European Internet Dating Convention in Prague

Filed in archive Dating Sites by Mark Brooks on October 10, 2005

Last Thursday and Friday I attended the European internet dating convention. Here are the pics.
The conference was better attended than last year with 65 attendees and
was more heavily attended by European dating companies. Last year half
the attendees were American dating companies. Execs from U.S. notables
Date.com, Match.com (UK based exec), and adult sites Sexsearch and
Iwantu were present. Here's a smattering of info for you from some of
my favorite presentations:

Alex Burmaster is Jupiter Research's new European online dating analyst
- Germans are most likely to be online daters
- British men are most willing to pay for online dating
- Pre-screening to provide matches is the most popular feature to help find love online

Jan Becker, CEO of German leader Friendscout24
- There are 11 million singles in Germany with 1 in 3 single in big cities
- 43% of European users on the web have used online dating (Statistisches Bundesamt 2005)
- Top sites are be2.de and Parship.de for high end 'introductory type' (personality profiling) services

Christian Vollman, CEO of iLove
- iLove had over 2 million uniques in May 2005 according to Nielsen Netratings
- iLove bills mainly via SMS billing
- Their mobile JAVA application has been downloaded 12,000 times so far

Nick Davis, Marketing Director for mobile enabler Mobestar
- Most European providers have recently launched 3G services. Japan is experimenting with 4G
- There are 10 million European 3G users with 18 million expected by 3/06

Eythor Arnaulds is VP at mobile enabler Enpocket
-
'EDEN' is Enpocket's Dating Engine, receives 2 million hits per day,
has 22 operators worldwide and powers Match on an exclusive basis in
the U.S.
- Airtel in India has 700,000 paying mobile dating members averaging 600 messages per user!

Final Panel Session
- Match is now operating in 32 countries in 19 languages; most significant markets being U.S., Germany and France
- Parship.de is the German leader for personality profiling based services (personality profiling)
- Parship.de charges 179 Euros for 6 months!
- In Europe, the credit card does not rule. One service collects just 30% of it's payments via credit card

Other notable presentations include
- Frederic Bien, Director of Flirt.com
- Richard Exon, Bus Dev Director for Bartle Bogle Hegarty gave an excellent presentation on TV advertising

Marc
Lesnick, the internet dating conference organiser, ran a
speed-networking session as an experiment on the second day.

We'll see more speed-networking sessions at future events.
Socials in the first evening and a Prague penthouse party on Friday
evening completed the event very nicely.

The next iDate is the big one: See you in Miami Feb 1-2.