eharmony suggests  you can do more.  Face to face is where it counts; how they smell, how they laugh.  There are a lot of little things you cannot do online.  Online dating allows users to learn a few things about each other.  The eharmony concept is, in my view bullshit.    

Mark Brooks: Your comments please.  Please make sure to add your signature into your comment.  Anonymous comments will be removed.  Thanks ;-)

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #6 - Webdate.com's CEO

OPW CEO INTERVIEW -- June 21 -- Online dating pioneer Webdate.com offers 'webdating' video chat, web chat and mobile phone based dating...all for free.  It's grown to 4 million members whilst maintaining a completely free membership model, much to the chagrin of it's competitors, Match.com, Yahoo Personals and American Singles.  Mark Brooks, Editor of Online Personals Watch, interviews Abe Smilowitz, Webdate.com’s CEO and Founder. 

Is webdate beyond 4 million users now?
Yes.  We've had a consistent growth rate.  Anywhere from 250 to 300 thousand new users a month.  60% is type in traffic from viral, from non-advertising referrals. 

Why did you start webdate? 
We started webdate to be the #1 online personals company in the world.  We identified online dating as a hot industry and decided we wanted to participate and create the best online personals service on the net.  We decided we would add the largest amount of users in the shortest amount of time by moving to a free model, and the rest is history...Now we're #5.  We're the 5th largest online personals company (per Hitwise).  Last year we were the fastest growing online personals company.  We grew 800% where the industry average was 42%.  The guys ahead of us are monsters and we've spent a fraction of what they've spent!  What they spend in a month, we spend in a year.  Some are spending in excess of $5 million a month.  That's unbelievable!  Probably some of the guys below us are spending several multiples of what we're spending...and we're still ahead of them.  It's credit to word of mouth marketing and our user experience.  We think users want a fast, simple, no frills, quick and easy communication oriented site.  They don't want to have to jump through hoops.  We're not overly complicated like other sites. 

Was there a 'magic moment' for you when you were first developing webdate?
The magic moment for us occurred when we came up with the video dating idea.  You can go to any online dating site and see fake pictures.  Then you show up to a date and find your match is older than they looked...it's crazy!  How do you get around the problem of fake pictures?  It just seemed so 'not personal' to us.  Online personals didn't give users much feel for a person's personality.  Users can write down any horse crap, put up a fake picture and the person on the other side has no idea.  Video dating, done properly just crushes that.  It really gives users a feel for a person, not the profile, but the real person. They can interact!  Enabling someone halfway round world to get a feel for someone's personality over the web, with pictures, and movement and voice.  You can see if a woman is sexy, get a feel for her attitude, see if she's funny.  You can pick all that up on video dating.  When you're just reading a profile, staring at multiple-choice questions, just looking at words, those things don't speak to the soul as much.  The way a person moves can say a lot about them.  You can't pick up on body language from a profile.

How on earth can you justify making webdate free for so long?
Our justification is industry ranking.  We've been able to build webdate to our #5 ranking in a very competitive industry.  We have a high number of active users and significant market share now.  Here's a scoop for you; we're looking to move to a premium services model in the very near future.  But, we'll continue to be less expensive than any of our competitors because we feel everyone should be able to enjoy online dating.  Part of our approach has been to extend online dating to all of society with webdate mobile.  Minority groups are generally more mobile oriented.  That's a totally different approach.  Our mobile service is $3.99 a month.  So, beat that!  And our mobile users can interact with the entire 4 million person webdate user base.  It's an inexpensive alternative to being on the website and it has most of the features of an online service.  You can see pictures, browse profiles, we stand alone in the industry as far as mobile goes right now. 

How does this compare with Match's mobile offering?
We've integrated the entire mobile aspect into the webdate.  Match breaks it up into two sites.  Ours is the only fully integrated service.  Which is the future of mobile applications, fully integrated.

What will webdate look like 5 years from now?
It will be fully mobile.  Everything you can do online, you'll be able to do on a cell phone, and that's what we're trying to do now. 

What's the end goal?  Do you want to be bigger then Match.com?
The end goal is to offer the best online personals service on the planet.  If we're the biggest, great.  Our philosophy is, if we build the very best product the users will come.  But, it has to be the best integrated, have the best features, be the easiest to use, and be fully integrated with mobile and video.  We're building the best mousetrap but not necessarily to beat Match.com in users.  We think that we will beat them in users eventually, because our product is going to be better.  The users will acknowledge that.  Users will often join several sites when they start online dating, and then end up sticking with the one they like the best.  We want to be that one.  In order to do that we need to give them great combinations of features, ease of use and value...which means not charging them an arm and a leg for the service.

