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

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?

Which dating sites will survive?

Most dating sites rely on advertising and premium memberships and live on the margin between advertising costs and revenue from membership fees. This is a hard business - not many reach the status where they make more then 1 Euro on every Euro they spend on advertising. Also, it is hard to get members to sign-up on a dating site and not every "expensive" visitor through a sponsored link (e.g. Adwords, Facebook) will result in an active member and not every active member will end-up paying something.

Now that the financial crises reaches many countries, also people are less willing to spend money on online dating. This might kill many dating sites that already had a hard-time trying to make more money on membership fees then spending on advertising, customer support and everything related to running and maintaining the website.

Another danger for many dating sites is Facebook: in real-life many people meet their partner through friends. Now with Facebook, it becomes even easier meeting friends of friends and Facebook also helps singles to meet their partner directly or indirectly. People also have a limited time to spend online every day - the more time they spend on Facebook - the less time they will spend on other websites such as dating sites.

Facebook, however, might become victim of its ipo in the near future - the stock market can be a friend of a business or an enemy.

Smartdate.com is dying? Flirt.com also in reverse-gear?

A lot of newspapers have written about Smartdate.com from France which managed to grow without any venture capital. Due to its success in France, they have received loads of vc in order to expand in other countries. But now, let's see how it goes: 

Quite embarrassing really....despite millions of cash, the site seems to be dying?

Also flirt.com, backed with plenty of money from its ipo, could perform better:

However, Cupid Plc also maybe focusses on other sites of their network more right now.
All of their dating sites are probably competing with each other, so that only the best dating sites will be kept in the long-run.

Plentyoffish.com switched to pof.com

This explains everything: Plentyoffish.com is now re-directing users to www.pof.com:

So, pof.com now has an Alexa of 200 - which is a decent rank for a dating site.

I wonder how the mobile traffic compares to the website traffic. According to Android market/iTunes the mobile app has 500,000-1,000,000 downloads so far.