STLTODAY -- June 2 -- The Illinois Senate late Saturday narrowly approved a 67% hike in the state income tax and imposed $1 billion in new sales taxes, dramatically reshaping the Statehouse?s budgetary stalemate. Dating services are one of the 39 services that would suddenly by subject to the state?s 6.25% sales tax. FULL ARTICLE @ STLTODAY Mark Brooks: Users pay tax on dating services in the UK and Europe. This is bad news for USA dating services. Your comments please.

MOONEE VALLEY LEADER -- June 3 -- ?Drive by dating is a way to meet people that you see on the road or at the traffic lights,? said Tara McGie, director of drivebydating.com.au. If the object of your affection has a drive-by-dating sticker on their car, you can find them online by searching for their car registration, vehicle make or colour. FULL ARTICLE @ MOONEE VALLEY LEADER

BUSINESS WIRE -- June 4 -- A new survey by eHarmony, conducted by Opinion Research, finds that 51% single parents believe they and their kids are better off emotionally when the parent is in a committed relationship. The eHarmony survey asked single parents about their motivations for dating again: - 87% said to have fun - 80% said for companionship - 61% said to have a mother or father figure in their child?s life - 60% said to share parenting duties - 37% said to appease their kids FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WIRE Mark Brooks: This very point is the top reason myself and Irena plan to devote our time and career to the internet dating industry for the next 20 to 30 years. Internet dating services and matchmakers help people make better matches. Better matches means happier families and kids. Happier and emotionally healthier kids may lead to a society that won"t self destruct in future generations. We"ve ALL got our work cut out. Its a good cause, and a great industry to be working in. Your comments please... See all posts on eHarmony

OPW INTERVIEW -- June 6 -- Why pay $5,000 to $50,000 for a matchmaker, when you can pay $20 a month for a dating site. Service. Matchmakers are doing well, despite the rise of internet dating. Here?s our interview with Samantha Daniels of Samantha?s Table. - Mark Brooks What is your background and what inspired you to become a matchmaker? I started my company, Samantha?s Table, almost 10 years ago. I was a practicing divorce attorney so I was spending a lot of time finding out why couples broke up and what didn?t work for them. At the same time I was working as a lawyer, I was throwing events for my single friends. At those parties I was introducing people to each other and they kept getting into serious relationships and getting engaged and married. I started realizing I had a photographic memory for names and faces and little factoids about people. I felt like this could be an interesting business for me. It was at a time where online dating hadn?t really taken off and there weren?t that many people in the matchmaking business. And I saw room in the marketplace for a matchmaker who would help social...

It’s no secret, a lot of people meet their mates at work. I read somewhere that the percentage was pretty high, something like 25%, and in a survey in 2008 from career builder, forty percent of respondents said they have dated at work, with 31 percent leading to marriage. I’ve certainly seen many people getting [...]

NEW MEDIA AGE -- Apr 30 -- The UK dating services industry is worth an estimated £600 million a year and, according to Hitwise, there are more than 1,300 dating sites in operation. Meanwhile, Jupiter Research predicts the number of paying members of dating sites will reach 6 million in the next three years, rising from 2.6 million in 2006. In the midst of such vast anticipated growth, two of the biggest players ? Meetic, which owns Dating Direct, and IAC, owner of Match.com ? have agreed to a deal. Industry reaction to the owners of Match.com and Dating Direct getting into bed together seems to be one of general puzzlement. IAC plans to sell its European operations of Match.com to Meetic in return for ?5 million (£4.5 million) and a 27% interest in Meetic. So why would the world"s largest dating site suddenly decide to sell its profitable European operation? Ross Williams, co-founder of WhiteLabelDating, which powers dating sites for publishers, sees the strategy behind the decision. "There was a clause in the announcement that didn"t make many of the headlines, but I think will tell you the direction IAC is going in: Match has the option to buy...

VANCOUVER VIEW -- May "09 -- Markus Frind is the CEO and founder of Plentyoffish.com, which is one of the largest and most successfull free dating sites on the Internet, popular primarily in Canada, the UK, Australia and the United States. Vancouver View: There are a ton of dating Web sites on the net. How did you become confident that yours would prove successful? Markus Frind: I created Plentyoffish to teach myself asp.net; there was no plan to create a major business - I just kind of stumbled on it. In other words this was never meant to be a business and there were no expectations to run it as a business. When I started Plentyoffish, there wasn"t even any way to make money from the site. VV: How did you spread the word about Plentyoffish? MF: I told friends in Vancover and Toronto and then it spread like wildfire. Because the only other major dating site at that time was Lavalife, it was easy to get the word out. I didn"t really need to spread the word about Plentyoffish when it first started because it wasn"t meant to be business and I had no way of making money off...

MIAMI HERALD -- May 2 -- In March, Ashley Madison claimed annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars and 3.3m users worldwide. South Florida was its sixth-largest market (177k users), behind New York and Los Angeles. The Gender breakdown is 70-30 men-women; 60-40 in South Florida. Americans spent $957m on dating sites in 2008; in 2013, Forrester projects $1.5 billion. February data from Compete show that Adultfriendfinder and Fling logged 37.9m unique visitors, more than the next 12 dating sites combined. Sites like these and Ashley Madison have one big advantage over the competition: ""Their target audience is going to be on the site forever,"" says Mark Brooks, an Internet dating industry consultant. "The typical dating services are victims of their own success. After three months, people bail -- they sign off because they"ve met someone, or they skip over to another dating site. The people at Ashley Madison have already demonstrated they"re not going to be committing any time soon, and they keep on cycling back around. It"s a wonderful cash machine."" ""Sneaky or deceptive is not my cup of tea,"" said Paul Falzone, founder of TheRightOne, and a professional matchmaker for 30 years. "These guys are...

OPW -- May 4 -- Tiffany & Co. is in the process of appealing a judge?s ruling that does not hold eBay responsible for the sale of counterfeit merchandise, and if they succeed, it could mean bad news for online dating. Buyers take risks everyday when purchasing items listed on eBay. ~6,000 fake items are for sale on the site at any given time, usually famous luxury products. In June 2004, Tiffany & Co. decided eBay should take responsibility for the counterfeit Tiffany jewelry being sold on the site, and sued. The argument was over whose job it was to police the site to help prevent counterfeit merchandise from being passed off as authentic. Four years later, on July 14, 2008, the ruling came down from U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan: ?eBay cannot be forced to police its listings to identify counterfeit products. It is the trademark owner"s burden to police its mark.? Tiffany was devastated by the ruling, which contradicted several international rulings from the previous year. The previous month, a French court awarded LVMH, the parent company of Louis Vuitton, nearly $61m in compensation for fraudulent items sold on eBay. eBay was also ordered to stop all sales...

PR NEWSWIRE -- Apr 22 -- The future of cheating has arrived in the form of mobile dating, courtesy of the world?s largest infidelity dating site. According to founder Noel Biderman, ?Now with Ashley Madison Mobile, you"re free to connect with your lovers throughout the day...on the train coming into work, waiting at the airport, or even late at night while your spouse is more focused on the TV than you." The product is currently in Beta testing, but several thousand users signed up within the first few hours. FULL ARTICLE @ PR NEWSWIRE See all posts on Ashley Madison This post also appears at the iDate Forums.