Does the public really care about mobile and video chat yet?
The video dating, absolutely!  Over 50% of users have tried video dating.  The video is here and it's here to stay.  It's not pie in the sky or something for down the road.  It's here now and it's only going to get bigger.  As far as safety is concerned...We were thinking about safety two and a half years ago!  Video dating allows people to go on first dates in the safety and security and comfort of their own homes...without putting them in uncomfortable or dangerous situations.  They can get a sense of chemistry from the other users, hear their voice and look into their eyes before taking it to the real world.  Mobile dating is still something that is not mature.  There's no doubt it's where the future lies.  There will always be online dating though.  You can't completely duplicate online dating with a cell phone.  There's not enough room, but there's no doubt mobile will play a huge role in the future.  Our goal is to be the innovator and shape the way online dating progresses, with a mobile perspective.  The companies offering it now will shape the industry down the road.

What does the future hold for webdate?  Where will webdate be in two years time?
We'll be the best personals site to get in touch with the 'right person.'  We're working to give our users as many options to communicate as possible in as time efficient a manner as possible.  Users can see who's online, who's on video chat, who's new on the site, who's viewed their profile, who's emailed and IM'd them, who's network of friends others belong to.  You shouldn't have to click five times to find what you want.  You only have to click once on webdate.  Everything users could possibly want is right there, laid out one click away from the home page.  We're building the best online personals site and in two years we'll be at the top of the online dating rankings. 

Mark Brooks: People, essentially, are the 'product' that online dating sites sell.  Webdate has invested heavily to build a considerable member base, get people talking (hey it's free!), and offer some great next generation services.  One to watch.

Online Personals Watch Exclusive Interview #5 - True.com's CEO

OPW CEO INTERVIEW -- June 17 -- Online dating upstart, True.com, states on it’s home page that married people will be prosecuted, has driven online dating background checks legislation, and challenged the integrity of it’s competitor’s personality profiling systems.  What will it do next?  Mark Brooks, Editor of Online Personals Watch, interviews Herb Vest, True.com’s CEO and Founder. 

Why the True employee layoffs August last year?
We got a little too big for our britches and were going in too many directions at once.  We decided to cut back and focus our direction. 

You're a newcomer, an outsider, you could have just been a VC without getting personally involved.  What made you be want to be personally involved?
I'm an entrepreneur at heart and like to be involved in running the business.  A VC is more akin to banking than entrepreneurship so VC's are not necessarily real good entrepreneurs, and vice versa.  I'm more socially oriented.  I want to make a difference.  What does society need?  One thing is money, the other is love.  I handled the money with HDVest, and so I then decided to try my hand at love.  I know we can lower the divorce rates.  They're way too high.  I believe True can do something about that. 

In your book you mention revolutionary entrepreneurs.  What is a revolutionary entrepreneur?
We tend to be social outcasts, not necessarily well liked in the corporate world.  We are very good leaders but not very good followers at all.  A revolutionary entrepreneur seeks to change society for the better by using their business powers. 

And what are the top 'principles of war' you've applied to True.com?
The main principle of war, business, and life in general is the principle of the offensive.  I think in general in life and business and in war you have to constantly be on the attack.  That is the thing that I have learned in life.  If you go on defensive you're going to lose.  You always have to be out their stretching and pushing the envelope and digging at the competition.  I like the competition to worry about me rather than me them.  In my book, Instructions To My Officers: A Revolutionary Approach to Entrepreneurial Strategy, I talk about the race car driver, which is one of the better parables.  It covers the principle of focus; focusing on the curves but being aware of other curves ahead.  You have to set yourself up for the future curves otherwise you’ll slow down and give the competition time to regroup.  This is the approach True is taking right now.   

How is True different than PerfectMatch and eHarmony?  How is the site better?
eHarmony is going after a particular group which represents around 20% of the market; those looking for a long term relationship.  The people at True believe that love is a continuum.  When you come off a relationship you may say, ”wow, I never want to do that again,” but it may not be too long before you wind up looking for another relationship.  So, if you have people who are looking specifically for long term relationships without regard to where they are in life, they tend to fail.  They are going into life with the idea that, “I'm going to find my partner.” I think, going in to a relationship to have a good time and ‘perhaps’ find a partner, makes more sense. 

