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.