Good point Markus. There are a lot of gray areas when it comes to affiliate marketing that are always being exploited. FB takes down thousands of ads every week that don't meet their guidelines, let along finding improper affiliate ads.

Every dating site with an affiliate program has a few if not many rogues. If it drives members, dating sites tend to turn a blind eye. I think you will agree that most dating site affiliate ads are not very good, surprising and how little effort is placed on such an important marketing channel. Look at Fling.com, there is a reason why they crush it, dynamically-generated ads based on location and lots of different types of ads.

Why does the consumer have to pay? Why not have the service subsidized by brands and other parties? Reminds me of credit companies saying "Pay us a monthly fee and we'll make sure you are alerted about fraudulent activity", when they should be doing this all along as part of their business. The story about your mom reminded me about the show where the guy's Tivo thought he was gay, so he had to watch adult and boxing and monster trucks for a while to re-train the service to pre-fetch content more in line with his tastes.

Why does the consumer have to pay? Why not have the service subsidized by brands and other parties? Reminds me of credit companies saying "Pay us a monthly fee and we'll make sure you are alerted about fraudulent activity", when they should be doing this all along as part of their business. The story about your mom reminded me about the show where the guy's Tivo thought he was gay, so he had to watch adult and boxing and monster trucks for a while to re-train the service to pre-fetch content more in line with his tastes.

Meetcha is a well-executed service and I'm not just saying that because they are my landlord and friends and I date their members and have a free membership and go to their parties and appear in their videos.

Fact: Background checks don't work in the dating space. Dating sites and people will only use identity verification services. There is a lot of research and real-world use cases that prove this time and time again. Trufina, Backgroundchecks.com, Honesty Online and at least a dozen other companies already offer these services to dating sites (with low take rates) and the large lady has sung.

I read that as "Iris Robinson, wife of First Minister Peter Robinson, admitted that she engaged in an extramarital affair with a 19-year old lover, Noel Biderman, CEO of AshleyMadison.com."

Not that I don't like to see people try to come up with new and innovative dating niches, but this is a false start. It features virtual dating based on Omnidate. Highly motivated women desiring NSA sex are not going to spend time in a virtual chat room. Maybe the nervous ones will pay to flirt, as many men do on adult sites who never plan on meeting anyone in person, in which case the Omnidate partnership makes sense. But horny women paying to join a niche dating site looking for sex? I just don't see it. That's what sites like Mate1 are for.

Skeptical about 10,000 people a day given the traffic profiles of other sites, unknown issues like the ad spend that day compared to other days, media mentions and other factors. Homewrecking has never been more profitable.

It's the busy season (valentines day), which drives ad spend, which drives traffic. Not much to do with the weather. Why are we talking about these sites? Feels like we're back in "only writing about clients" mode again.

At first glance, it's a novelty site that leaves the same taste in my mouth as Ashley Madison. Sure it's going to exist, just like drug dealers (they both serve a need unsavory to some, necessary to others.) But we have to remember when Online Booty Call came out and everyone thought "oh, another casual/adult" dating site, and look where their efforts led them (profitable and launching Herway). Perhaps Beautiful People has really nailed their niche. Or it's just another dating site that will limp along making some money but not enough to really be considered seriously.

That was brochureware, where is the "study?" Ross, disagree strongly, the beauty of services like Crowdflower is that they have built-in failsafes to deal with bad calls. If you talked with them like I have several times you would see that they deal with your concerns. Outsourcing can be powerful rejuvination of resources, leaving people free to do more important things, like testing landing pages and affiliate creative. Having people look at photos is stupid and will go away in a few years. You can't imagine how many interesting stats and trends we're seeing with photo verification and evaluation services, fascinating stuff. There are no issues with data protection, we're talking about profile photos which are (should be) covered with the most basic TOS.

Josh great overview of how you operate. The more you make it public the better you will fare because the dating industry doesn't like tests, or new innovation, and everyone thinks they have the perfect solution. Moreover, no tests of any kind of significantly added squat to the effectiveness of a dating site. If you don't spend a lot marketing your site it's going to fail, plain and simple. I don't care how good your systems may be. "In short, instead of pretending to know what 'the right questions to ask' are within a stock survey, at Matchmaking by Cinekin, our members relate to each other, and to us through the vast realm of human experience as represented by thousands of movies." This is why cinekin is a feature and not great idea for a dating site. You would be better off licensing the IP than spending millions marketing your site. Call it my first 2010 prediction.