What would you say to Dr Warren and Dr Pepper?
eHarmony and PerfectMatch are actually trying to tout tests that purport to measure compatibility between couples when in fact there's no scientific evidence that they do.  I think they are highly misleading.  I would like the industry to look at compatibility testing on a more professional level.  I’d like to see these tests certified against principles set up by professional psychologists.  I think the public is going to wake up and feel duped unless we conform to professional standards.  It’s going to completely destroy the industry.  It’s a very serious situation.  We need to establish generally accepted principles.  We need to look at the methodology, conclusions, findings and algorithms used in these tests.  Once independently verified, professionals should publish their testing manual on their site, as we've done.  You can find that on True.com.  We've also had Dr James Houran publish results in professional journals and invited criticism from other professionals.  This is the way science has always been done; the generally accepted principle.  I am appalled we're not applying that as an industry.  We'd like to do something about that eventually.  We’d like to poll all dating sites to adopt a professional method of testing that has been accepted by the scientific community, or, if they don't do that, then they need to label their tests as ‘fun’ tests.  They can't imply reliability.  It’s very dangerous for the public and we think something needs to be done about that. 

How will True influence society over the next 5 years?
We plan to lower divorce rates in this country, and others, with scientifically backed matching.  We also need to improve the courtship process.  We will work on testing methods, dating tests and things like that.  There’s a big difference between dating and long term relationships.  For long term relationships it’s important couples agree about raising kids, finances, household chores etc.  For short term dating, the relationship factors are not so important as sense of humor, mindset and interests.  We want to facilitate both sides of the equation, for the long term and short term mindsets. You will see more and more testing on True; matching base upon users goals, whatever they are within the dating continuum. 

What’s next on the agenda?
We have ambitions far beyond just online dating.  As a relationship company, in the next couple of months we will introduce pre-marriage counseling, pre-commitment counseling and self help guides combined with a referral service to specialist counselors.

Can you give me an example of why this is needed?
My wife and I occasionally argue, as do all married couples.  We stumbled on a technique where we become each other’s attorney.  We’ll put each other on the stand and pretend to be each other, taking the others view.  True will introduce conflict resolution techniques over time.  Every year suicides occur because of failed relationships.  People need to think through issues before they become hot issues.  Many problems can be averted.  I have had a lot of experience with conflict resolution over the years.  There’s usually something that can be done.

Any plans to move True into Europe?
Definitely, but much more long term.  We’re focusing on the US market.  We have every reason to believe that couples problems in the US are the same as international problems, but, we want to research this more.  We will be moving internationally.  One step at a time. 

What does the future hold for True? 
In a short time, just one and a half years, we’ve already taken a substantial leading position in the industry.  We will hold and gain.  You’re gonna see a whole lot more of us, raising a lot of ruckus.  We made progress with safer online dating.  The industry needs to get more serious about full disclosure and doing a great job for the consumer. 

OPW Exclusive Interview #4 - PerfectMatch's CEO

OPW CEO Interview -- June 1 -- Duane Dahl is CEO of Perfect Match and the former CEO of Kiss.com and Udate, which were acquired by Match.com/IAC.  Perfect Match is eHarmony's most direct competitor.  It's the only other top tier dating site that requires all it's users take a personality test.  - Mark Brooks

How is Perfect Match different from eHarmony?
Dr. Neil Warren has done some excellent things within the Christian ministry and his Christian oriented publications.  However, he doesn't hold a candle to our Dr. Pepper Schwartz.  We've made Dr. Schwartz available and accessible to our PerfectMatch.com members, which we believe is key.  Neil, on the other hand, is a spokesperson who appears on TV and that's all he is.  Our vision has been to leverage experience and expertise for the good of our members through several Dr. Schwartz vehicles:  Her Q&A, chat, monthly column, etc.  Also, we do not condone exclusionary practices.  I think people want to know how people are being matched.  People are starting to question the matching.  If you're going to discriminate, you need to be up front and disclose why you're discriminating.

How does your matching philosophy differ from eHarmony?
Transparency is the key.  eHarmony has a black box approach.  We’ve worked very hard to create a matching algorithm that members can actually use, benefit from and work to their advantage.  Take a look at the True.com test.  They contracted doctors to come up with a test.  It's a good test on a poor site.  We want to put our members in a position to impact results. We encourage our members to review results of their tests and identify with those they had relationships with in the past, so they can get an idea of who would be a good match for them in the future.  Also, wouldn't it be nice, while users are waiting for their matches, for them to be able to search the database freely?  On PerfectMatch.com that’s a highly prized option.  On eHarmony, you just wait for someone else to decide your future.

