Why all whitelabel dating site providers suck

The idea sounds nice: Run a dating site without writing your own code and without running a server yourself - and get loads of members right from the start.

The theory is good - in reality, things are a bit more disappointing...

The main reasons, why you should think about buying a dating site script (at the beginning to see how it goes)- or write your own dating site (maybe at a later stage) are the following:

• the default template provided suck - they do not meet todays requirements and most of them are not even responsive
• in the footer, you often find disturbing and seo-damaging "mandatory" backlinks to the dating site provider (e.g. datingfactory) or other links you dont want to have
• you have the same site as thousands of competitors and hardly a way or feature to "stand up" from the growd
• if you took the time to implement your own templates (if possible after all) - you might find them later in a similiar fashion offered to all other dating site users
• "up to" 65% revenue share sounds great - but it is "revenue share" not "gains share". You don't have to pay for development or hosting - but major factor is advertising costs - not development or hosting. What happens if you spend 1000 USD on advertising? Maybe 500 USD convert and you receive maybe 250 USD "revenue share" - but the dating site provider profits most: his own database of members grows and also all other sites of the network profit - but you only get paid for your conversions - not indirect conversions due to more female members or more activity on a site.
• it is hard enough to make more money then you spend on advertising with a dating site - and it takes a long time until you reach the break even as not all members convert directly. But if you share the revenue, it is almost impossible to profit. This only works if you have "free" traffic - but then you should think about doing it yourself (depends on the traffic level of course)
• you can only make money with a whitelabel dating site - if you run the white label dating sites network yourself -> then thousands of webmasters work for you - and you dont have any expenses for advertising - but profit on all the good marketing ideas your customs come up with.

Update: I found an interesting article about this topic on here:

http://ascamorlegit.com/white-label-dating/

This also matches my experiences and thoughts about this platform.
However the mentioned PGDating software is not something I would consider. I looked at the reference sites: the first one had a database errror the second one loaded, but had many Javascript errrors. Maybe just coincidence - but I do not think the software has the necessary quality level / code maturity. Apart from the technical quality of dating software, the challenge is, to cover advertising costs with membership fees or optional premium features. Being able to make money with a dating site is a tough business...and the majority of webmasters - even with millions of venture capital - will fail. Also the big players on the market are having a hard-time.

#Lovoo: 200 policement raided lovoo offices with machine guns

Last wednesday (June, 8th 2016) there was a large-scale raid on Lovoo office as well as on the homes of employees. Company bosses of the popular dating app could be jailed for 10 years.

Last Wednesday, 16 objects were raided at the same time of a large group of police officers (~200) in Dresden, Berlin and several private homes of employees.

It seems like a clear betrayal of its cutomers: fake profiles and fake messages were sent in order to increase in-app purchases inside Lovoos dating app.

It sounds pretty much the same as what "Cupid" did according to a BBC coverage in the past.

To be honest, most successful dating apps seem to do this. Recently I tested Badoos dating app - and even without uploading a picture, after 10 minutes, 5 models wanted to get to know me. How odd. 

Both company directory Benjamin Bak (CEO) and Alexander Friede (COO) need to stay in prison for now due to  danger of flight.

Chances to get compensation

All customers who paid money to Lovoo in the past have good chances of getting a financial compensation. However, they need to file an official report at the police.

History

Already last autumn, a "whistelblower" told German media - what everyone already know - but with a lot of details and for example that Lovoo called their female employees  "Promo bitches".

Around 50 GB of internal documents leaked and were handed-over to the police.

Most people probably have not expected such a large-scale police raid to Lovoo's offices as a lot f dating apps and websites are known for such activities - and so far no legal actionever git the ccompanies.

DatingFactory acquired by Agile Wings

DatingFactory acquired by Agile Wings

Agile Wings is the new owner of DatingFactory - a while label dating site service provider.

The new owners are said to bring their technology resources, marketing knowledge and years of experience to improve and continue to grow the Dating Factory White Label platform.

Agile Wings promises a better performing product,  higher return on investment and long term growth...