This value proposition can't be beat. Reminds me of how Match had a companion "friendship" site years ago. Challenges: majority of people think matchmaking is not worth the expense, they will most likely have to spend a huge amount on marketing and they are going to have do deals with several big online players to make the most of their competitive advantage.

I hope they succeed. Astro-matching is much maligned by the experts (see above), but it certainly seems to have some merit based on a few thousand years of usage, as opposed to a decade for online dating based on tests. All I'm saying is keep an open mind.

As one of 100+ dating sites to launch recently, let's give the company six months to establish traction and we'll see where things stand. I question any company that throws ridiculous valuations in a press release, its amateurish and the investors I work with would most likely agree. The $20 lifetime membership is an interesting idea, although I don't like them missing out on all of that reoccurring revenue. Unless this is a launch special?

I was just reading some FTC data on blog ads, disclaimers and restrictions. If these companies are your clients, you should call them clients. Sponsors means advertisers, which your tag line says you have none of. We need to be careful about these things is all I'm saying.

I visited Online Buddies HQ yesterday, Impressive operation. Very open about their business and lots of potential for growth with the DList acquisition.

Impressive number of nominations. When I read this in their investment prospectus my head exploded: "This past March, YouNoodle predicted the value of Lovetropolis.com would reach $44.7 million, by summer’s end. At that point, the dating site will only be about six months old." I see 3,000 monthly visitors in the US or is the growth more on the international side? My usual statement- they need to be spending a few hundred thousand dollars a month in marketing costs *at the bare minimum* to even come close to being a top-25 dating site. If they ain't spending it, they ain't making it.

That's a nice service, just like several others out there, perhaps more reach. Because spoofing sentiment in social media is so easy, I don't trust these numbers in the least. Problem is that I bet I could send out a few hundred tweets and positive blog posts and game the system, but it is nice to be able to review commentary in a single place. Obvious that certain brands are undertaking social media efforts. A few people are talking about Zoosk, which gets more positive mentions with no strength and a lot of reach. The same people are talking about OBC to counteract the negative comments. Socialmention needs a data visualization designer to do some magic on these numbers to make it easier to grok trends and alerts. Nice find, you should clean up the data and do monthly reports on this. Much more useful than traffic stats, which lately, are so far off as to be unreliable. Not sure what the total possible number of mentions is?

This thread is yet another example of why I and most other people versed in the world of private label dating have a difficult time recommending specific vendors. I just point people to these threads and tell them to go with their gut. Running a thriving white label dating site depends on the site manager being an expert online marketer with a big pile of money to support advertising initiatives. If you're not those two things you're not going to be successful. It's as simple as that. Of course there are issues with templates, administrative functions and customer service, but in this day and age of being able to purchase any sort of traffic you want immediately, it's really all about how hot the women in your ads are. This may seem counter-intuitive to my above comment about being an expert marketer, but your traffic sources are key and being able to identify lucrative partners is incredibly important. Most people running a white label site don't have enough domain knowledge or resources to be competitive in the space. How appropriate that the article that started all of this is not even reachable.

The talent, energy, money and support seems to be settling in NYC these days and I hear from more and more Bostonians who are splitting time between Boston and NYC to get things done. It's easy to say Boston is great for startups, but the SV comparison is stale. We'll never be SV, and SV will be where the lion's share of innovation/people/money is. Absolutely nothing wrong with that in the least, we have plenty of good stuff to work on right here inside 128.

Qite the juxtaposition, here in the US on Wall Street the number of bankers acquiring handgun permits is on the rise, supposedly to fight off a presumed rebellion by shareholders. In the UK, the downtrodden financiers would rather cheat on their wives. It's a strange world indeed.

Keeping an eye on this one, for several reasons. A bit too much personal founder hype for my tastes, perhaps that's what people will respond to. Going to take a ton of ad dollars to get anywhere.