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After Google’s stock took a hit based on reports that Google ads are not being clicked on as much as they use to be, comScore is reporting today that the market may have got it wrongthe evidence suggests that the softness in Google’s paid click metrics is primarily a result of Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.In part this might be right, but what’s being ignored by most is a little decision in November that changed the way Google ads worked:Google has made a small change to AdSense that may make a big difference in cutting out errant clicks and even your AdSense revenue. They’ve redefined the clickable region for Google AdSense from the entire boxed region, to just the text link. I’ve been hearing first hand reports since then from publishers who have experienced a big downturn in CTR and Adsense revenue since that change was implemented. Well regarded online marketer Jeremy Schoemaker even recently told me in a podcast that Adsense was dead as a monetization strategy. It’s happening to big sites and small sites. Markus Friend from Plenty of Fish, one of the more famed and bigger free-making money from Adsense sites (January):The CTR on text ads declined about 60% in the last 2 months with googles changes, Image ads on the other hand stayed the same. If you take a screen shot of a text ad and then run it as an image ad it will get 2 times the click thru rate.You read that right, image ads with double the CTR of Google ads when showing the exact same thing.

I wish I could have this problem. Markus has made so much money already, it’s hard to feel sorry for the guy. I haven’t used Google adsense for a while now, because they said I had fraudulent clicks, and didn’t answer any appeals from me. Adsense is a broken product at this point, as far as I’m concerned. If you look hard enough, there are better offerings out there anyway…

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This free online dating entry was posted Saturday, March 1st, 2008 filed under: Dating 2.0, Online Dating News, Uncategorized, Wall of Shame by Andy
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An interesting patent has surfaced today indicating that Microsoft might be planning to enter the mobile dating industry. The patent, entitled Image-Based Face Search details how Microsoft could be developing complex facial recognition software. The patent explains how a photo could be uploaded from a mobile phone or PC and compared with millions of other pictures to find similar matching faces. Imagine a dating site that allowed you to upload a photo of a certain hot celebrity and then returned profiles of all the users who looked like them? Another implementation of the software is a HotOrNot style application – the user is shown a face and then rates it according to how attractive they find the person. As you can see from the screenshot below the user can say they really like a persons eyes but that they aren’t too keen on the mouth. Microsoft can then take this information and find some matches that are more suited to your tastes. This would have huge potential in the lucrative online dating industry.

From the patent:

A search includes comparing a query image provided by a user to a
plurality of stored images of faces stored in a stored image database,
and determining a similarity of the query image to the plurality of
stored images. One or more resultant images of faces, selected from
among the stored images, are displayed to the user based on the
determined similarity of the stored images to the query image provided
by the user. The resultant images are displayed based at least in part
on one or more facial features.

This disclosure is directed to image-based searching, and is shown
and described in the context of an image-based face search for an
online dating service.  

Traditional image retrieval techniques, such as those used in
facial-recognition, cannot readily be applied to image-based face
retrieval for online dating, since those conventional techniques
typically focus on searching for a specific person (i.e., the same
person depicted in the image used as the query), not other
similar-looking individuals as desired in the online dating arena.
Also, traditional image retrieval applications are not concerned with
how to evaluate similarities between two persons’ faces, and how to
understand what people perceive and evaluate when viewing similar faces.

The image-based search described herein allows users to search
profiles using a desired reference or “query” image. This image based
search may be implemented as an alternative to the textual queries used
on most online dating sites, or may be combined with such textual
queries to provide an augmented image-based face retrieval filter.

I’ve seen a few other companies try this type of looks of facial mapping. I don’t think it will work very well for a site where people are looking for a serious relationship, but it will definitely be a home run for men (men go on looks first), and on sites like adultfriendfinder or onlinebootycall where looks are all that matters.

This free online dating entry was posted Saturday, March 1st, 2008 filed under: Uncategorized by Andy
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WHAT?!!? Yes, you heard me… it’s dead! The “traditional” online dating site is dead, especially paid sites (Sam I look forward to hear how I am crazy :D).

2008 is the start of the end for paid dating… and if you don’t believe me, go see what wired has to say about the future of business.

This free online dating entry was posted Friday, February 29th, 2008 filed under: Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Finding Love Online, Global Dating Market, Online Dating News, Social Networking, Uncategorized by Andy
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Who owns your friends (or rather the list of who your friends are and how they are connected to you) has been a big source of debate in the social networking world. Control over that data is what makes social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn so potentially valuable. Yet there has also been a movement afoot towards letting people take their friends with them, if you will, to other sites. In an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web takes social networks to task for hoarding data. The interview, conducted by Paul Miller, focuses mostly on the Semantic Web, which to Berners-Lee is all about linked data.

Paul Miller:

I think, it is a very grown-up thing to realize that you are not the only social networking site… otherwise it is like a website which doesn’t have any links out. In the Semantic Web similarly, if you don’t have any links out, well, that’s boring.

In fact, a lot of the value of many websites is the links out.

Now if you look at the social networking sites which, if you like, are traditional Web 2.0 social networking sites, they hoard this data. The business model appears to be, “We get the users to give us data and we reuse it to our benefit. We get the extra value.”

So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, “Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.” . . . So, the users are saying, “Give me my data back. That’s my data.”