So far the main problem with running dating sites on DatingFactory was: it was almost impossible to make any money with it: conversion to finally paying members was extremely low and advertising costs extremely high. Even without paying a big part as an affiliate fee to a dating site provider, it is a tough challenge to make money in the dating field with a subscription based model as costs-per click go up to several GBP / Euros / USD per click.Only a few "clicks" convert to registered members and of those a small fraction are willing to pay. A big part of those paying (most male) members on paid dating sites in general, often finds out there is actually almost no female members apart from spammers/scammers or fake profiles and want a refund which leads to expensive backcharges....

So even when you can keep 100% of the revenue only very few companies manage to reach the break-even or even make money. Imagine you pay 50% ot 70% comission? Almost impossible to make money as client of a white-label network.

Also thousands of webmasters never reach the minimum payout - so the whitelabel provider never has to pay the commission.

At least white-label providers will always profit - they generate new signups and members to their database and often never have to pay for those signups as webmasters never reach minium payout or as members never convert to paying members or only after a very long time - or lead to other people signing up who will convert to paying members which the system would never find out.

Tanya Fathers  will continue in the position of the company CEO and work on the further growth strategy for the business and Lisa Moskotova will continue as COO.

The best linking strategoy for multi-national dating site networks

What is the best linking strategy for multi-national dating websites?

Assuming you had to optimize the linking strategy of a dating sites network (same brand), what would be the best strategy?

First of all, you need to decide if you have one domain per country or whether you are going to use one subdomain for every country.

Secondly, do you want to use canonical tags or rather not?

Thirdly, which sites should be linked from which sites in order not to be treated as a link-farm by Google?

I would say, let's look at the top dating sites in the uk that are international and server individual sites per country.

Match.com Linking Strategy(?)

Match.com uses a .com domain for all country - with 2-letter country codes as subdomains for each country (maybe as they have not managed to get the trademark/domain in everywhere?)

In the Uniteds Kingdom, http://www.match.com uses the subdomain http://uk.match.com.

Strangely, they are setting a canonical tag to themselves on uk.match.com:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://uk.match.com" /> 

There is NO link to www.match.com however around 15 homepage links to the specific country subdomains.

Also the .com domain sets a useless canonical  to itself:

<link href="http://www.match.com/" rel="canonical" />

On the .com Domain, the only link to usa.match.com and uk.match com as well as the following page:

www.match.com/international/index.aspx?lid=446 

which links to all existing(?) subdomains- however not directly - with redirects.

 POF.com Linking Strategy

pof.com mainly uses www.pof.com but Google has indexed country specific subdomains such as de.pof.com. Those subdomains however often redirect to country-specific domains such as pof.de or pof.fr.

pof.com does not use any canonical tags.

 On the homepage, pof.com uses links to the country-specific tlds:

1. <a class="footernav-link" href="http://www.pof.com.br">POF Brasil</a><br />
2. <a class="footernav-link" href="http://www.pof.fr">POF France</a><br />
3. <a class="footernav-link" href="http://www.pof.es">POF Spain</a><br />
4. <a class="footernav-link" href="http://www.pof.de">POF Germany</a>

eHarmony.com Linking Strategy

eharmony.com uses tlds for every country the are offering their dating service.

On country-specific domains such as www.eharmony.co.uk they link to other English tlds such as www.eharmony.com.au, eharmony.ca or eharmony.com.

eHarmony uses a canonical on the .co.uk homepage that points to www.eharmony.com

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.eharmony.com/" />


eHarmonyalso links from the .com to their English-speaking tlds. The signup form shows a deeplink for the action that points to https://www.eharmony.ca/singles/servlet/homeRegS

parship.com Linking Strategy

parship.com uses subdomains for every country the are offering their dating service.