What are your thoughts on the progression of matching technology?
It's still very, very early days in the business.  I think the business has grown so quickly,  the technology hasn't been able to keep up.  As the space evolves, it's going to become more specialized...more member centric.  We make sure every single one of our members has the ability to have their profile reviewed on the site.  There are millions of members who don't quite get it and they need assistance.  So, we have a comprehensive 10 point review, from photo selection to the content in their profiles.  This review is available with our standard membership.  It's very important to make sure the membership is educated and someone takes the time to teach them what works and doesn't work.  We've developed our own leading-edge technology to have our member services team review all profiles.  We're constantly reinforcing to our membership 'they're not alone here.'  A few years back we saw a Jupiter report and most online personals members were on three or four sites.  The reason?  They don't really know how to use online dating.  They're just going to three  or four 'bars' at different times of the week.  We're making sure our members can leverage the vast experience we have, and greatly increase their odds of success.

Do you really think you can trounce eHarmony?
I have no doubt.  For us, my team got back into the space so we can compete and win.  We are actively seeking out partners.  Every time we compete with eHarmony on a proposed deal, we win.  Sitting back and looking at it, why are we winning?  We're not spending more money.  We are, however, willing to go beyond traditional ads and be creative.  Major brands will not work with eHarmony in this regard.  If I can be in situations head-to-head for business development, I love that.  Christian content is just not mainstream.  We look forward to crushing eHarmony.

eHarmony doesn't favor webcams?   Does PerfectMatch favor them?
A few years ago we thought webcam usage would ramp pretty quickly.  One of the difficulties is the inability to audit what is going on in a community.  This is why many sites have struggled.  The same goes with recorded video.  We just don't have time to review it all.  Also, when we work so hard to build a brand, the last thing we want is a someone uploading inappropriate content. 

eHarmony excludes homosexuals.  What’s PerfectMatch’s position on homosexuals?
We never have and never will judge our members.  We built a community to allow people to find sincere relationships, so of course, we allow individuals to pursue same sex relationships.  I find eHarmony's exclusion of homosexuals almost as appalling as the notion of them excluding people who've been married a couple of times...because the assumption is they never will be happy in a relationship.  To me, it’s absolutely laughable for some 70-year-old guy, who is sitting on the king’s throne in Pasadena, to judge men and women in this culture in such a way.  Relationships go bad.  But, that doesn't mean these people are not worthy of ultimately finding love.  It's really ridiculous. 

What does the future hold?
We're very excited for the online relationship and dating spaces.  Some exciting things are happening at both sites.  Dating sites like Yahoo Personals and Match, but we're still troubled with True's approach, though. We would like them to get away from the business of having to use suggestive female photos to drive members.  I think that hurts both the dating and relationships space.  We remain very committed and excited about the future.  We’re there to compete and win.  And, when we win, our members will win, by finding that special person. 

Mark Brooks: After the interview Duane gave me a heads up on the following upcoming Dr Phil show...

"Finding Your PerfectMatch, June 3rd on Dr. Phil Dr. Phil wants to help make some love connections! Along with PerfectMatch.com, he's setting the entire studio audience up with their "perfect match!" Then, he kicks off "The Dating Game" ... Dr. Phil style! See what happens when Bree, who's been unlucky in love, quizzes three bachelors who are supposedly right for her and then chooses her man. And, Dr. Phil sends two singles on a date that will test their true compatibility ... as future parents. If you haven't met the partner of your dreams, find out what you could be doing wrong."

OPW Exclusive Interview #3 - Click2Asia's CEO

OPW CEO Interview -- May 27 -- Click2Asia is focused solely on the Asian dating market and competes with AsiaFriendFinder and AsianAvenue.  Pierre Wuu co-founded Click2Asia in 1999 and talks about his company and the Hong Kong internet dating convention (photos). - Mark Brooks

Pierre Wuu - During the internet heyday Click2Asia was an Asian online portal.  In late 2002 we adjusted our business model and focused on Asian online dating.  Now we have two major divisions; nationwide events and online dating.  We get quite a lot of Yahoo and Match defectors because we're so focused.  They offer 'Asian.'  We offer 23 breakouts so there are a lot more Asian subcategories for people to search on.

