General News

On August 6th, 2009 DC Thomson acquired Friends Reunited Dating from ITV for £25m. All 60 staff members will get to keep their jobs. There is further news that DC Thomson plans to merge their genealogy website, Find My Past, with Friends Reunited's social networking, dating and genealogy operations. This will make DC Thomson one of the largest sites in the UK for the online paid-for genealogy market, with about a 50 percent share. Their main competition is Ancestry.com.

DC Thomson also plan to launch and over 50 dating site which they hope will appeal to the users of their genealogy business.

For the full story, read Guarduan.co.uk and to find out more about the dating site, check out our review of Friends Reunited Dating.

IAC reported their Q2 financial results on July 29, 2009. The company saw revenue drop 4 percent to $340 million when compared to the same quarter last year. Looking at just the online personals side of things, IAC had a busy quarter. On June 5th, Match.com completed the sale of Match Europe to Meetic for $64.3 million (see Story) and on July 13th, acquired People Media for $80 million (see Story).

Revenue generated by Match.com declined by 5 percent this quarter to $88.3 million when compared to $93.3 million from quarter 2, 2008. Once again if you take the European Operations out of last year's revenue then, Match.com actually saw a 9 percent increase in revenue due to subscriber growth and in product execution.

There was no mention made of Chemistry in this quarters report. Since the People Media sale happened right at the end of quarter 2, we will have to wait to next quarter to see what additional revenue and subscribers will be generated by People Media's 27 dating sites.

Here is the complete IAC Q2 2009 Report. For more information on the dating sites owned by IAC, read our Match.com review and Chemistry review.

Related Story: Match.com First Quarter 2009 Financials.

eHarmony recently received a complaint in a letter from eRecruitment which stated that the dating site is infringing on their patents. eRecruitment is a job search site based in the United Kingdom that hold several patents which deal with classifying and indexing a website's members personal information. In the letter, eRecruitment told eHarmony to either shut down their dating site or start paying licensing fees.

eHarmony’s attorneys from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe asked Judge Paul Friedman at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to declare that the company had not infringed on patents owned by eRecruitment.

In my opinion this looks like someone who just wants to make a quick buck off of eHarmony. In the unlikely case that eRecruitment ends up successfully suing eHarmony, then all dating sites would be in trouble. Of course we have seen frivolous claims like this before. I forget who the company was but, there was one a few years ago that was attempting to sue any website who streamed video over the internet.

For more on the story, read The Blog of LegalTimes.

If you are planning to start, or just started an online dating site, then you may want to take a look at this blog post at White Label Dating. The post is actually commenting on another post at "Startup Professionals" which attempts to show all new dating site endeavours will fail.

I do agree with most of Startup Professionals reasons about why starting a online dating site is tough:

• Direct competition is huge.
• No longer a growth market.
• Entry cost is very high.
• Intellectual property is tough.
• Social networks and search engines.

The only real exception I have is the point they made about online dating not being a growth market. While growth may be slowing a bit, the Online Dating industry has a huge potential for further growth. The reason is, most single men and women are not online daters. In 2008 there was 93 million single Americans, only 3 million had paid that year to use a dating site (see Stats).

Including the point about "Entry cost is very high" may confuse people who have looked into buying software for a dating site. To buy and setup a readymade dating site script is relatively easy and can be done for under $300. There are hundreds of these type of dating sites out there but they all suffer from a couple of major problems. One problem is getting your website noticed, to do this these days costs money, lots of it. Dating terms in Google Adwords are not cheap and to generate enough traffic to hopefully get people to come back to your site will cost you alone at least $10,000 a month (conservative est.). Of course one month is not enough, you have to keep the marketing dollars flowing. The other problem these dating sites have is no members. People sign up to a dating site to connect with other members, if you don't have any, no one will sign up. This is the same problem as the chicken or egg scenario, which came first?

The White Label Dating post has a successful argument on how someone with a limited budget can bypass these points on why your dating site will fail. White Label Dating provides their clients the dating software, membership database, payment processing, customer support, hosting infrastructure, tax processing and more. All their clients need to do is provide a brand, website design and marketing. If you want to start a dating site but have limited funds, this is really the only option you have if you want a half decent chance at success.

Starting Saturday July 25th, when members of eHarmony logged into their accounts, they found a message about a new feature and profile questions. There are 7 new questions which focus on commonalities. The multiple choice questions look at common traits that include things like your approach to money and food, cleanliness and humor. Once completed you can then see how your commonalities compare with other members when you view their profiles. While these questions are part of your profile, they are not taken into account when you are automatically matched with other members by eHarmony. That is what the other 256 profile questions are for.

Be careful when you fill out the commonality questions, as it looks right now, you cannot edit the answers once you have saved them.

To find out more details about this matchmaking service, read our review of eHarmony.

The dating sites BlackSingles.com and HurryDate (both part of Spark Networks) have partnered with Eizzil Entertainment in a marketing campaign for the movie "SPEED-DATING". The movie is slated for a 2010 release and is a feature length romantic comedy starring Mekita Faiye and co-starring Clint Howard and Chris Elliott (among others). As part of a combined U.S. national promotion tour, Spark Networks and Eizzil Entertainment will present BlackSingles.com and HurryDate events in 12 major cities across the country.

For the full press release, visit SOA World Magazine and for more information on the movie, visit the SPEED-DATING website (including a full cast list). To find further details about the dating service for African-Americans mentioned in this post, read our review of BlackSingles.com.