They are using (useless) canonnicals that point to themselves, e.g. on uk.parship.com that show a self-referencing canonical:


<link rel="canonical" href="http://uk.parship.com/" />

On the homepage they link to all their networks - interestingly https. Most pay-sites are fully https while most free sites still use http in order not to cut their revenue from advertising.

https://fr.parship.be
https://www.parship.be
https://www.parship.it
https://www.parship.nl
https://www.parship.dk
https://uk.parship.com
https://www.parship.es
https://www.parship.com.mx
https://www.parship.fr
https://www.parship.se
https://www.parship.ie

On www.parship.com you see an error - they accidentally link to http:// instead of https:// - dough!

So, on the .com they link to ALL of their domains (even if the wrong protocol).

The canonical points to itself...so you can ignore it.

http://www.parship.be
http://www.parship.dk
http://www.parship.de
http://www.parship.es
http://www.parship.fr
http://www.parship.ie
http://www.parship.it
http://www.parship.com.mx
http://www.parship.nl
http://www.parship.at
http://www.parship.ch
http://www.parship.se
http://www.parship.be
http://www.parship.dk
http://www.parship.de
http://www.parship.es
http://www.parship.fr
http://www.parship.ie
http://www.parship.it

http://www.parship.com.mx
http://www.parship.nl
http://www.parship.at
http://www.parship.ch
http://www.parship.se
http://uk.parship.com

cupid.com Linking Strategy

 cupid.com uses subdomains for every country the are offering their dating service.

the www.cupid.com domain does not reference any other domains or subdomains while the uk.cupid.com subdomains links to all other subdomains:

<li class="us location_item"><a href="http://www.cupid.com">United States</a></li><li class="ca location_item"><a href="http://ca.cupid.com/">Canada</a></li><li class="au location_item"><a href="http://au.cupid.com/">Australia</a></li><li class="fr location_item"><a href="http://fr.cupid.com/">France</a></li><li class="de location_item"><a href="http://de.cupid.com/">Germany</a></li><li class="it location_item"><a href="http://it.cupid.com/">Italy</a></li><li class="es location_item"><a href="http://es.cupid.com/">Spain</a></li><li class="se location_item"><a href="http://se.cupid.com/">Sweden</a></li><li class="in location_item"><a href="http://in.cupid.com/">India</a></li><li class="no location_item"><a href="http://no.cupid.com/">Norway</a></li><li class="br location_item"><a href="http://br.cupid.com/">Brazil</a></li></ul></div>

Cupid.com does not seem to use canonical tags at all.

flirtbox Linking Strategy(?)

flirtbox uses country-specific top-level domains, e.g. https://www.flirtbox.com or https://www.flirtbox.co.uk and no canonicals. Global cross-linking could not be detected.

The end of cupid.com and cupid.com

According to a recent announcement - Cupic PLC will finally give up the dating business...which is an unexpected piece of news - however understable. The big question is: why not earlier?

Cupic PLC will become a pure investment company and change its name to Castle Street Investments plc

Hopefully they won't invest in dating sites ;-)

Maybe they try to copy Rocket Internet who recenty went on the stock market in Germany - they own a big portfolio of well known websites worldwide - all of them making a loss.

The difference between those 2 companies is probably: one makes revenue, goes to the stock market and then makes losses - the other company makes losses in the first place and then goes to the stock market to collect more money....

Cupid plc

Proposed Disposal of Dating Business

Cupid plc (AIM:CUP), the online dating operator, announces that following a strategic review of the Company's dating business, the Group has conditionally agreed to sell its Traditional Dating Assets to Tradax IP Licensing Limited; Together Networks Holdings Limited; and Together Networks Limited, for a total consideration of £3m.

The Disposal constitutes a fundamental change of business under Rule 15 of the AIM Rules. Accordingly, the Disposal is conditional upon approval of Shareholders at a general meeting to be held on 23 December 2015.

Headlines

·     Disposal of Traditional Dating Assets for a cash consideration of £3m

·     Payment of a reduced deferred consideration for casual assets has been accelerated with £12.5m to be paid by 15 December 2015

·     Substantial return expected to be available to Shareholders in 2015

·     Company will be reclassified as an Investing Company under the AIM Rules

·     Cash at the end of December 2014 (prior to receipt of Disposal proceeds) expected to be ahead of forecast at £10m

·     Proposed name change to Castle Street Investments plc

·     Irrevocable undertakings to vote in favour of the resolutions granted by 40.53% of the shareholders

·     Cancellation of treasury shares

A circular, explaining the background to and reasons for the Disposal and providing notice of a general meeting (the "Circular"), was posted to Shareholders on 6 December 2014.  Copies of the Circular will also be available on the Company's website (www.cupidplc.com).

