Microsoft and Match.com Partner.

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9713301-7.html

Microsoft will offer the ability to let other sites integrate presence information through Windows Live Messenger within 90 days, Richards said.

At Mix07, Match.com will show demonstration of how it has integrated Microsoft’s instant messaging within its Web site via APIs. The integration will allow people to anonymously send messages to Match.com members.

Microsoft will offer the ability to let other sites integrate presence information through Windows Live Messenger within 90 days, Richards said.

Hopefully I can get into contact with someone at microsoft so I can get into this as well

SecondLife Scammers.

I wonder how many other dating sites got this?   Reminds me of those guys on Ebay that buy a dating script for  $20 and than resell it over and over for $100 per auction.

*********************

Greetings, I am interested in helping your company in the promotion of PlentyofFish to the next level in online dating. As a media developer,I see Secondlife as the new Medium of the future for Marketing and Branding. I can effectively promote Plentyoffish.com with my Metaverse Presence Marketing Skills. I am a premier developer in Secondlife, the worlds fastest growing 3d world and multimedia platform. I represent a group of seasoned and experienced agents with the capacity to work alongside your company to promote Plenty Of Fish internationally throughout the Metaverse. 3d webinars, 3d products , 3d events, virtual marketing and branding are some of the things that we specialise at within SecondLife. If this proposal has invoked a curiousity to envision PlentyofFish as the Premiere Service worldwide WITH Metaverse extensions and marketing capability, please feel free to contact me at your convenience at XXXXXXX@yahoo.com or by phone atXXXXXX during normal business hours EST. Conversely you may opt to sign into http://www.secondlife.com and see for yourself what the real potential of your products exposure through our skills can be. Thanks for taking the time, and hope to hear from you soon

Top US websites by user visits.

Comscore Rankings by number of sessions per visitor a month.

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/most-frequently-visited-websites-not-what-youd-expect/

Plentyoffish comes in at 39 In the USA and the most visited dating site and 3rd after social networks.

Plentyoffish destroys all other dating sites when it comes to engagement but its very misleading.   Plentyoffish doesn’t advertise much  so we don’t get tens of millions of “uniques”.    Remember the visits per user per month =  Total visits/uniques.       Sites like singlesnet and match.com  may do a million popups plus a month  and that totally kills their “engagement” metrics.   The entire list is made up of games sites,  users homepages, and sites that don’t advertise.

Plentyoffish Logo.

One of the first things I did when I started Plentyoffish is hire a graphics designer to create a logo for my business cards.  I never ended up using it online.    But after browsing some of my directories yesterday I found it again and have started using on the site.

Google buys doubleclick and KO’s Yahoo and Microsoft.

Well google did the right thing and bought doubleclick for 3.1 billion on friday.   People are saying that google bought the company for its advertiser and publisher relationships, I highly doubt that.

This deal will have major impact on adsense and publishers.

1.  Double click can IP/frequency cap,  adsense currently can’t.      For monetizing social networks or any large site with high pageview to unique user ratio  you can dramatically increase earnings using capping.  This means you can set your CPM based ad buy to only display to a person 3 times in one day not 50.

2. Doubleclick is an inventory management system.    It allows you to slice and dice your inventory and makes you a LOT of money if you use it. 

Yahoo has been working on YPN for years and they still haven’t been able to roll it out to anywhere outside the USA.  Yahoo doesn’t even do geo targetting on YPN.   Yahoo just added geotargetting to their search results this year and you can bet it will be years before they add more basic functionality.

This acquisition effectively gives Google at least 2 to 3 years lead in development time and in those years google will be able to offer sites far more revenues then yahoo or microsoft ever could.   Yahoo and microsoft don’t have the teams in place to effectively replicate this stuff.   Once yahoo and microsoft come out with something google will effectively control the advertising ecosystem.

Google, yahoo and microsoft will eventually offer advertisers the ability to target users based on their demographics and display branded ads to them on the content distribution networks.  

Microsoft Podcast.

In between a LONG day of meetings at Microsoft’s campus I did a impromptu podcast and its now up on channel 9.  Talking about ASP.net IIS running a large site  etc.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=300230#300230

Twitter Business model.

