Lovetropolis logo PRESS RELEASE - Dec 16 - Dating site Lovetropolis.com has been recognized as a finalist in five of eleven categories for the 2010 iDate Awards. Lovetropolis.com is a nominee competing for top honors as Best Dating Site, Best Dating Site Design, Most Innovative Company, Best Marketing Campaign and Best Up and Coming Dating Site. The iDate Awards are being held as part of the annual Internet Dating Conference. FULL ARTICLE @ OFFICIAL WIRE

Mycreativemate logo PR WEB - Dec 14 - My Creative Mate is a new dating site specifically targeting creative-minded individuals and entertainment industry professionals. MyCreativeMate.com includes popular functions enjoyed on other dating sites, but also features additional options catered to its unique clientele. Artists can not only upload their own pictures, but also create an album to show their portfolio. Their work can be displayed in their galleries, allowing members to connect through specialized interests. All member benefits are currently free to registered users during this phase of the site. Eventually, subscription rates will apply and will typically be less than half of other popular dating sites. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

Mycreativemate logo PR WEB - Dec 14 - My Creative Mate is a new dating site specifically targeting creative-minded individuals and entertainment industry professionals. MyCreativeMate.com includes popular functions enjoyed on other dating sites, but also features additional options catered to its unique clientele. Artists can not only upload their own pictures, but also create an album to show their portfolio. Their work can be displayed in their galleries, allowing members to connect through specialized interests. All member benefits are currently free to registered users during this phase of the site. Eventually, subscription rates will apply and will typically be less than half of other popular dating sites. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

Ashley madison logo new NATIONAL POST - Dec 11 - Pro-family organizations are "shocked and outraged" that Toronto Transit Commission is considering plastering streetcars with advertisements for the Ashley Madison Agency, an online dating site that promotes adultery. The campaign is planned to start in January with a four-week test buy that would see a streetcar's exterior wrapped with the website's trademark phrase, "Life is short. Have an affair." If the initial ads are successful, Ashley Madison would enter into a deal with the TTC to see a total of 10 streetcars outfitted in a similar manner, amounting to a $200,000 influx to the Commission. Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman responded to criticisms that the proposed campaign is offensive by pointing out the proliferation of ads glorifying the use of alcohol and Viagra. "No one is going to have an affair because they read an ad on the side of a streetcar," he said. "They're going to have an affair because there are issues with their long-term relationships." FULL ARTICLE @ NATIONAL POST

Mamba logo OPW - Dec 9 - Russian dating site Mamba.ru has just announced that its membership totals over 11M with 100,000 active online users. Mamba's members are most active at the end of the working day and less active between 4-6am with ~25 000 online users.

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Rsvp fastimpressions partnership DAILY TELEGRAPH - Dec 6 - Dating services RSVP and other operators are introducing specialised tours for those who don't want to travel on their own. The concept is about allowing groups of people to go away that are at a stage of life when all their friends are married or in relationships. It's not necessarily about dating. Often single women travelling will make friends with other single women. Fast Impressions' speed-dating service has introduced one-day wine tours for singles to the Hunter Valley, Victoria's Yarra Valley and the Bar- ossa region of South Australia. Grand Pacific Tours has introduced its first tour for singles, a trip to New Zealand next year. FULL ARTICLE @ DAILY TELEGRAPH

Happiercouples logo BUSINESS WIRE - Dec 1 - With 50% of U.S. marriages ending in divorce, and 75% of America’s 168M spouses identifying themselves as ‘unhappy’ after only ten years of marriage, a new website HappierCouples.com seeks to stem the rising tide of unhappy marriages. Created by matchmaker Jeff Ullman – founder of Great Expectations, HappierCouples.com provides couples with access to the long-overdue tools and services necessary to breathe new life back into their partnership. FULL ARTICLE @ SYS CON

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Tiger woods NY DAILY NEWS - Dec 3 - TMZ has obtained a contract AshleyMadison.com sent to Woods offering him $5M for "advertisement, endorsement, sale and promotion" of their site. AshleyMadison.com has 3.5M members, making it the largest online dating site for people in relationships, said CEO Noel Biderman. Biderman said he has preserved more marriages than he has destroyed. FULL ARTICLE @ NY DAILY NEWS

Zoosk logo new PR NEWSWIRE - Dec 3 - Zoosk, the social dating community, has closed a $30M Series D round of funding. The round was led by new investor Bessemer Venture Partners, the oldest venture capital firm in the United States. Existing investors Canaan Partners and ATA Ventures also participated. Since its launch in December 2007, Zoosk has attracted~40M singles. Singles can join Zoosk via their social network by adding the Zoosk application on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster. FULL ARTICLE @ PR NEWSWIRE

Happiercouples logo BUSINESS WIRE - Dec 1 - With 50% of U.S. marriages ending in divorce, and 75% of America’s 168M spouses identifying themselves as ‘unhappy’ after only ten years of marriage, a new website HappierCouples.com seeks to stem the rising tide of unhappy marriages. Created by matchmaker Jeff Ullman – founder of Great Expectations, HappierCouples.com provides couples with access to the long-overdue tools and services necessary to breathe new life back into their partnership. FULL ARTICLE @ SYS CON