George Elliott, Chairman of Cupid plc, commented:

"After a number of fundamental changes in the dating market, we instigated a rapid strategic review of the dating business. The Board believe that today's announcement represents the solution which protects the best interests of shareholders, by providing much greater certainty over the Group's cash balances and deferred consideration and removing substantially all costs from the Group.

The Company will effectively become a well capitalised cash shell with approximately £18 million that can be utilised for new opportunities in line with our proposed investing policy or returned to shareholders."

Update from December 28th: Cupid PLC's homepage is not accessible anymore.

In general, a lot of other dating sites profit from this. First, Cupid PLC bought a great part of the dating market - then decided to discontinue some sites they bought - and now finally they stop all dating sites....a few will be sold - but in generall the number of competitors on the dating market has decreased a lot. Dating webmasters now expect a decrease in advertising costs in the online dating field due to less competition and lower prices per click.

German Tinder clone mbrace receives millions of venture capital

 Mbrace receives a 7 figure sum through IBB, Paua and Astutia

Mbrace (www.getmbrace.com), a German Tinder-clone received a 7 figure sum from venture capital firms in order to get going with their tinder-clone. Primarily the money is intended to invest in the product and grow the team.

But why on earth does a vc firm give money to a clone while the original itself has issues and traffic drops after quickly reaching its peak?

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tinder.com

At least the 3 founders managed to get the money. The team consists of Ruben Haas (Hitfox), Jan Tillmann (Head of Business Development for AppLift in San Francisco and Lukas Krauter (Head of Business Development for ad2games).

mbrace was founded in 2013 in Berlin.

 Similiar clones to mbrace who also started around this time are "Band with friends" and "Flinx" (also from Berlin but does not look as professional).

Is Cupid.com dead yet?

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Cupic PLC stock keeps on falling, and falling...and falling.

As you can see on:

http://markets.investorschronicle.co.uk/research/Markets/Companies/Summary?s=CUP:LSE

 Cupic PLC stock keeps on falling, and falling...and falling.....

Currently it is below its issue price in 2010 - and it looks like it has not reached the bottom yet.

If you bought shares in 2011 for almost 250 GBP - you lost 85,4% of your money!!!

In contrast, iIf you bought Match.com stocks in 2010, you made 100% so far:

http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=IACI

Signup conversion rates for dating sites

What are typical signup conversion rates or dating sites?

Free dating sites - have on average a signup conversion rate of around 3,5% on average.

This means from 100 new visitors, around 3,5% signup on average.

This sometimes also includes pay-sites as they do appear as if they were free.

What are typical free-to-pay conversion rates or dating sites?

The ratio of how many free members will convert to a paying member varies a lot. A good rate would be however something around 7%. It really depends on your website, the campaign, the target group country - and last but not least month / day and even time of the day.

What is really important to know: you can not directly make money on a dating site with an advertising campaign. You need to be patient and wait for a long time until you reach the break-even. On average it can take around 100 days for a member to pay enough fees until you covered the initial signup costs.

Dating Factory is handed-over from Caerus AG to Tyche Technologies AG

Some news from Whitelabel dating sites provider "Dating Factory":

Dating Factory business will no longer be run by Caerus AG but a newly formed company called Tyche Technologies AG in Switzerland(Zug).

Tanya Fathers continues as CEO.

This takes into effect from June 1st 2014.

Tyche Technologies AG takes over all rights and obligations out of the  existing contracts.

Why this is happening?

Nobody knows ....

Mailchimp and the dating industry. No emails for dating sites?

Mailchimp is a really popular and powerfull mailing list service provider....what is a bit weird however, the do not accept dating sites to send emails to their customers.