How is Click2Asia different from Asiafriendfinder and Asian Avenue?
Many of the Asia FriendFinder women are overseas Asian and many of the men tend to be non-Asian.  Our site focuses more on the core U.S. Asian community.  We don't have many overseas women.  Asian Avenue tends to be a much younger demographic. Their average age is early twenties whereas our demographic is more late 20's. 

Where are most of your members?
L.A. and San Francisco followed by NY and pockets of Seattle, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and Vancouver.  All in line with US census.  Asians represent 4% of the U.S. population which is roughly 12 million.

How did the Asian internet dating convention go?
It went well, Marc did a great job.  We got to network and learn a lot about the Asian market.  It opened my eyes in terms of what they are doing in China.  Especially the mobile and seeing how much further advanced beyond the USA they are.  It's a huge market with a lot of upside but it has it's share of challenges; namely pricepoint and payment procurement.  You can have tens of thousands of subscribers but may only get $4-$7 a month.  Also, payment can be up to 3-6 months delayed.  For example, with China telecom, we could be waiting 3-6 months for payment.  Online dating in Asia is huge but it shouldn't be treated as homogeneous market.  Korea, Phillipines, China, Singapore, Vietnam, all need to be treated very differently.  Finally, the advancement of the mobile technology is way ahead of North America; texting, paging, use of mobile devices and how they pay with mobile. 

How much are they willing to pay?
In China people are willing to pay 20-25% of the U.S. online personals memberships; $4-$7 a month.  However, for events, we should be able to get 50% of the U.S. market rate.  There's definitely a group of people who will pay a higher price point at events, there's a finite number of tickets, but it's better to be less expensive with online dating to maintain critical mass. 

How about the presentation on the Indian market?
The presentation on the Indian market opened my eyes.  They don't typically date.  They are more interested in marriage.  It's a totally different approach. 

What does the future hold for Click2Asia?
We're looking at Asia and expanding our network within North America.  When you look at the Jewish market, Jews in North America represent half of the Asian market.  So you can see the ethnic online dating market has huge potential.  We want to make inroads on the kinds of numbers Jdate are doing.  Jdate is a good comparison for our future potential. 

OPW Exclusive Interview #2 - Tribe.net's New CEO

OPW CEO Interview -- May 1 -- I've been intrigued with Tribe.net for a while now; 'Craigslist meets Friendster.'  Marc Pincus started it not long after Jonathan Abrams started Friendster (purportedly friends).  But Marc is handing the CEO's baton to former Pepsi and Proctor and Gamble exec Jan Gullett.  I interviewed Jan to find out a little more about Tribe and where he plans to take it.  - Mark Brooks

Is Tribe.net a dating site? - Dating is a fairly specific activity and we're a general social community.  Building relationships is at our core, but dating is only one kind of relationship.  We’re much broader in scope and certainly not a dating specialist.  We have a local focus and we help get people together.  Knowing who people are is really critical to knowing if you want to do business with them.  We think people are hungering for relationships with people they can trust and ‘community’ relies on people knowing one another.

You mentioned recently you'd be taking a more proactive approach to marketing, but given that Tribe.net is a social network, why the need, it grows itself? - We’re not as big as other social networks but we have good organic growth, so additional marketing will accelerate our growth.  We have attractive fundamental metrics that we want to take advantage of.  We’ve had a nice compound annual growth rate for the last year now.  It just remains to be seen how fast we can step on the accelerator. 

What do you think of Craigslist? - Craigslist is a great service to the community.  Tribe.net is quite different in approach, and people are better off for having both of us.

Why did you decide to join Tribe? - Tribe.net is a real benefit to the community, it’s fun, and I believe there’s a great opportunity for growth.  We had an individual who had cancer and raised $100k from local people through the site. This just wouldn't have happened if he went out and stood on a street corner.  Helping people pull together to help one another is of great interest to me. 

Is there any similarity between Tribe and Starbucks? - Besides being equally addictive?  The reality is we have incredibly intense usage by our members.  The involvement, time and relationship with the site is really very strong.  People hunger for relationships and friendships and being a part of a larger social group.  There’s a hunger to be in groups of people with similar interests.  As we live in more crowded areas, with less public space and fewer places to hangout…it seems like most of hangouts have gone by the wayside and are being replaced by commercial real estate.  Starbucks and Borders have become the new local hangouts.  In a way, we’re the online version of that.

What's the caffeine? - Personal satisfaction from high-touch human relationships.

