It looks like sites are quickly taking down the mobile scams thanks to techcrunch.  Hopefully datehookup will be the next one to stop scamming users with mobile offers.

These offers also run through rightmedia on yahoo,  and its one of the reasons I could never use their network.   The problem was that there were networks running several banners promoting these mobile offers that would say you have new messages,  or  check your inbox etc and it would blend into my site perfectly.   The CTR was well over 2 or 3% and my total daily pageviews would decline by 3 or 4%.    It would hurt my site in a big way when those offers got through.

As a side note,  Yahoo told me a few weeks ago that all dating sites were banned from advertising on yahoo and the only way dating sites could now advertise was by buying traffic via right media  no more direct sales.    Is this true or is it just restricted to free dating sites?

Plentyoffish is sending 42 lucky singles on a blind date of a lifetime.      Enter our contest and we will send you on a date with another single were you will have backstage/VIP passes to lady gagas  concert in your city.  This is really a once in a lifetime experience so signup now!

Looks like the media finally wakes up to the fact that much of the social gaming/virtual currency is in fact a complete scam.   Its been a open secret for at least the last 3 years,  that no one ever questioned any of this is absolutely amazing.

A lot of the networks promoting these offers are nothing but a smoke screen and if you dig deep enough you will see many of the people/companies pushing the offers are facing multiple lawsuits in many states.    The top people/companies in these scams are pulling in revenues of over a million dollars a day.   Should be interesting to see just how much of an effect this will have on facebooks revenues.

I’m heading to the web 2.0 conference next week.    I remember standing around in the halls 2 years ago with other CEO’s talking about how most of the companies there wouldn’t be in business in 2 years because they had no way of making money..   Funny how it turned out true.   I also remember talking to Evan Williams about twitter and a lot of other ceo’s from companies that were growing fast.    This year it looks like there aren’t really any companies with buzz except for Zynga and playfish.

What are the best places to eat in San Fran ?   I like all types of food except for sushi  we get enough of that in vancouver.

Evidently plentyoffish is a top 10 mobile site.    After reading this today i went and downloaded a iphone emulator and changed the site around to actually be useful for mobile users.   It was very hard to do anything with a cell phone, and should be a lot better now.   Especially reading and replying to emails.

Probably the most important thing in advertising that has happened in a long long time and as a result google will probably become the largest display advertising player in short order.   Google has added view through conversions to google adwords today.        I’ve long used view throughs as click throughs are absolutely meaningless,  even comscore says 8% of the population account for 85% of clicks in ad campaigns.        I know my users spend 10’s of millions on other dating sites every month and now using view thoughs  other dating sites can find out just how much they are really making advertising on plentyoffish.com    When I advertise on other sites for every one person that clicks I get 5 to 15 times as many people going to a search engine typing in plentyoffish and finding it or just typing in the URL.    At any rate  our advertising inventory and all social networks inventory just got a lot more valuable.

Here are the top dating sites in the world,  from latest Comscore July 2009 report.       The most interesting trend over the last year is the growing difference between usage at paid sites verses free sites and hybrids like singlesnet.   

We are doing super well in Canada even though we don’t have a french version of the site which is about 1/4th of the population.   We dominate the english speaking part of the country.    As you can see in august  our user visited nearly 18 times a month compared to 4.2  at eharmony.  And we have 16 times the number of pageviews as our closest competitor  Eharmony.

It definately looks like the US(chart not shown) is trending free like Canada,   If you combine total visits at Singlesnet and Plentyoffish in the US,  our 2 sites combined already have more monthly visits than all pure paid sites combined.    I don’t think many paid sites are going to be able to maintain critical mass over the next year.    It is sort of the same trend we are seeing in all english speaking countries.

http://cyberdatingexpert.com/ask-the-cyber-dating-expert-radio-show-with-mate1

Mate1 is going to be like singlesnet,   paid members can contact anyone and free members can only contact paid members.  They are also trying to copy our matching engine as well as launching a facebook app/site

Friends account seems to have been hacked by scammers this morning and they are running the exact same scam that is reported here…

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2009/08/26/nl-facebook-826.html

Its one thing to read about these things its another to see it actually happen.    I’ve still got the messages up on my computer and they are the same as the above reported scam…

http://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/teracents-hall-discusses-new-video-creative-optimization-platform-and-matchcom-case-study/#more-5835

I’m amazed they would actually tell people…