Partnerships

This story seems to have slipped under the radar.

On September 14, 2010 Lavalife announced a partnership with Yahoo. Lavalife is now the exclusive dating site for Yahoo! Canada. When users click on "Personals" listed under "Yahoo! Sites" on the Canadian Yahoo homepage they will receive a unique co-branded online dating experience in both English and French. Visitors will not only be able to create a profile on Lavalife, visit the different relationship communities, and communicate with members but, they will have easy access to Yahoo and their services through an extra toolbar that has been added to the Lavalife dating site.

Yahoo also has a similar partnership with Match.com in the United States (see Story).

To find out more about this popular Canadian dating site, please check out our review of Lavalife.

Glamour Magazine has partnered with the online dating site Match.com. This is a good move for both companies. Of the roughly 3 million women who visit Glamour.com, 70 percent are single or divorced. This is obviously an ideal market for Match.com to offer their service too. Plus a large percentage of Glamour readers are between the ages of 20 and 50. This age range is the prime users of online dating sites. From this 2 year deal Glamour will receive a percentage of the revenue from people who sign up for this Match.com extended dating service called Glamour Matchmaker.

When singles log into Glamour Matchmaker they will find specially chosen profiles which are organized by personality types. These personality types will be created by the staff at Glamour and will include names like "Adventure Seeker" and "Foxy Bohemian".

Glamour Matchmaker is expected to go online sometime this month.

For more on the story, read The Wall Street Journal. To find out more about the dating site which partnered with Glamour, check out our Match.com review.

I knew change was a foot on Yahoo! Personals.

I was visiting the site this morning and all was normal and then just a couple of hours ago we were sent official word that Match.com is now the exclusive online dating site for Yahoo in North America. We had hints of this possibility back in May of 2009 when the CEO of IAC (owners of Match.com), Barry Diller mentioned that they were in talks with Yahoo about acquiring their personals service. Yahoo and Match are also no strangers to partnerships. The dating sites for Yahoo UK, Germany, Taiwan are all partnerships with Match.com in Europe. Granted the Match.com European Operations were bought by Meetic last year but these partnership deals were in place long before the sale. It also looks like the partnership with eHarmony that Yahoo Australia had is over with Match.com taking the helm.

For current members of Yahoo! Personals, you will be experiencing a transition period. You have 3 options to choose from:

Quepasa.com is a social network website with over 13 million members that services the Latino online community. According to Compete their traffic has increased 5 times to 275,000 unique visitors a month, over the last 6 months. Last week an announcement was made that Quepasa has partnered with the dating site Zoosk to make their service for singles the primary option to all of Quepasa members. This partnership benefits both companies. It gives Zoosk a large, new, and relatively untapped singles market and it gives Quepasa an additional revenue generating service.

Members of Quepasa can expect the dating service from Zoosk to go live by the end of this month.

To find out more about the dating site you can read our Zoosk review.

In mid March, Match.com announced a partnership with Yahoo!7 in Australia. Match.com will be the exclusive dating partner to Yahoo's Australian news and search portal as well as Yahoo!Xtra for New Zealand. You can now reach the new partnered dating service by visiting Yahoo!7 Dating or by clicking on the "Dating" menu item available on the Yahoo!7 home page.

Currently on the Yahoo!7 Dating page visitors have access to both the old dating service and the new Match.com partnered service. The original Yahoo!7 Dating will close it' doors in June, 2010.

Match.com and Meetic have created an equal partnership together in Latin America where the two dating companies will be combining their resources. According to the CEO of Match.com, Greg Blatt:

By combining ParPerfeito's strength in the Brazilian market with Match.com's presence in the rest of Latin America, we believe we're best positioned to drive that expansion and create an asset of meaningful value. We're confident from our work together in Europe that further partnering with Meetic will be a productive experience.

The online dating market is less mature in Latin American than the larger North America and Europe markets. By making a combined push now both companies feel that they will come out ahead in this merging dating market. Match.com will control the new entity's operations and will pay Meetic $3 million in cash at the closing (March 15, 2010). I am not sure what Meetic's responsibility in all this is but, I will assume that they must be required to push traffic to the new venture. At the beginning of the fourth year of operations Match.com has reserved the right to buy Meetic's share of the entity at fair market value.

When we receive more news about this new entity (like the name of the website) we will be sure to pass it on.

For more on the story read the press release.