Many Body Theory

It looks like someone at Facebook checked out what Bing is doing and is asking users to bookmark a certain url: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=hp

It looks like the product manager in-charge of bing.com likes knowing how many users bookmark Bing. Super-smart. As a consultant I’ve suggested some variation of this to nearly all of my clients…

One thing about tracking if someone has bookmarked your website is that you need a seperate URL. One could measure referring URLs that are blank/null but that is not 100% because not all browsers forward the referring url (and users may type the URL directly in their browser chrome).

Good job, Bing!

Zoosk must be hurting for revenue. “Mom Makes $379/day Working From Home” — geez, don’t you have 40M in funding to keep the lights on?

I don’t even see those kinds of ads on Plenty of Fish, and that’s the hot-spot for affiliate traffic these days…

Disclaimer: I ran acquisition at Zoosk and later consulted for SpeedDate

Over a year ago SpeedDate ripped the Zoosk payment page and later took it down after getting a nasty letter from the CEO. Now it appears Zoosk has taken some major inspiration from SpeedDate’s latest design.

I was on Facebook the other day and noticed an update from one of Zoosk’s engineers about a recent design. To my surprise it looked really familiar… then it hit me, it was a rip of SpeedDate’s profile layout.

I haven’t heard many good things about the company lately.

I’ve had off-the-record conversations with a few VCs that were pitched by Zoosk to raise up to another 50M in funding without positive feedback. Word on the street is that while revenue grew in 2010, many of Zoosk’s marketing efforts were not profitable for most of the year.

Obviously I don’t have access to the day-to-day numbers anymore but from what I’ve heard it all seems to add up. Zoosk is no longer the leader in the Facebook application space, does very little direct marketing and I haven’t seen Zoosk launch a landing page test since I left the company in 2009.

Check out the screen-shots below.

Does the new homepage of Ignighter.com look familiar? They blatantly stole Singlesnet design including the text used. It looks like this is something they asked a developer to just hack up and did a really poor job trying to duplicate the look and feel. Nothing about their new homepage looks original.

On a separate note — Ignighter has an affiliate program with Neverblue and I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any success with it. According to the program’s description they are paying $7.50 for someone to enter in a free trial (credit card submission). I can’t imagine anyone making it work at these price-points (including Ignighter internally).

Zoosk was recently featured in TechCrunch. A few weeks ago we hit acquired our 40 millionth user and reached a 30M/yr run-rate for revenue.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/20/zoosk-hits-40-million-members-eyes-20-million-in-revenue-this-year/

Recently we launched a new desktop application for Windows, Macs and Linux computers. You can check your Zoosk messages without ever opening up your internet browser… SICK

Our community manager wrote a blog about it recently: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=115921932882

Outside of the part where she mentions “download here” is her quote “Monday just went from blaaaahhh to YAYYYYY”

If you have not checked out Zoosk — you should.

I will be in NYC from August 7th to 11th

Let me know if you want to meet up.

For those of you readers who are Zoosk users — we just launched a mobile version of our site.

http://m.zoosk.com

This was actually launched about a month ago but I haven’t had that much time to post about it. There are a lot of features that we are still going to be add which will enhance the mobile experience but I wanted to make a post about how proud I am of the Zoosk team for pushing this out.

So I had a court case in Chicago later today… I showed up about 55 minutes before my flight and because it was already under an hour someone on standby took my seat.

Delta/North West Airlines sucks hardcore.