Virtualdatingassistants logo PR WEB - Dec 1 - Virtual Dating Assistants has allowed men to outsource online dating since June of this year. The company has decided to open its doors to time-strapped women. The company’s virtual dating assistants handle everything from profile creation to online interaction and, ultimately, bring online dating offline for its clients for $480/month. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

YENTA JWEEKLY - Nov 25 - Yenta911.com is a new Jewish dating site that gives members flexibility in their profiles by allowing them to keep a blog, post videos and connect with their friends who are also using Yenta911.com. “You can learn a lot about a person by seeing who their friends are,” said Yenta911.com's founder and CEO Alexandra Weiss. FULL ARTICLE@JWEEKLY

Mark Brooks: You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. This site will do well with youngsters, but not so well with people 35+ who tend to be more concerned about revealing their singleness. The older set tend to like the anonymity that traditional dating sites offer.

Markus frind picture vancouver view interview VANCOUVER MAGAZINE - Nov 20 - Markus Frind, the founder, CEO, and sole owner of Plentyoffish.com, works as little as he desires. He’s been quoted as saying he works about 10 hours a week. Plentyoffish.com now has 16M users, earns tens of millions of dollars a year, and is growing 80% a year. Alexa ranks Plentyoffish.com the 35th most trafficked site in Canada and the 100th in the US. It serves up 2.4 billion page views/month.

Plentyoffish.com spends far less money than other sites do. Match.com and eHarmony.com each spend $100M a year on advertising. They run thousands of costly servers even though their traffic is smaller than that of Plentyoffish.com, which has only 11 machines.

The next level Frind aims to conquer is the world of “scientific” dating research. Companies like Chemistry.com, eHarmony.com and Genepartner.com hire psychologists and scientists to design questionnaires and even DNA tests to help people find mates. Frind did hire a relationship psychologist to create “compatibility matching tools” for Plentyoffish.com. Now he thinks he can do better with his own algorithms. “The science of dating,” Frind scoffs, “is all BS.” Those much-heralded matching tools are only 15 or 20% better than chance. And does Frind think he can optimize and tweak his way to beat that score? “I could double or triple it.”

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Patrick perrines book OPW - Nov 21 - Patrick Perrine's 2nd book Sex vs. Love: The Ultimate Showdown! is available at Amazon. Unlike his first book, Bringing Perfect Back, Sex vs Love is written for men, women, gay or straight. It is an easy read, with a fun and insightful look into sex, love and relationships as they exist today.

HeartboxTECH CRUNCH - Nov 18 - Every few weeks OkCupid shares a few truths about the online dating scene and human nature in general. The latest report to come out addresses ‘Your Looks And Your Inbox’, charting the number of messages users receive in relation to how attractive other members rate them. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does. Men on the site tend to be more generous than women when it comes to rating attractiveness. But despite their fair ratings, they tend to ignore many of the women they find reasonably attractive and primarily target the most attractive females. Women, on the other hand, rate a whopping 80% of men on the site as ‘below average’. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Eharmony-logo MARKETING WEEK - Nov 18 - eHarmony.co.uk has been slammed by the advertising watchdog for misleading claims in its television campaign. Five viewers complained to the Advertising Standards Authority to challenge the claim that 2% of US newlyweds met via the site. eHarmony said the 2% figure was extrapolated from an online study of 7,000 respondents undertaken by an independent market research company. The ASA ruled eHarmony’s ad was misleading because it had made an “absolute claim” that suggested a “definitive figure” of marriages based on an extrapolated 2007 online survey. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKETING WEEK

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Snapinteractive logo MARKETWIRE - Nov 16 - SNAP Interactive, a provider of online dating apps for social networks, announced operating results for Q3 '09. Q3 '09 revenue increased to $801,120 as compared to $784,242 in Q2 '09 "We are excited to report our seventh consecutive quarter of operational profit," stated SNAP President & CEO Clifford Lerner. "With ~3M monthly active users and very limited spending on user acquisition to date, we are aggressively pursuing non-advertising based monetization opportunities, including virtual gifts and subscriptions. We plan to roll out these features to our user base over the next several months", he added. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN MONEY

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Forced-fat-camp MARIE CLAIRE - Nov 15 - Is skinny really beautiful? Not in Mauritania, in Western Africa, where big is beautiful and stretch marks are sexy, young girls are brutally force-fed a diet of up to 16,000 calories a day--more than four times that of a male bodybuilder--to prepare them for marriage.
Rolling layers of fat are the height of sexiness. Big women are back in vogue. The ultimate sign of beauty, however, is silvery stretch marks on the arms. [Two Mauritanians] inspect a photo of a bikini-clad model in a glossy magazine from neighboring Morocco. "She looks ill," they agree, clicking their tongues at her jutting hips and clavicles. Then they turn to an article about liposuction, and laugh so hard the walls seem to shake."
FULL ARTICLE @ MARIE CLAIRE

