General News

According to the New York Times, True has a huge advertising bill from the last six months which they have not paid. In March True.com was ranked as the number one most visited dating site according to Hitwise. Since then it has fallen too number six and the main reason for this most likely is only a few True dating ads can be found on the net now. True's big advertising push most likely got them in financial troubles with ad spending out pacing paid members sign ups.

Hot or Not has decided to abandon their free dating format. The main reason the dating site suggests, is because the number of spammers and fake profiles increased to the point of being out of control and slowing down the system. In my opinion Hot or Not is switching back to a paid dating site because it is more profitable. A couple of months ago they switched to a free dating site system hoping to draw in more users. Free dating sites make money by selling ad space on their site or by the number of users who click on these advertisements. Hot or Not was hoping with their current user base and the additional users they would receive for being free would off set the cost of loosing membership fees. This was obviously not the case.

You must remember running a good dating site, with some sort of quality control of profiles and customer support costs money. Not only that, online dating is a very competitive market and dating services must be constantly upgrading their services and adding new and useful features to their site to help attract more singles, which again costs money. With Hot or Not going with basically the same paid format as before, will benefit singles on the site more in my opinion, than being free.

Yesterday Canada's number 1 ranked dating site (among the top 10 in the world) Lavalife released a press release regarding there partnering with Playboy. Lavalife members who belong to the Intimate Encounters section of the dating site will get access to content from Playboy.com, while Playboy members will receive access to Lavalife's online services. Lavalife's other dating sections include Casual Dating and Relationships.

While at first I was surprised with this partnership since Lavalife image has always been more low key (until the recent internet ads anyways). Playboy has been hit hard with intense competition from the internet becoming so popular so they are obviously looking for other ways to expand. With Lavalife's Intimate Encounters becoming more popular I can see where this may bring in more business for Playboy while giving Lavalife access to more young adult males.

I noticed a feel good article at the MiamiHerald.com today about how a couple met using Match.com. The small twist in this story is the woman, Cheryl, is in a wheel chair. She has been in a wheel chair her entire adult life. When Cheryl first tried online dating she go a lot of email replies stating that the single men she had emailed couldn't handle her situation. That is until she met Mathew. He was hesitant at first but thought he should give it a try. Now 3 years later they are married.

About.com noticed that Lavalife offers a free Profile Doctor service to all of it's members. Once you are logged into Lavalife, click on the link for LavaLifes Magazine, Click. Once you are viewing the magazine you now then can go to the Profile Doctor signup page in the left hand column. The profile doctor will help you improve your headline and the "In My Own Words" descriptions by giving you pointers and informative comments on each section of your LavaLife profile.

Login to Lavalife to try out Profile Doctor or read our Lavalife review for more information.

Yahoo! Personals has decided to settle with Robert Anthony from a lawsuit reported late last year. Robert claimed he was a victim of a "date baiting" by Yahoo which Yahoo! Personals has denied completely. Yahoo decided to settle to prevent a long drawn out case which would obviously result in bad press.

A couple of good things have come out of this settlement. The first one being inactive profiles of more than 120 days will be removed from the system. This should have been standard procedure for Yahoo from day one. A few of the larger dating services (like Match) already do this. Why waste customer's time and frustrate them by allowing them to try to contact someone who hasn't been online dating for a while. Yahoo will also keep the ability of users to report bad behaviour and suspicious profiles along with the ability of when the user cancels there paid membership they can have there profile deleted.