The new site will fall right in line with all these ideas. Why in this day and age are we still having to fill out yet another profile form. This data is a user’s data, why the heck shouldn’t that have control of it. I think that user backlash for sites that don’t follow these principles will force sites to fall in line. This will be good for consumers in the end, as if the site your on doesn’t give you what you want, you can pack up your data and your friends and take your business elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: date, dating, dataportability

This free online dating entry was posted Friday, February 29th, 2008 filed under: Api's, Data Portability, Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Uncategorized by Andy
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Google product manager Amar Gandhi announced in a blog post on Tuesday night that there have been “a couple of modifications” to the company’s release of OpenSocial compatibility for its Orkut social network. In other words, there appears to be some red tape. Instead of immediately rolling out the Orkut platform, which it was originally scheduled to do right around now, Google will be conducting a “prelaunch testing period” for select applications. That will last about four weeks. “We apologize for delaying the launch a few weeks,” Gandhi wrote. “We feel that this prelaunch testing period will ensure that users are introduced to apps in the best way possible.”

I have to say I’m not terribly sad about this, as it will give us some more time to polish our app. When opensocial launches, we will be one of the first dating sites on the scene and will capture the new “free and open” business model. This will give us a huge advantage going forward that sites like Match and Plentyoffish will just not be able to keep up with

This free online dating entry was posted Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 filed under: Uncategorized by Andy
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Tag based dating site for geeks Consumating is to shut March 15, according to a notice posted to the Consumating forums.

Consumating was acquired by CNet in December 2005 and was later relaunched in June 2006. The sites traffic remained strong in 2006 then fell away in 2007 according to Alexa (the site was too small to register on comScore).

This was actually a pretty cool site, one of the few I liked. It had a fresh approach. I think what really happened was that there was little to no promotion of the site, and I think the name was a little iffy (sort of like Collaboradate). It’s creative, but hard to remember.

This free online dating entry was posted Friday, February 15th, 2008 filed under: 2006, Buried, consumating, december, geeks, iffy, march, relaunched, remained by Andy
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Congrats to James and Jim! This couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. The integration with facebook, is what put HotorNot over the edge into something viable. It’s gonna be interesting to see what happens to the site under new ownership…

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This free online dating entry was posted Monday, February 11th, 2008 filed under: Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Funding, Online Dating News, Uncategorized by Andy
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WooMe’s online network that can be used for virtual introductions ranging from speed dating to job interviews has just announced a $3 million bridge round, led by Mangrove and previous investors Atomico (which was founded by Nikas Zennstrom and Janus Friis), and Klaus Hommels. WooMe has also added the help of Oliver Jung to aid with the company’s international expansion.

Looks like people may be warming up to a new way to meet online, I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like it would be a little uncomfortable/creepy to meet people this way, but it must be working.

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This free online dating entry was posted Thursday, February 7th, 2008 filed under: Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Dating Video, Online Dating News, Speed Dating, Web 2.0, atomico, friis, klaus, mangrove, nikas, woome, woome’s, zennstrom by Andy
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The rumor last week was that Google (as well as Verisign and IBM) were mulling over the idea of joining the OpenID 2.0 single sign-on framework. But the real news comes today, as Yahoo and its roughly 250 million user IDs officially jump on the bandwagon. Today, there are only approximately 120 million valid OpenID accounts. In one move, Yahoo more than triples that number.

This is great news for us. 360 Million users (theoretically) can now join our site with a login and password they already have. Many users don’t join dating sites because they don’t want to go through the hassle of signing up or giving up a bunch of personal information and a credit card number.

We’re really in a great spot right now, as we’re about a month away from launching with these features in tact and ready to rip. I don’t know of any other dating site that can say that. OpenID, opensocial, facebook… we’re ready to rock!!! Are you?!?!!

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This free online dating entry was posted Thursday, January 17th, 2008 filed under: 360, Api's, Dating 2.0, Online Dating Identity, Web 2.0, bandwagon, ibm, ids, jump, mulling, openid, roughly by Andy
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What’s it take to make $10 million in 12 months in these wonderful times of mighty Web growth? Apparently not very much.

Not very much work, that is. Today’s New York Times delivers a nice, sprightly memo about a 29-year-old coder based in Vancouver, Canada, who managed to put together a dating website, dubbed Plenty of Fish, which, because it is purportedly a self-sustaining entity, requires of its owner, Markus Frind, only about 10 hours per week of attention and care.

I’ve never bought the 10hrs a week figure, I don’t care what anyone says… there is no way to admin a site that size in that amount of time.

What this article fails to realize is that the reason that POF has done so well is because no other free site has really stepped up to challenge POF. Markus was at the right place at the right time. Yes the outdated modem yielding public that still remain love plentyoffish… cause they don’t know any better. As the internet matures, along with the knowledge of it’s users, sites like plentyoffish will be seen for what they are. Outdated relics with little to no innovative or useful functionality.

There is only one other free dating site currently open to the public (until we launch the new site) that is worth taking a look at, and that’s OkCupid. Though Okcupid missed the train on capitalizing on this huge surge in free online dating by trying to base the site around stupid quizzes.

My guess is that 2008 will bring a huge uptick in singles turning to services that bring in data portability, and that utilize existing social graphs, something that no free dating site offers. What about IM? What the heck are these companies doing with their time and money?!!

If they won’t capitalize on what users REALLY want… we will. Thanks for the opportunity guys!

This free online dating entry was posted Sunday, January 13th, 2008 filed under: Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Wall of Shame, Web 2.0, care, coder, dubbed, managed, purportedly, sustaining, today’s, what’s by Andy
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