Radio Date™

Congrats to Josh Meyers, Greg Kim, Daniel Chen and the rest of the team at PeopleMedia for landing a sweet biz dev deal with the syndicated Steve Harvey Morning Show.

Local radio is huge for reaching African-American consumers and attracts some $805 million/year from marketers. According to ROI Media Soultions/Arbitron (2007), radio leads African Americans’ daily time spent with media.

Here’s how Radio Date™ works:

1. Sign Up
Create a Free Profile on BlackPeopleMeet.com to receive a username to be eligible or Login if you are currently a member.

2. Participate
Click Participate in Radio Date and complete the signup form.

3. Listen
We will choose one female member and three male members to participate in an on-air interview on a Wednesday morning with Steve Harvey and the Morning Show crew. The woman will ask the questions and the guys will respond. The woman gets to choose the guy she wants to go out with, and the couple will go on their very own Radio Date™ that weekend. On the following Wednesday, they will call in to the show and let us all know how it went. The following week, we will pick another woman and three other guys and start another Radio Date™.

4. Vote
Everyone can vote and let the woman know who they think she should pick. You don’t need to be a member to vote, so check back each week and vote for the next Radio Date™.

Value and Risk

Wonderful thought provoking video here presented at TED by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert about value, risk as it relates to human psychology. Lots of good brain food that will get ya’ thinking. Enjoy…

Cupid Media Affiliate Program

Not sure how I got on their mailing list or how new their program is, but CupidMedia, a strong niche dating company, now has an affiliate program. I covered CupidMedia in an earlier post, and like their business. Also, take a look at our affiliate network – we convert really well and are industry leaders for a few of our niches.

Peace!

Marketing To Muslims

Good article in The Economist about companies beginning to market to Muslim consumers in the West. This is great to hear, especially since we are well positioned to help such companies reach their desired demographics online.

“Marketing to Muslims: Food, fashion and faith”

eHarmony’s Advantage

On dating sites, men, more so than women, are photo search crazy. Men typically have a higher tendency to search for profiles with photos because of the importance placed on physical beauty. Often, many base their decision to email a member solely because of a photo that piques their interest. On World Singles sites, we see a significantly larger % of women email men who do not have pictures than men who email women without pictures. If more people actually read profiles, there would be less emails sent to women who clearly articulate what they are and are not looking for in a partner.

A few years back when I was single and readily used dating sites for business and pleasure, I really enjoyed how eHarmony’s system de-emphasized looks/photos by preventing members from manually searching for photo profiles. Matches delivered to members of eHarmony were based on lifestyle, morals, outlooks and how you live; they were not based on the “ideal” physical traits that we seek in partner. It was a refreshing approach and many of the matches that I met were people that I could develop a friendship with, even if we lacked that physical romantic spark.

I have not read any studies to support my claim, but I feel that religious men and women may place less emphasis on physical beauty than they do on other relationship dynamics like lifestyle, faith, morals, etc. Of course, a physical spark is one of many dynamics that draws us to someone of the opposite/same sex, but where does it rank in the priority list? Is physical attraction more or less important for some people? Yes, I think so…

If my premise is right that physical attraction is not as important for devout Christians than non religious folks, this bodes well for eHarmony, a site that has deep Christian roots. eHarmony seems to have very strong brand loyalty among the Christian community. I think that the recent controversy of eHarmony’s policy for banning gays from joining the site, only entrenched their popularity in the Christian community and helps differentiate them from competitor Chemistry.com. Sure, the bad press hurts them with fringe users, but it solidifies their appeal to core users who I am sure are predominantly single Christians. I have no doubt that women will love Chemistry.com b/c it’s everything that Match.com is not, a yuppie meat market, but I am not so sure that the average guy who is photo search happy would embrace Chemistry as quickly….unless he is Christian of course =)

Life is good.

Dating Ads On MySpace (Part Deux)

Add AmericanSingles.com to the carousel of dating sites advertising on MySpace. For a company with so many years of experience in the online dating sector and annual revenues at $80 million (give or take a little), you would think that Spark Networks could do a better job of giving the site a more memorable identity. In the crowded field of generalist dating sites with the likes of Yahoo Personals, Match and others, what makes AmericanSingles.com stand apart from the rest?

Our MySpace Ad Campaign

Whoa, we’re a few days into our MySpace campaign advertising two World Singles sites and so far so good. While I suspect the click through % will come down a bit when we are a few weeks into the campaign our current overall click through rate is a stellar 0.89% with one particular ad generating a whopping 2.08%. According to MySpace our click rate is “significantly higher” than other dating sites that are running campaigns. I’ll take their comment with a grain of salt but given the niche target of our campaigns I am not surprised. Plus, the IranianPersonals.com ad in particular is money (see below). A little bird told me that of all the dating sites ManHunt.net generates a high click rate at a hair above 1%. While the click rate is decent (or “excellent” by MySpace standards), the more important conversions are profile registrations. I’m pleasantly surprised at the high conversions and quality of the profiles.

Next time I will definitely deal with MySpace though an ad agency. Let them interface with MySpace. The support has been terrible. If you think that surfing MySpace feels like a meat market just wait until you deal with their sales reps and account managers. They’ve screwed up the parameters/specs for the campaign twice and getting your sales rep on the phone after he’s made his commission is Mission Impossible 4.

