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April 24, 2003
Google Personals - Coming Soon?
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Google™ is the Internet's most popular seach engine and personals business is one of the web's biggest revenue streams. Most big search engines, news portals and enterteiment site have online personals communities added to their sites. We know of Yahoo! Personals, MSN Personals, even New York Times Personals… WHY we don’t know about Google Personals? LoveCompass suggests its opinion based on very basic research and our subjective opinions. There is no such thing as Google Personals as for now, but maybe…
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What do we have now?
Google™ is an extremely fast-growing search engine, portal, advertising agency and God knows what else; they are known for constant improvements of their services quality and variety – there is always something new you may find out about Google™ next month, and very often it is something spectacular!
Another important fact is that Online Personals industry is one of the most profitable Internet businesses. Even though its development tempo slowed down a bit during the year 2003, we are still awaiting for its tremendous success. Article posted in Internernews.com - Consumer Spending on Online Content Fell in Q4 states the following:
”By far, 2002 was the year of personals sites. The study said spending on personals and dating sites more than quadrupled to $302.1 million. Business and investment sites, despite a gloomy year on Wall Street, saw spending increase 36 percent to $292 million. Spending for content in the entertainment and lifestyle category more than doubled to $227.5 million.”
Google™ is not a charity, they do work for money, even though they have a mission, money still matter and they have more than enough advertising resources to launch and promote Google Personals.
Big Dogs ARE playing “Personals”
Let’s just make a simple search in Google for “Personals”. Look at the results:
#1 is the Google’s old friend and biggest traffic competitior – Yahoo! With their Yahoo! Personals. Google guys must know and they do know that Yahoo! makes big money from that listing alone and Google could have a good stake if they had their own online personals facility.
#2-3 is New York Times Personals, which is a “Match.com powered” service. Oh well, you all know what that “powered” thingy means, but tsssss… who said “affiliate” or … “dupe content”?
#4 is Match.com itself – yeah, they are making real good money from personals services and Google sure knows about that too.
Ok it looks like a lot of big dogs have it, many of them, and I would say, most of them: Canada.com Personals, Salon.com Personals, Boston.com Personals, Montagar…, GlobeandMail…, and even MSN Personals (geez… how come Google doesn’t want to k’em out of the game, btw – “powered by Match.com” again ;) )
What we may expect to see in future
Ok… let’s face it, we don’t know much about Google games, plans, changes, and that leaves us a lot of food for guesses, hopes and expectations. There is no any official or at least competent information about anything at least closely related to Google Personals stuff, however some people have been already talking about this particular phrase.
Old debts and Yahoo! Personals
Yahoo Personals! is getting more active this year and it now overbids Match.com in most Pay-Per-Click search engines, they invest a lot of money for all sorts of advertising trying to be indefinite leader in Personals business. Thus Yahoo!’s interest in this market is obvious and they wouldn’t be happy to see… you know whom as a competitor. Looking back to the history, we may recall that Yahoo! gave a real boost to Google popularity when it started powering Yahoo!’s secondary search results. Now, what? Yahoo! search uses Google even more now and Google, in turn, doesn’t run Google Personals. Does it make sense for you? On the same hand we know of recent acquisition of Inktomi by Yahoo!, which must sooner or later lead to the end of historical Yahoo!+Google contract and maybe then we’ll see a new logo, similar to the one that Biz Stone saw in his dream:
Google Personals – possibly the world’s best cupid
Being one of the most popular web site and with its huge hardware and software power, Google might become an absolute winner dating and personals industry. Do they make more money from their Google News? Or Google Images? Add the fact that connecting people has always been a good mission. The only reason for the delay I can imagine is that Google wants to make it DIFFERENT. Again and again they would prove that Google is unique and the best. This point is nicely described by Matt Pfeffer in his "Why Google really bought Blogger" article:
”It's all about personals. At first, I was stunned. But the vision is pure genius. Forget plain old web surfing! Think big. Think, the biggest killer app of all time: Love. Google will become the ultimate engine for finding ... romance. Just imagine it: Every search you make, recorded by Google (and stored in a cookie for 35 years — and now we know why!) and used to match you to your perfect mate. The news stories you click on, the goods you shop for — Google will throw everything into the mix, more data about you to better ensure you find that special someone. Google already has almost everything it needs to do this.”
Nothing is clear yet, however the possibility to have a new major player in Online Dating / Online Personals business is quite obvious. We’ll keep track on changes and we’ll keep our readers informed about anything related to possible launch of Google Personals.
Posted by LC at April 24, 2003 08:23 PM
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