CyberDating ~ Dating Personals Blog

       ... Please take a minute to see what's New and News in our Blog:

It's a Boy!

Monday October 16, 2006

OK, it's not a boy...

But we have a new arrival in our family.
In our continuing quest to bring useful, interesting and intelligent content to the world, we have just launched our newest Website: www.WikiObits.com

WikiObits is a Wiki site where you can help to compile the biggest database of obituaries there is. You know how when someone dies there is always a big rush to get someone to write an obit for the person in order to properly remember him or her? Well, we want to help avoid that by getting people to either write their own obituary or to get anyone who knows about the person to help write the obit.

As are things on most of our sites - it is totally free. Add your obituary today and get your friends to help to hone your Obit - Because, you never know when a bus is going to fall on you! That'll leave a mark.

Tucker

How Times Have Changed

Wednesday October 11, 2006

I've been one of the co-webmasters here at Cyberdating for a little over a year. One of the fascinating things I've realized during this period of time is how holding such a position goes beyond just the technical aspects and know-how one would assume are pre-requisites.

It's a position where I get to see the proverbial "big picture" as I field questions from members originating from all over the planet. Some members are concerned about security and scamming issues, while others are more pre-occupied with kids and marriage. Some are more materialistic than others placing a premium on the big toys of life (i.e.: ATV.s, boats, cars... etc). In some regions of the globe it seems like what matters is sex and getting one's "freak" on.

For example, I have suggested the CEO of Cyber dating to start a new venture to address multiple requests coming from our East Indian members. Stay tuned... more to follow later.

Gone are the stereotypes and prejudices associated with online daters. Dating seems to be an activity that cuts across all demographic profiles, social statuses, class structures, ethnicity and geographies. From wealthy professionals to broke students we.re all out there, searching for that elusive soul mate. The only difference is that we now have a powerful tool in our arsenal to assist us, the Internet.

Karl
Co-webmaster

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Wednesday September 14, 2006

Last time I wrote here I explained how our free dating sites make money. And, I promised that I would explain some of the unique ways that Internet advertising works that are unlike the TV advertising that you are used to.

Firstly, we do sell advertising space just like TV stations do. We offer advertisers a place to put their ads and then we charge them based on the number of people that see the ad. It's usually counted in cents per thousand impressions (the number of times someone sees the ad).

We also do a lot of Affiliate Marketing. This kind of promotion is a lot like commissioned sales in brick and mortar businesses.

Affiliate Marketing works like this:
Website A makes a deal (Affiliate Marketing Agreement) with Website B to promote Website B's product or service. Website A places coded links on their Webpage that leads to Website B. When a visitor on Website A follows the link to Website B, Website B is able to determine where the visitor came from using the code in the link. Then, if the visitor makes a purchase on Website B, Website B gives a commission to Website A.

In this type of arrangement, Website A makes no money until a visitor makes a purchase on Website B. But, if a website refers highly targeted visitors to another site, it is possible to make some decent money.

We have been affiliates of AdultFriendFinder for many years and much of our revenue comes from their sales to our visitors. Note the number in the link when you mouse over the AdultFriendFinder link. That's our affiliate code.

Knowledge is good!
Cheers,
Tucker

How To Make a Living on the Internet

Wednesday September 7, 2006

For those of you who are skeptical about free dating sites, here is a quick overview of how we make a living on the Internet.

We make money the same way TV companies do. Here is a tutorial for those of you who have never thought out the logistics: TV companies provide a venue where consumers (TV viewers) have the opportunity to see TV shows for free. In exchange for seeing the free content the viewers are forced to watch commercial advertisements. In the end the TV companies make sufficient money to produce and show the content and the viewers get to see the content. A marriage made in heaven. Remember that there is also PayTV in many parts of the world which allows you to watch content without the bother of commercials - but remember, it'll cost ya.

The same thing happens here. We provide consumers (You) the opportunity to see personal ads for free. In exchange for the free dating profiles we force you to view advertisements.

For an explanation of the different types of advertising that we can do on the Internet that they can't do on TV... Tune in next week...

Same bat time, same whatever.
Tucker

The Nigerian Issue

Wednesday August 30, 2006

We've got a problem. In the last few months the incidents of African scammers has totally gone through the roof. We are now seeing as much as 30% of our message traffic from African countries and, unfortunately, the majority of that is from scammers.

Up until now we have only banned individual email addresses from our network, but it seems that we are going to have to ban all IP's from Africa. It is commonly known that virtually all the other large dating sites have already banned not only Africa but also China and India. The thing is that we have always had the philosophy that our site should be totally available to anyone. We have always been free, we have always been accessible using older web browsers, and we design with the impaired visitor in mind, but it seems like we are going to have to start keeping people out. That stars with a total ban on the Africans.

Before we get a ton of complaints from people that say we are painting all African people with one brush, I would like to say that we fully understand that the vast majority of you are honest people. The problem is that some of the African people who use our site have ruined it for all of you.

Please accept my apology and understand that our site is really designed for the North American visitor and I'm sure that it is not the best place to find an African mate.

Sincerely,
Tucker

Server Downtime Today

Monday August 28, 2006

All CyberDating Network sties are going to be down for about 20 minutes today around 15:00 EST while we upgrade the memory in our main server. Sorry for any inconvenience, but the performance improvements should be worth it.

Cheers,
Tucker

Why all the Old Profiles?

Wednesday August 23, 2006

We get lots of inquires asking why there are so many old dating profiles in our database. Some folks even think that we do this to inflate our membership numbers by keeping old profiles around, but it's not true. Let me explain...

It's really simple. Since we are a totally free website we have no reason to remove profiles from our database.

If we ran a pay dating service, at the end of a member's payment period, if the s/he didn't want to renew and pay again, we would zap their profile and they would be history. But with our free dating sites we only remove a profile if we find out that it is no-longer valid. Usually that means their email address is no good.

Another contributing factor is that, since our site is free, some people post their profiles and then forget about them. When these people find relationships they don't bother to remove their profiles. So some of the folks are already hooked up - we just don't know about it yet.

Of course, if someone tells us that they are not looking anymore we remove their profile. And we periodically prune our database by reviewing older profiles and sending the member an email.

I hope that clears things up.
Tucker

We're Back...

Wednesday August 16, 2006

It's kinda funny; about 5 years ago we took down a webpage that had a running commentary about what was "new and news" about CyberDating - an online diary of events. It was pretty popular for a while but eventually noone wanted to look thru the chronological entries that we wrote, so we trashed it and moved on.

But, the Internet continues to evolve and eventually weblogs (Blog) became all the rage. And suddenly, a running commentary in chronological entries is totally where it's at. Well, holly cow - we were doing that before it was cool! So needless to say - we're back with our new "BLOG"!

We hope to do two things with our new Cyber Dating Blog:

Firstly, we are going to recreate what we originally blogged about. Whenever we make changes to the Cyber Dating Network of sites that is either important or interesting, you'll be able to read about it in this blog. We are always making changes that affect you members and it's good for you to know where to find out about them.

Secondly, there is a ton of misinformation on the Internet about dating sites and especially about totally free dating sites like ours. So, I'm hoping to try to help quash some of the myths out there. CyberDating has existed for almost 10 years now and we've seen a lot. It's time to blog about it and explain some of the behind the scenes stuff about Cyber Dating websites.

Cheers and Welcome,
Tucker