You may already know that we have recently completed an internal project that has replaced all of our database hardware.

Since then we have seen a massive improvement in speed and efficiency across the entire database. Our members appear to be enjoying the system refinements as well, as our Customer Support team have reported that member complaints have now been slashed to under 1% of the total number of member queries.

"Since the recent server updates, we have noticed a considerable increase in positive reviews coming through to Customer Support. Obviously, member satisfaction is something that we strive for here at WLD so providing a service that is fast, efficient, productive and overall enjoyable for the user is very important to us."

Our hugely successful site maximdating.co.uk, which was launched on behalf of Dennis publishing for their Maxim magazine (a men's lifestyle magazine) has received even more press coverage in the May issue of Revolution. To read the full article please click on the link below.

Full Revolution Article

As I walked into the WLD offices this morning I couldn't help but notice that a few of us were looking a little bleary eyed, which could only mean one thing, a great deal of dedication and hard work at Internet World!

We had a fantastic time, and although we are all feeling the effects of a very exhausting few days, we are absolutely delighted at the overall success of the show.

We received many compliments about our stand with our palm trees, beach scene and hula girls and spoke to hundreds of interesting people, so many thanks to those of you who came to visit us. Please be assured that we will be in touch, we have a very dedicated partner account team who will contact you as soon as possible. We were astounded at the volume of interest we received whilst at the exhibition so please bear with us!

On the evening of Tuesday 29th April, we also held a dinner for our existing partners at the Shanghai restaurant in Knightsbridge. I would like to take this opportunity to extend our thanks to those of you who were able to join us for the evening, and hope you enjoyed meeting each other, and the fantastic food and wine!

We were so pleased at how many of you that were able to attend that we already have plans to make this a quarterly event, with many new partners on board, so watch this space!

My final thanks must of course go to our fantastic WLD staff, who were, as always working exceptionally hard and certainly did us proud.

If anyone was unable to visit us at the show, but would like more information, please do not hesitate to contact our partner team, who would love to hear from you.

WLD stand at Internet World

Internet World

In the internet dating space, bigger is not always best. According to the latest U.S. numbers from Hitwise, the top niche dating sites are steadily gaining market share while their big mainstream counterparts stagnate.

A great post today on Techcrunch about the growth of niche dating as other general dating site growth stagnates as they battle for market share:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/24/niche-dating-sites-grow-steadily-as-mainstream-ones-flail/

We are very pleased to announce that WhiteLabelDating.com will be making an appearance at Internet World this year.

The show is designed to educate business decision makers on the latest developments in the market and introduce them to the suppliers who can help them implement their online strategies. It has also been awarded best business exhibition at the 2007 Event Awards.

There will also be a series of seminars running that visitors will be able to attend. Our very own Ross Williams will be presenting, along with Paul Downing from Rock Solid Ideas. This presentation will take place in the Ecommerce and Connectivity theatre on Wednesday April 30th at 11:am so please come along, it would be great to see you there.

The exhibition is being held at Earls Court London and will run from April 29th - May 1st, and we can be found on stand number E201.

We are really looking forward to attending the event and are confident that it will be a massive success, so please come along and visit us, we would love to talk to you!

As you may already know, we have recently launched maximdating.co.uk for Maxim magazine on behalf of Dennis Publishing. Following this, we have had some great coverage about the launch in New Media Age. To read the article, please click on the link below.

NMA Article

We had a great night playing the inaugral Rawnet vs WhiteLabelDating.com football match. Rawnet was the agency that first developed the WhiteLabelDating.com application and although we've now brought development in-house we owe a lot of our success to their team so it was great to have a kick about together.

Now it should be mentioned that Ross, our founder and chairman is rather "public school" and hasn't played football since he learnt how to escape by doing extra latin. However, our secret weapon was our partner manager Gary who played for QPR youth team, backed up by Matt and Steve who have both played football at county level. We were also joined by Nick, one of our new developers and Jacob, putting a sterling performance in defence.

The final score was 11 : 5 to WhiteLabelDating.com - we're looking forward to the second round!!

Click here for the winning team

I'm very pleased to announce the completion of an internal project to replace our ageing database hardware with powerful new hardware and the latest version of our database software. The changes, launched last week, have already resulted in improved performance across the entire system and have slashed page load times.

For those interested in the technical details of the new setup, the platform now uses MySQL 5 on Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (64-bit). We're replicating to slave database servers to help balance application reads across our web servers and each new box has 16Gb of RAM and fast discs configured in RAID 0 and 0+1 for fast I/O.

In addition to new hardware, we've identified areas of the database structure that can be optimised and we'll be rolling out schema improvements over the next weeks and months. We're not resting on our laurels; performance is a moving target and we'll continue to measure and improve as the WhiteLabelDating.com platform grows.

Partner managers have reported today that March has seen an increase on revenue by over 25% since February.

This equates to an overall revenue increase of just over 75% in the first quarter of 2008, since December of last year.

This is an outstanding achievement and we are highly confident that we can expect constant improvement on this, and would urge all partners to work closely with their partner managers to ensure they can achieve the same rate of success gained by our highest performing partners.

What a fantastic weekend!!

Partners have seen on average twice the number of basic members pay to upgrade to full membership and membership cancellations decreased by 25%.

This massive improvement follows the deployment of new database servers on Friday morning so our servers are now running at only 20% of capacity.

This means all sites are running much faster and partners are immediately seeing their income rise as a result.

WhiteLabelDating.com has always been the best converting online dating platform for partners - we're now seeing it get even better.

We'll post more news and exact results in a few weeks but in the meantime keep an eye on your stats as you can expect to see a significant improvement in new paying members.