If you look at the terms & conditions you find the following:

Some industries have higher-than-normal abuse complaints, which can in turn jeopardize the deliverability of our entire system. Nothing personal, but in order to maintain the highest delivery rates possible for all our customers, we can’t allow businesses that offer these types of services, products, or content:

• Escort and dating services
• Pharmaceutical products
• Work from home, make money on online, and lead generation opportunities
• Online trading, day trading tips, or stock market-related content
• Gambling services or products
• Multi-level marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Credit repair and get out of debt opportunities
• Mortgages and loans
• Nutritional, herbal, and vitamin supplements
• Adult novelty items or references
• List brokers or list rental services

Extremely astonishing: Escort and dating services are mentioned within the same line

Also it is really amazaing that they mention dating services in the same list as Gambling and Pharmaceutical produtcs.

So if you run a dating website - don't use Mailchimp - especially do not make any payments to Mailchimp as your account will be disabled and the money is gone!

The brute force dating attack of a "math genius"

On Wire.com, Kevin Poulson wrote an interesting article about the Mathematician Chris McKinlay, who tried to - and finally found - a date on okcupid.

Unlike the majority of okcupid users, he wrote scripts to harvest the website with user data, then matched the user profiles with his own interests - and contacted them....

He then invited some of the women,  who wrote back, on a date....after a few unsuccessful attempts, he even met a woman he even married (probably by now).

You can read the whole story here:

http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all/

 

What I was wondering?

 

Did OkCupid sue him for financial compensation? Did any of the users report him as their "private" data was illegally copied to another server / pc ? (and might still kick around on a harddisk in his flat)

Or what that a viral marketing idea from OkCupid ?

If so, the viral marketing campaign really went viral - most sites picked up on this story.

Globalspersonals.co.uk / Whitelabeldating in direct competition with its customers

Globalpersonals.co.uk proudly feature their first tv spot on their homepage:

http://globalpersonals.co.uk/press-release/global-personals-bring-niche-dating-mainstream-launch-first-tv-campaign-justsingles-com/

Why on earth do they offer an own brand?

Wouldn't it be wiser and more ethical if they just concentrated on providing the platform without running their own sites?

This way, they are in direct competitions with their own customers, driving click prices / advertising costs - and also you get the impression, globalpersonals / whitelabeldating always want to /need to stay one step ahead and might not offer all their own features to other customers.

Fat, lazy, poor sick guys with stds...get plenty of dates on Cupid.com ?

According to a recent BBC coverage, John Hempton of Bronte Capital, has revealed how even fat, lazy and poor guys with stds get many messages from beautiful women on a dating site called Cupid.com

He made his profile - headed "Fat, lazy, poor sick guy wants support" - as unpleasant as possible, including saying he suffered from a sexually transmitted disease, to see what sort of reaction he would get on the site.

"Strangely and almost immediately a fair few age-appropriate and good-looking women want to talk to my false profile. Girls I could not get normally I think," Mr Hempton said on his blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21904616

I personaly, was not surprised....my inbox was spammed by messages like "you have mail" - not only cupid.com or other cupid plc dating sites, but also dating sites like flirtomatic.com or basically any other dating site that charges membership fees.

There is one thing though, the BBC got wrong:

One of UK's biggest online dating providers has seen its shares fall by more than half after announcing an audit into the way it operates

To me this was not due to this, but rather as bosses from Cupid plc and other insiders or investors might have sold their stocks before the shares are worthless:

http://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/prices-and-markets/stocks/exchange-insight/company-news.html?fourWayKey=GB00B4NJ4984GBGBXAMSM

The funniest reaction from Cupid Plc was:

It also said it had commissioned an independent audit by one of the "big four accounting firms".
How ridicilous is this? Everyone knows what they are doing - and independent audit? Are they turning this "feature" now off for a a couple of days until the independent audit is over???

I have the strange feeling Cupid Plc might end like smartdate....and vanish in the not too distant future.

Update: Also check out this BBC Article here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21552566

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? ;-)