Webdate converts to free.

I was expecting most of the paid sites would hold off until after Feb before converting to free.

Supposidly webdate sent out the following email to some users, and I see they are now saying they are 100% on their homepage.

Back by popular demand webdate is now FREE again for all users to enjoy. Webdate will have 100% FREE access to all users no questions asked. If you had a silver or gold membership your credit card will not be charged any more and you can continue to enjoy webdate for FREE.

Quantcast  chart.    Looks like webdate would have gone out of business in 6 months if they didn’t convert.  I doubt they are much better off now.

Wtf is Hotornot up to?

From James Hongs blog…

The decision to restart HOTorNOT recently is a fairly ballsy one, we are shutting down the cashcow and going for it again. It’s risky, but a hell of a lot more fun!!  For the time being, we’re only looking to let 4 people(developers) in.

hotornot claims they make 5 million plus a year and vast majority of that is profit because they have little to no costs or employees.

Lavalife is for sale again.

This time vertrue isn’t trying to sell just lavalife,  its put the entire company for sale.  Looks like private equity and companies are bidding over Vertrue.  Lots of speculation in the press and on todays conference call.    News Article here.

Lavalife has been dieing,  the majority of the revenues are generated from its late night phone based “dating” service.   With declining web revenues, price hikes and other money grabbing ideas it only managed 4% year over year growth.   Management is now referring to lavalife as a “Social Network”  I wonder what that means…

Paid Dating sites declare war on social networking & me.

When I was at idate 2 years ago  most people laughed at me when I said I would create a major free dating site.    This year at Idate most of the major dating sites were talking about how they could go free at least behind the scenes.

It is strange to see a completely new internet bubble forming around what i’ve done.  What is the most disturbing is that common sense and reality have given way to greed in many cases. 

The biggest problems i see are..

1.   Monetization via adsense 3 years ago was 10 times higher then it is now.
2.   Free dating sites are way more hardware/resource intensive then paid sites and social networks.   The reason being free sites consume more resources per user then paid sites.  As for social networks, most of those are simple clustered index seeks on the database side,  verse ranged scans where much of the data can’t really be partitioned in a dating site.  Check Spark networks public filings and compare costs to social networks..
3.   The whole idea of creating a free site and then creating widgets for myspace are rediculus.   Social networks consider themselves free dating sites at least internally and I have yet to find one that will allow Plentyoffish to advertise.  The day we see free dating sites advertising on myspace is the day we see facebook widgets all over myspace.

The landscape..

Probably the biggest effect of paid sites going free is it will have the effect of declaring war on social networking sites.   I don’t know how this will play out,  but if you brand a site as a dating site the average member stays only 3 months and has the effect of wiping out viralness.    As a free site I still have to pay $5.00 a member just like paid sites if you want to advertise.  With monetization at 2 cents or so a unique visitor per day, that being a unique visitor that wasn’t tricked into coming  its impossible to build a free site on mass advertising.   Social networks on the other hand require no advertising and are highly viral.

Other free sites.

I don’t think people realize there are other free sites,  although most of them are extremely small it does show you just how hard it is to make money.   Okcupid just raised 6 million,  it has a staff of 9 and a self reported 70,000 uniques a day.  It is easy to see why they raised money,  given monetization at 2 cents a unique they were making about 45k a month.   I would be surprised if the company was at break even, even assuming they spent no money advertising.  Looking at technorati i’d say at least 70% of okcupid’s traffic is coming from the millions of links they have to their tests. Matchdoctor  with over 10 employees has even less traffic.   LTR.com with 16 employees has no traffic at all and not even launched.

I predict 2007 will be a year of carnage,   many paid and new free sites will go under.   Social networking and dating will attempt to merge.   Paid dating sites will seek higher price points and get into personal matchmaking.  Social networking sites will fight back.   If free dating sites gain large market share in the US then the paid model will collapse to a fraction of the size of what it was as it has in Canada.   Just ask any ex lavalife employee what happened at lavalife when plentyoffish and free dating came along.

Google Crowd Sources Quality Control.

Google is now soliciting feed back when paid links are clicked and the back button is pressed.   Does this mean the end of Made For Adsense Scrapper sites and the like?

Eharmony gets into affiliate marketing.

Eharmony gets into affiliate marketing.   I see awords all over the place for the following site.

http://www.neilclarkwarren.com/

I wonder what the ROI on this is?

Free phone personals.

It looks like the phone personals industry is going to take a major hit this year.   Currently sites like lavalife and others make hundreds of millions of dollars a year on phone chat lines where men call in and spend a couple of dollars a minute to talk to women.

 I think that VOIP chat rooms monitized via google adsense for audio  is going to reduce this industry to a fraction of its current size.    I wonder how quickly this will be deployed by other sites?

Friendster Numbers.

Venturebeat   has some numbers on friendster.

6 Billion pageviews a month
$700,000 a month in revenue in December
$410,000 loss in December.
16 million unique users a month.

Last time I saw the comscore numbers,  all dating sites combined in the US only had 4 billion pageviews a month.  But the paid dating sites in the USA will pull in $650 million this year.

With the number of free sites exploding, and operational costs of a dating site significantly higher then social networking sites  it will be interesting to see which other free sites will be able become profitable.   When I look at the 2 other dating sites my size I am disturbed to see that their tech budget per month is a multipul of my monthly revenue.   

It is also great to see that most of the major dating sites have started running banner ads and advertising across their sites.   It will be interesting to hear what they have to say at the conference on monday.  

M&A heats up, 2 more buy outs today.

Meetic bought Datingdirect.com today for 27.3 million pounds (40.67 million euros/$52.8 million).  

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2007-01-08T230417Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-282717-1.xml&archived=False

Looks like they got a good exit,  Datingdirect isn’t as big of a player as they make out.  Lots and lots of advertising  but session time is only 3 minutes compared to 20 minutes average for the rest of the top players.  Match.com is certinally far bigger, and datingdirect is definately not 3 times the size of match.com as meetics news release hints.

Hearst picked up ecrush today.    Any independent companies going to be left to attend the dating conference on monday ?       The ceo of ecrush is on the final panel with me next week.

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/hearst-buys-youth-social-networking-company-ecrush

AOL Hacked?

In the last few months i’ve seen large number of nigerians attempting to spam my site coming from AOL.   Not sure what to make of it  but it looks like either AOL’s  users are having their computers hijacked  or AOL’s Proxy servers are being used by nigerians.   At any rate when i look at their accounts  they’ve got a AOL email address,  AOL brower  and US ip address  it makes it hard to tell who is legitimate or not from AOL.

If someone from AOL is reading this here is one of the IP’s being used  207.200.116.20.     AOL  has gotten real bad the last few weeks,   I can only imagine how much grief they are causing myspace.

**Update***

Someone in the comments said AOL is allowing anyone to use their proxy servers ?   I can’t see this being true.     If its true and they aren’t passing on the http_forwarded_for  then expect AOL to be mass blocked/restricted as it becomes a haven for criminals.