DatingFactory aquires CrossDating

Whitelabel dating site provider Datingfactory aquired Crossdating and is now going to merge both platforms.

All Crossdating sites and configurations will be integrated into DatingFactory by the end of this year / beginning of next year(2013).

Tanya Fathers (CEO Datingfactory) keeps the founders Lutz Obermann and Marcel Knass as country managers for DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and for product management.

Like on the dating market, the whitelabel market is getting smaller by aquisitions and mergers.

Whitelabel Dating business is blooming....

The harder it gets to make money with a pay-site, the more interesting it becomes to offer white label dating sites: you just provide the technical infrastructure and don't have to think about advertising costs and conversions - it is not your business, it is the customers problem. You do not need to care whether they even make money, as long as you have enough webmasters who pump traffic to your central database.

The following companies currently offer white label dating sites:


 - datingfactory.com
-  cupidplc.com with www.thedatingstudio.com
- whitelabeldating.com
- globalpersonals.co.uk

And in Germany:

- crossdating.com (former: whitelabeldating.de)
- datingnetzwerk.de/ (from the people who run singletreffen.de, once a popular dating site)

And the French have:

http://www.easyflirt-partners.biz/?locale=en (also for English speaking countries)

The big question is:

- who offers the best conversions / earnings per visitor ?

Also a decisive factor is: how much time & money (or nerves) does it cost to reach a professional looking dating site? Is it a professional design by default or is the default theme a piece of crap?

Other things that should be considered:

- does it advertise other dating sites when mails are sent to "your" users?
- is the usability and design already optimized for maximum signups and user retention?
- is it also usable from a mobile phone?

Smooch.com was aquired by Global Personals Ltd!

The UK dating site Smooch.com and its parent company WooWise  has been aquired by Global Personals Ltd.

The Windsor-based company which was launched in 2003 powers over 7,500 dating websites globally for 1,500 partners and an annual revenue of £36million.

Global Personals Ltd will now be running the site on its white label platform and integrate it into its landscape.

Many dating sites have been aquired by bigger companies in the last months - also from Cupid PLC for example.

Compared to a couple of years ago, many of the top 50 dating sites now run on only a small number of platforms as a kind of white label site (i.e. a single database and many different domain names with slightly different templates point to it).

Usually big dating sites buy competitors, merge the sites with their own sites - and a couple of years later management often decides to let some small sites die and only focus on the most promising dating sites in future.

Twoo.com - a new star on the dating market is born

Netlog (?) launched a new dating sites - twoo.com. Twoo.com shows a massive traffic growth within a couple of months and already approaches pof.com - regarding the number of reach / users.

While Zoosk.com has reached the maximum traffic and stays around the same, pof.com and twoo.com are fighting now for being the number one on the dating market.

Unless pof.com now starts a major relaunch, twoo.com will kill plentyoffish.

Plentyoffish will probably need a couple of months to relaunch the site - until then twoo.com will have killed it?

Let's wait and see.

But maybe twoo.com also dies as quickly as it came - just look at smartdate.com!

Plentyoffish.com still in reverse-gear?

Plentyoffish.com still seems to be loosing active members and / or traffic:

But maybe this is only due to Alexa.com not being able to track mobile traffic? However, if this was the case, other sites would suffer as well and then Alexa would stay the same?

Why has Smartdate.com died?

I just wanted to check out whether Smartdate has changed their design or added some new stuff - but Smartdate.com was not accesible.

Looking at Alexa.com, it looks like the site has died?

I wonder what has happened their?

(a) they were making big losses and they didnt receive any more money
(b) they fired some technical guy who was pissed of at getting sacked and let the site die?

Update: Yes, it has! Check the blog of Fabrice Le Parc:

http://fabriceleparc.tumblr.com/

Can I have the domain name please? ;-)

Dating traffic over XMas and NYE

Internet traffic - especially for a specific niche - such as dating sites, have similiar usage patterns over time.

Over christmas, traffic goes down - shortly after christmas (27th) traffic goes up - higher then before christmas as people need to "catch up".

Especially before New Year's Eve - many singles are looking for a date to celeberate the new year and traffic on dating sites goes up.

This year, I could also observe that the mobile traffic and tablet traffic was increasing after xmas - probably as many people received a tablet pc or a mobile phone as a xmas gift.

Badoo.com - will it eclipse Facebook? Definitely not...

Just read a really weird article with the title:

Dating website Badoo is on the rise; will it eclipse Facebook?

Looking at Alexa the graphs show what I have expected - Badoo is nothing compared to Facebook:

Also its traffic did not grow - it even goes down in the long-term - with only a temporary "uprise" probably due to spending the remaining advertising budget in the end-of-year rallye:

I guess they have release a press release and someone was stupid enough to believe in this and wrote and article about this - or even got paid for it?