An Online Dating Blog by Shimrit Elisar

Get in there!

The book is almost ready and one of the final touches is getting some incentives in to add value to the book. I’ve already got a couple of companies giving me some promo codes/coupons, but there’s room for a few more if you’re quick. If you’re looking for what is basically free exposure to a load of target demographic, talk to me. I’m mostly interested in UK companies, but would also accept foreign ones who have a good UK membership base.

Add comment April 9th, 2007

What we can learn from social networking sites

There’s been much debate recently about the shift in the US online dating market. I’ve been following the discussions with interest. It looks like the market is slowing, social networking sites are taking a chunk of the audience and site owners are sniffing the trends and trying to combat the problem. Some sites are going from a free model to a paid model, others are going from a paid model to a free model and there’s some sites popping up that try to bring together social networking and dating to create something that will appeal to both audiences.

I think that if you’re sold on the idea that social networking is stealing your customers you gotta take more than a superficial view at what social networking sites do that dating sites don’t.

I gather that there’s lots of operators out there who went “oh, social networking is free and we’re trying to charge our users money, so no wonder they’re going away”. I think this is a rather simplistic way of looking at what your customers want or need. If you’re free, and Myspace is free, then what is your site giving your users that they can’t already get for free on Myspace? Are they going to have to spend months on your site filtering out the freaks? Time is money.

Continue Reading Add comment April 9th, 2007