This guy says that Twitter is getting spikes up to 11,000 page requests per second.  
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000608.html

That works out to a peak load of 950 million pageviews/day   That is as much traffic as facebook did per day in Jan of this year.  In Twitter’s case probably 99.9% of those pageviews are RSS, automated requests and status polling of some kind.

This company reminds me a lot of Youtube,  lots of bandwidth and no way of monitizing it.   Twitter is going to have a tough time covering 6 figure bandwidth costs if those numbers are even remotely correct.    But at least for twitter they have traffic,  and traffic gives you options, such as acquisition! 

Plentyoffish now UK market leader & launching affiliate program.

Its taken me a year to go from nowhere to market leader of the mainstream market of the UK,   though we are still faaar away from competing with gaydar.    Compete.com has shown here  that ranking sites in terms of raw uniques is meaningless as it doesn’t represent people actually using the service.   The best we can do in the UK is rank sites by visit time * visitors to get a metric for most used.

Gaydar 378.84
Plentyoffish 135.36
Girlsdateforfree 95.7957
Match 73.7555
Friendsreunited 60.295
Loopylove 45.9
datingparents 30.957

I am looking to accelerate growth in the UK even faster and in the next week I’ll will be launching an affiliate program on azoogle and paying $3.00 per registration in the UK.     Plentyoffish  completely dominates canada and we are starting to go mainstream in the UK and affiliates can help us get there!.

The UK is becoming extremely competitive,  with companies like singlesnet, mate1 and others moving into the market quickly and meetic and match.com spending huge amounts of money.    And in the last year most of major dating sites in the UK have been sold.    The last site to be sold  was datingdirect,  which has about  5% of the traffic of plentyoffish worldwide for  52.8 million.

Hotornot goes free.

Looks like hotornot just became the second largest free dating site over night by converting to free.

Here are some of the compete.com statistics.   This is USA only traffic.

 Sitename,   Unique Visitors,   Visits,  Attention (visits*session time)
Plentyoffish 1,247,723 13,056,184 0.094987%
Hotornot.com 734,944 4,255,446 0.015883%
okcupid.com 509,888 1,354,140 0.008969%

The stats here show okcupid has virtually no traction,   or their unique visitor number is mostly made of myspace kids taking the random tests.   The repeat visitor ratio is virtually non existant.

Hotornot is in a very strong position,   lots of uniques,  good visitor to unique ratio.   Hotornot owns a niche and there are currently no real competitors.   If they move outside of the niche then they could have a lot of problems.

People are dramtically over estimating the size of the dating industry,   sure comscore says “20 million uniques” visit dating sites each month,   but the vast majority of those are users being redirected to sites like true.com via affiliates, popups etc.   Then you get sites like eharmony saying they sign up 10-15k a day in the US.  But only 10-20% of those people end up paying.    If you take out the duplicates the number of real people actively (2 or more logins/month) using dating sites in the USA drops to between 2 and 3 million/month.

As a free site all your money is made via advertising.     No matter whose numbers you use there are about 2 to 3 billion pageviews a month in the US from dating sites.   If you are lucky you can get 50 cents a CPM from ALL those pageviews. Myspace monitizes at 5 cents for the bulk, 50 cents is a lot and hard to get as an average when you have hundreds of millions of pageviews.  So assuming you can take 100% of the industry and at least 80% of those page views are monitizable  you end up with a market size of $12 million a year in the US.      If free dating mirrors social networking then 1 player will control 80% of the market and the other players will fight over the remaining $2.4 million in yearly revenues.  This of course assumes that all paid dating sites convert to free,  or free dating sites cause the number of people using dating sites to double.

Compete.com Launches attention and lots of new stuff.

Looks like compete.com’s servers are getting pounded right now and there are a couple of bugs  like match.com not having attention data showing.

True.com 0.117590%
Singlesnet.com 0.103640%
Plentyoffish.com  0.094987%
Eharmony.com 0.092182%
Mate1.com 0.030613%

Lots of new graphs and features that even the big paid sites like hitwise and comscore don’t have,  and the detail is far greater to.     Not to mention these stats are actually useful.

http://snapshot.compete.com/mate1.com+singlesnet.com+true.com?metric=att

ALL data is USA only.