Pof lady gaga picturePRESS RELEASE – Nov 11 – PlentyofFish.com, the world's largest free dating site with more than 17 million members, has partnered with Iconic recording artist, Lady Gaga. The site is sponsoring a contest for single fans to win a “date of a lifetime” with Lady Gaga during her upcoming North American concert tour, “The Monster Ball.” Two lucky winners will be selected per concert stop. PlentyofFish.com will also be giving away tickets and backstage passes for each stop. Visit www.plentyoffish.com/gaga for complete details. FULL ARTICLE @ EIN NEWS

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SYDNEY MORNING HERALD – Nov 6 – The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has accused dating site, RedHotPie, of misleading conduct. The site operators have allegedly created fake profiles in order to increase activity by sending flirt messages to its 1.6 million register users. The hearing is set for December 10th in Perth. FULL ARTICLE @ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

OnlineBootyCall Celebrates A Major Milestone With A $1 Million Sweepstakes

Onlinebootycall logo PR WEB – Nov 5 – OnlineBootyCall.com has reached 4 million members and will celebrate by giving away $1 million to one of them. An additional prize of $5000, and five $1000 prizes are up for grabs. OBC's last million dollar sweepstakes culminated in a world class celebration in Los Angeles, CA. This year's party will surely surpass it. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

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WASHINGTON POST - Oct 29 - LousySpouse.com was founded this summer. The site was started to give support, resources and options to people who have just been knocked upside the head by their husband or wife. LousySpouse.com provides information on lawyers, private investigators, finances -- even movie suggestions to help people laugh off their louse. The Web site also offers some horror stories. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST

For sale picture OPW - Nov 2 - Contact Joe Chan or submit a bid trough GoDaddy if you are interested in any of following online dating domains:

* $800: BostonDateCoach.com
* $500 each: ObamaDatingSite.com, RichSugarMama.com
* $200 each: ArtistDate.com, CuteCollegeFriends.com, HospitalDate.com, SingleCollegeFriends.com, SmartWomenWanted.com, WealthySingleFriends.com

Absoluteuggos picture ESARCASM - Oct 26 - If your goblin-like appearance frequently frightens small children, AbsoluteUggos may be the dating site for you. Its creators say all the recent coverage surrounding BeautifulPeople.com inspired them to take action. The site will require all visitors to upload head shots in addition to a full-body nude photos. Its automated system will then scan the images as part of a preliminary screening procedure. Once passing the computerized inspection, prospective members’ photos will be posted for a BeautifulPeople.com-like member vote. Only those scoring a 1 or 2 (out of a 10-point attractiveness scale) will be accepted. FULL ARTICLE @ ESARCASM

OPW - Oct 30 - There are two days left to pick up your Internet Dating Conference ticket and safe $520. Register here. The online price is $750 through Saturday, Oct 31st, then it's $1275 at the door. Attendance is looking strong. ~1000 people are expected. The Internet dating conference will be held at the Miami Beach Convention Center on January 27 - 29, 2010. See the agenda.

REAL BUSINESS - Oct 29 - While many sectors have been cripped by the credit crisis, there is one industry that's booming off the back of the financial gloom: online dating. Ross Williams founded WhiteLabelDating in 2004 and business, he says, has never been better. Turnover this year doubled to L25m. And Williams' is expecting a further 100% growth this year. FULL ARTICLE @ REAL BUSINESS

The awards are organized by the Internet Dating Conference and Online Personals Watch.
FULL ARTICLE @ MARKETWIRE

SF CHRONICLE - Oct 27 - Some argue that social media such as Facebook or Twitter, which provide a more accurate snapshot of users' lives, can lead to better connections. Gelato, a new dating site, lets users create their profiles based on information from Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, Netflix and Last.fm. Thread, a site that opened in September, takes a jab at the awkwardness of navigating the Internet to meet strangers by helping Facebook users connect with the friends of their friends. Zoosk claims to be  a combination of social networks and online dating. Co-founder Shayan Zadeh said that the site's platform is the digital equivalent of going out to a bar with friends and meeting new people. BlackBox Republic, another newcomer for sex-positive people, describes itself as a social dating site. It provides an environment where people can create networks they can retain even after finding new love interests. In a way, its goal is to challenge the shop-and-go spirit of the classifieds system, BlackBox Republic CEO Sam Lawrence said.  OnlineDatingPost.com editor Dave Evans Evans said "You're always going to have these dominant players, but the interesting stuff is with the edge cases. These guys have created a sexier proposition." FULL ARTICLE @ SF CHRONICLE

REUTERS - Oct 8 - Researchers said that women whose hormones are chemically controlled are less likely to seek out muscular, rugged men. Whereas ovulating women not on the pill are particularly attracted to men showing dominance and male-male competitiveness and prefer partners who are genetically dissimilar to themselves. The birth control pill could also throw a spanner in the works of the laws of natural attraction as it prevents women giving off monthly fertility signals believed to be subtly alluring to men. FULL ARTICLE @ YAHOO NEWS