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Search engine companies were making substantial money from a bidding war by companies trying to vie for those keywords.

At one time keywords such as ‘dating’ could reach as much as $7 per click for bids.

If you took this number and assuming that a conversion rate of 10% was feasible then the cost to the company to acquire one signed up member could be as much as $50 per member!

The bigger dating firms were scrambling to lure webmasters to their affiliate programs, because the cost to do business in this way was lower.

However, the affiliate program had some of its own issues in trying to retain loyalty of webmasters with its company and to ward off competition from other firms.

One time they flew down a UDate.com representative to meet with me when they realized that I had switched my affiliate program to another competitor.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 7 >>>

<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 6

Some companies who are fortunately bankrupt now also wanted a piece of the action and setup middle tier operations offering dating companies targeted traffic through their programs.

Usually they had operations setup overseas where a bunch of people would illicitly go to the dating site and setup fake profiles claiming to have sent legitimate traffic in order to earn their commissions.

I have been hoodwinked by a company such as this and lost thousands of dollars until I was alerted to these fake profiles by the emails and similar names that they were using.

It is sad to find companies that appear so professional at first sight should go to these lengths to steal money from those who labor so hard to derive their income.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 8 >>>

<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 7

The affiliate marketing campaigns have now taken a back seat and the real king of marketing is now Google through its two dependant services Adwords and Adsense. Google Adwords are available to companies that want to pay for their traffic through the listings that appear in a search results page.

However, in addition to their search engine traffic, Google now offers contextual advertising to companies through their networked partners ie. other websites in the business of making money.

For example, say that Chemistry.com wanted to pull targeted visitors to their website and have signed up with Google Adwords.

They may setup campaigns to target users that are coming through Google’s search engines for specific keywords such as “online dating’ and/or they can bid for words on other ‘dating’ related websites that pushes Google’s contextual ads. through their Adsense program.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 9 >>>

<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 8

Since Google has a fairly good understanding of the website that hosts their own ads. Google is able to push highly targeted advertisements on their partner sites and pay the webmaster for clicks and impressions emanating from there.

At the time of writing Google pays a whopping 68% of the revenue that it collects from the Adwords affiliated company.

Due to Google strong branding and reliability of this program, this has led to many webmasters migrating to the Google platform for all their entire advertising income.

This obviously led to a dramatic slow down of affiliate programs by many companies and now they are only offered by top middle-tier companies such as Commission Junction (cj.com).

Previously when the affiliate marketing was strong, one could go to the actual website say eHarmony.com and sign up to their affiliate program and have your own unique code to paste on your site and drive traffic in this manner.

For most of these companies the lure of Google and Yahoo advertising programs were hard to resist since they controlled a bulk of the internet’s audience.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 10 >>>

<<< Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 9

Today, we are witnessing another shift and re-alignment of the marketing sphere with the introduction of behemoth sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The phrase touted for this is social-media marketing.

The blogosphere has trundled along for the last few years and still going strong with fresh content and drawing much of company resources and interests while new applications are continuing to evolve.

We are seeing many more hand-held devices coming into the market and functioning with the same power and capacity of desktop PCs of ten years ago.

Everyone has readily accessible applications and information literally at their fingertips albeit a smaller screen.

Along with this brings companies trying to get a foothold in this hot market with their own unique applications and leveraging the new services being offered by Google such as mobile advertising.

The global handheld marketplace is expected to grow by 10-20% in the next year, so expect fierce competition and new companies sprouting up all over the place.

Ten years of online dating – past, present and future - part 11 >>>