Traffic to all dating sites declines sharply.

After holding steady for years visitors to dating sites have started to drop sharply since the summer.

Nothing better than a graph to show a point…

fortunately for  Plentyoffish traffic has increased.

Rebilling and dating sites in serious trouble.

It was only a matter of time until something was done about the out of control rebilling problem.   Now many dating sites have lost their merchant accounts or are at risk of losing them.

1.  Time sensitive offers,  and having a clock counting down the seconds you have left until your offer expires is a no no.

2.  Any trial period must be a minimum of 10 days.

http://blog.mediatrust.com/2010/01/update-on-direct-marketing-merchant-account-suspenions/

Most of the top 10 paid dating sites are not in compliance with mastercard new terms,  wells fargo stopped processing all rebilling,  and visa is soon to follow with their new terms.   This is a result of the senates investigation into Eharmony’s and True.com’s billing practices.

You’d think the most important thing to happen to the dating industry would have been discussed at this weeks annual dating conference in maimi

Match.com Launches new relationship site.

MatchAffinity is our new relationship site.  Whilst match.com is focussed on dating and allowing members to look around for suitable people, MatchAffinity helps people to find their partner through some more scientific means.  Each user takes a simple psychometric style test (takes about 10 minutes) and will then be matched with other members on the site based on a percentage compatibility ratio.  In order to then communicate with the member, users will need to subscribe to the full service, we find that curiosity usually gets the better of them!
 
looks like the borg have been busy this year,  buying up dating sites and expanding.

Affiliate Summit.

I’m at affiliate summit this week,   its amazing that the only other dating site here  is match.com   There are 3,500 affiliates here and dating sites are paying them 10’s of millions of dollars.     The dating industry is kind of backwards  why wouldn’t more dating sites attend an event where people who are responsible for such a massive part of their revenues attend ?   

At any rate the conference has been a huge success for us,   we met thousands of affiliates many of which buys ads on our  platform.   What other marketing conferences are worth attending?  The only other conference we are going to attend the next few months will be ad tech.

We are hiring more programmers.

http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/van/eng/1539090435.html

We are looking to hire more local programmers.    We have billions of impressions a month on plentyoffish,  and now we are serving billions of impressions a month through our self serve ad platform.     We need more programmers  as we start building things i’ve wanted to build for years!    The job is challenging and we are looking for smart programmers who are comfortable working at a scale you won’t find anywhere else in vancouver.  Send us an email if you have what it takes.

Plentyoffish ads moving site wide tomorrow.

Tomorrow we are going to start displaying our self serve ads all over plentyoffish instead of just half of it as we have been doing.   We will also begin removing all adnetworks for our logged in traffic.  

If you are advertising on POF  via google adsense or adnetworks better switch over to the new system fast.

Shoemoney just won’t give up.

Yet another bs post from  shoemoney saying i funded blitzlocal in 2006,  which i definitely did not.   If he had done even a remote bit of research he would see the company wasn’t founded until mid 2008 but hey lets not let facts get in the way of anything.   Or maybe he could do a search on linkedin  or ask all these former employees  he is supposedly talking to and ask when the company was actually formed?  I can’t see any mention of it before 2008.    This is so ridiculous why do i have to keep saying I never invested a dime into it?   Hell  maybe he could just go to blitzlocal ask the founders of blitzlocal if i ever invested cash into the company.  The only private company other than POF  i’ve ever invested any kind of money into was thesocialcorp

The people who actually funded blitzlocal and put real money into it are Emelia Wilcox , Matthew Flynn , Austin Stierler  go annoy them.   Of course Shoemoney has long known this,  but that doesn’t help his agenda.   Its not the first time shoemoney has done this.  When i posted a large cheque a few years ago shoemoney said it was all a lie,  even though google went on record in the wall street journal saying it was real.

*** Statement from Brad  the co-founder of thesocialcorp.

Shoemoney’s post.

Here is shoemoney’s post.

I never invested a dime into blitzlocal.   I invested  a small amount of money in a company that was building websites for charities, including the guy who won the nobel peace prize.   The company went under,  and somehow  my shares transfered to blizlocal, although no one elses did.   I’ve never talked to anyone on the board of directors at blitzlocal or seen any business plan or spoken with any employees,  although “supposidly” i’m on the board.     After reading shoemoneys post i went and looked at the operating agreement.   Since I didn’t do anything required in the operating agreement I don’t see how I even could be an investor.   I don’t really care one way or the other.

I must say the pannel at affiliate summit  with me shoemoney dennis and others at affiliate summit west is going to be most interseting.

Plentyoffish Self Service Advertising Platform.

In the next half hour we will start serving ads from our own self service advertising platform  located at  ads.pof.com   Our ads are in the same format as the facebook ads so it should be pretty easy for advertisers to use the same format.

We are different from nearly every other ad platform.    Instead of guessing at who your ads will reach you can target based on zip code, age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, profession,  if a user drinks, smokes   etc etc.

This first version of our system is meant for advanced users,   as we have many sophisticated advertisers spending 50k+ a month with us and we wanted to move them over as fast as possible and give them as many targeting options as possible.      Our next version will be more targeted towards local advertisers  who don’t need a million and one targeting options and just want to reach people within a 5-10 mile radius of their business.     You can advertise locally now,  but if you have never used online advertising it will seem alien.

US Congress investigates True.com and Eharmony for scamming ?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/17/ecommerce-scams-hundreds_n_361140.html

This is a bit of a surprise…      Why would dating sites put up interstitials?