The Middle East: An Emerging Market

When speaking of emerging Internet markets China and India are at the forefront of discussions but the Middle East is a market that’s knocking on the door. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, recently speaking at the opening session of the three-day Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai, said that the Arab world will be transformed into an economic player of global standing through the Internet. “Schmidt said Google has begun simultaneously translating Web pages from English to Arabic and vice versa, making the Internet more relevant to Arabs.” (read full article here)

ArabLounge.com and IranianPersonals.com are two of the properties owned by World Singles so I obviously pay close attention to Mid East Internet related news and have access to some compelling member data (profiles created, memberships sold, etc) that supports statistics showing big increases in Internet usage across the Middle East.

According to InternetWorldStats.com Muslim Middle Eastern countries with the largest populations of Internet penetration are Iran (7.5M Internet users, 10.8% penetration), Saudi Arabia (2.5M, 10.8% penetration) and Egypt (5M – 7% penetration). The oil rich Gulf countries like the UAE and Kuwait have high Internet penetration but significantly lower populations (See chart). Hard to believe that despite all the turmoil in Iraq the most recent Internet statistics show an increase in Iraqi Internet usage up from 12,500 in December 2000, to 36,000 as of September 18, 2006. Is this possible? Maybe the insurgency and warring religious sects are Internet savvy and setting up some fiber to facilitate communication *shrug* A stretch I know, but I’m puzzled. Anyway…

People across the Middle East want to be heard, share thoughts/ideas with others and they want access to information. Internet access and new technologies are laying the seeds for a Blogger revolution across the Middle East (see article in the Washington Post “New Clicks In The Arab World”). Censorship by governments that are attempting to control the flow and nature of information is occurring daily. From Iran recently blocking access to sites like YouTube and shutting down blogs critical of the government to the United Arab Emirates sole state owned ISP Etisalat notorious for blocking sites like ArabLouge.com I believe that such censorship will ultimately be a losing battle for the regimes in power. People want the freedom to explore, share and absorb. With VC funds supporting start ups and a human spirit thirsty for knowledge and freedom of expression, the Internet will continue to empower people and help reshape the Middle East as we know it.

History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.
~Charles de Gaulle

Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
~Jeffrey Borenstein

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
~Woodrow Wilson

Dating Ads On MySpace

If you spend any time on MySpace you will quickly see that dating ads are aplenty. Match and Spark Networks have recently joined TRUE, Mate1 and SinglesNet in the rotation of dating ads polluting MySpace.

Match.com
To the best of my knowledge this is the first Match campaign on MySpace. They are running ads of young girls acting as though they are chatting it up on their webcam. Cute ads but the funny thing is that Match doesn’t even have a Video Chat feature. I like that their ads run the gamut in featuring Asian, Latina(ish) to White girls but what what about African Americans? If my ethnicity/race on MySpace is “Black”, their campaign would generate better click throughs if they occasionally served me an ad with Black women. Despite selecting Black as my race for a few weeks I have yet to see their recent campaign display any African Americans. Curious to see for how long and how aggressively they will continue advertise on MySpace.

BlackSingles.com
Owned by Spark Networks they were up to this past weekend running ads with print at the bottom that read “Meet Atlanta Singles”. Hmm, I live in Southern California so what gives? Wasted impressions…anyway, looks like they fixed the boo boo. I wonder how much this cost them in potential clicks, impressions and dollars?

TRUE
Ah man *sigh* the king of “t and a” ads. I would guess that over the last few months TRUE has run more ads on MySpace than any other company. To their credit they frequently update their ads and these sexually provocative ads are seemingly performing well for them in generating traffic (not so sure about registrations though).

Mate1
Similar to TRUE their ads are typically risqué with suggestive adult content. The two ads I have posted for them and TRUE are tame in comparison to some of their other ads. Seems like they have scaled back their MySpace ad budget of late. Given that their ads and front page ooze sex I reckon that their campaigns probably perform better than Match.com’s.

SinglesNet.com
Based out of Mass. this company is shelling out big bucks advertising not just on MySpace but all over the Internet. They’ve been around since 1998 but honestly, I had never heard of them until recently. Of all the dating creatives on MySpace I find theirs to be the least appealing; the ads are down right bland and *ho hum* easy to ignore. Check out their traffic spike in the last year on Alexa – dating sites have never been known to be so explosively viral so safe to say that they have come out of nowhere by spending big bucks to buy traffic. The site is currently free for a “limited time”. We’ll see how their traffic is affected once they start charging…

Dating sites missing from MySpace: Zencon peoperties (a company out of Arizona that runs some 40+ niche properties like BlackPeopleMeet.com), Date.com which seems to be losing chunks of traffic monthly, FriendFinder.com and eHarmony.com. BlackPeopleMeet had a campaign on MySpace a year ago; not sure how it performed but considering that they are no longer advertising on MySpace one can conclude that the results were not so great. MySpace is obviously not a good fit for the older, more conservative and religiously inclined eHarmony but FriendFinder may have some success advertising on MySpace.

We are currently running banner ads for a few World Singles site on MySpace. Curious to see the results.