What do you think of the background checks legislation? - In the early days people communicated anonymously online.  Now there’s the concept of wanting to be known as a real person online, no longer wanting to do stuff surreptitiously.  I believe in honesty, and being comfortable being a real person in the online world is important.  For young people, the online world is their world.  It’s not artificial for them, not a separate playground.  It’s where they live and they want to be associated with others as real people.  That’s why we’re investing a lot of time and effort in building out the ability of our users to represent themselves on the web.

And what of Yub.com’s ‘affiliate program for everyone’ site model? - Amway made a lot of people successful.  I would say there's business promise.  But there’s the sanctity of social friendships based on merit and fundamental essence of goodwill.  We don’t want to pollute Tribe.net with an external economic motivation.  We’re an online hangout…for very good and valid reasons.  Gratifying reasons.  Rather than capitalize all out, we’d rather benefit everyone from the Tribe.net goodwill.

What have you learned from Tribe.net users? - We measured response rates of listings from people with profiles and those without and the difference is phenomenal.  We have actual proof of the value and leverage of having real people, known in the Tribe.net community, list items...they get an order of magnitude greater response rate to their listings.  This is at the core of who we are: providing a rich environment where local people can connect with each other  ‘Thin’ services run the risk of burnout. 

How will Tribe.net make money? - We’ve put a lot of thought into this.  We’re a media business...sponsored tribes, listings and display advertising. These are just different types of marketing messages which we intend to monetize.

OPW Exclusive Interview #1 - R-Kevin Ambler

R-Kevin Ambler - House sponsor of the Florida background checks legislation

Why the need for legislation? – “I have a 15 year old daughter and a 17 year old son who live on the internet.  It’s their tool for communicating.  Background checks sounded like a good idea for protecting their interests in the future, especially after I heard about a national poll in which 20% of the one thousand online dating respondents thought background checks were already required. (Independent national survey of online daters, Infosurv).  Many online daters have a false sense of security.  Clear disclosure is required in this case, along with the meaning of 'background checks' and limitations.  It’s not a perfect system.  Some states don't release conviction records publicly.  I have written this legislation so if a site does a check a pop-up that has to be electronically acknowledged is displayed.  Do you know there are over 200 million conviction records publicly available!  I want my daughter to know, and have the ability to identify felons in the future.  As a parent it's incumbent of me to protect my kids future.  They are the most internet savvy generation yet...and the most likely to drop their guard.  The government looks after public safety and welfare.  Disclosures are a part of that.  The government requires labeling and warning on cigarettes and other known perils.  I should note, this legislation does not require anyone to adopt background checks.” 

What is the legislations likelihood of success? – “The first committees have processed it after an excellent vetting of the issues.  It was debated twice for over an hour in the house.  We are becoming alarmed about the number of predators and felons so anything we can do to improve the odds and safety is a good thing, a step forward, so I have a very positive outlook on this legislation.  The Florida legislation is different from the rest of the country.  I spent 20 years as an attorney, am a former federal prosecutor with the US attorney’s office, and have a deep understanding of constitutional issues. I drafted the legislation to balance business, commerce and government issues in the interests of protecting safety.  It was very carefully tailored to be minimally intrusive to the business model but offers a fair level of protection.  The legislation goes one step further; if the site does background checks and finds convictions, it can choose to disclose to the member that this person has been identified as having a felony or sex related conviction.  It’s up to the site if they choose to ban communication or simply disclose.” 

How about married people? – “We’re not legislating on marriage disclosure.  We’d be getting into morality issues.” 

What are the next steps for the legislation? – “There’s one more committee in the house and senate; the justice council and judiciary committee.  It then goes to full votes in the senate and house and has to pass in both chambers, and then the governor has to sign it.  If it were to fail then it could not come back up till next March in the next legislative session.”

What are the implications for other online services? – “ISP's are excluded from liability…background checks have nothing to do with the carriers of online dating sites.  The employment area is also ripe for discussion  i.e. monster.com should indicate if applicant background checks have been done.  I don't see anything beyond services effecting individuals safety as possibilities for future legislation.  Sites that are involved in financial deals could also choose to do background checks.  I could foresee them being offered in environments such as eBay.  But, this area does not serve the same compelling safety interests for legislation.  I don't have to meet people from eBay…but a background check would have some bearing on whether I trust them.” 


Mark Brooks: Some useful links to proposed legislation; MICHIGAN SB 286, FLORIDA HB 1035, FLORIDA SB 1768, TEXAS HB 1307, CALIFORNIA AB 1681