FabulousEntertainment

It’s nearly two months since my last benchmarking, so here we go again:

The big story here is that Sex in the UK continues to rocket and has even overtaken Gaydar to become the number one dating site in the UK according to Hitwise.

Local Swingers and The Adult Hub continue to plumet being punished by the huge marketing spend of Easy Date (Sex in the UK’s owner) and the community surge behind Fab Swingers. The Alexa rankings quoted are the three month averages, but it’s clear that the position is even worse for them over the last month and indeed Fab Swingers is in the top 100,000 based on our last month.

Dear old Swinging Heaven and has now began to drop down the table and I’d be surprised if it’s not been beaten by SDC when I next do these rankings.

UK Swingers has now declined so far that I’m inclined to replace it with another site unless it significantly improves before next time.

Thinking about the bigger picture, one of the questions I often ask myself is whether Fab Swingers is like easyJet — which didn’t simply snatch customers from British Airways but it actually grew the market because suddenly lots of people who couldn’t afford to fly were able to. Alternatively it may be the case that there is a fixed swingers/sex-dating community and it’s a pure zero sum game with every gain of a member for Fab Swingers another site’s loss.

Looking at the series of benchmarks the obvious conclusion to draw is that the latter applies and that all of the astonishing gains that Fab Swingers has experienced has been directly paid for by the decline of the other sites.

Here’s a brief unscientific benchmark: I’ve just logged into a few of the major UK swingers sites and I’m just checking how many members are online. Now, each site has probably got a different metric for working out whether a member is online so it’s not particularly accurate.

On this measure we presently have 6.5% of Swinging Heaven’s traffic, 20% of Adult Hub and 23% of Local Swingers.

It also shows how relatively inactive Swinging Heaven’s members are with 0.4% of their members online but 2% of our members being online. This isn’t surprising as Swinging Heaven is a much older site so some of the claimed members may well have not signed in for years and also many members of the site will signup and then discover that they can’t do anything without paying. While Swinging Heaven are presently claiming 780,428 members I would discount this down to 156,000 active members.

So basically we need to increase our membership by 15 times in order to snatch the leading British site from Swinging Heaven.

As we approach the end of the first year I thought it would be good to revisit the competitor benchmarking.

In every single benchmarking report I’ve done over the past year Swinging Heaven has dropped down the Alexa rankings and this report is no exception. I expect SH to be overtaken by both SDC and Sex in the UK this year.

Sex in the UK has been doing pretty well which I guess shows what happens if you spend an enormous amount of cash on AdWords.

The Adult Hub (14,864 to 41,603) and Local Swingers (29,790 to 64,261) have both dropped quite badly over the year. However both Swing2Us (111,209 to 215,969) and UK Swingers (124,171 to 286,550) have experienced catastrophic losses of traffic. This scale of traffic loss must be putting their businesses at risk.

As for good old Fab Swingers we’ve moved up another place since the last benchmarking and I think we’ve got a great chance of passing both Local Swingers and the Adult Hub in the coming year, especially if they continue their decline.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done the benchmarking. Here’s the table updated:

I guess the news this time is that Swinging Heaven continues its gentle decline and it looks like Google’s web spam team have implemented a new algorithm which has brought down a lot of the PageRanks.

Fab Swingers has now moved up one place in the table and based on our weekly averages I think we will have moved up another place by the time I next get round to doing the benchmarking.

I’ve just re-done the benchmarking. The Google Toolbar has not been updated since the last benchmarking so that’s unchanged. The Alexa Rankings have moved though.

Once again, virtually all of the competition have moved down while Fab Swingers has moved up. As long as we can maintain this momentum then we’ll start to move up this table quite quickly this year.

This is an odd story. Good old Swinging Heaven have announced that they are creating a print magazine! To say that I’m surprised would be an understatement, I am in fact shocked.

Here we have one of the top sites in the UK, albeit in decline, suddenly deciding to go into print whilst we’re going through the biggest shift from print to web that there has ever been.

I really can’t imagine what strategy this could be part of.

Here’s the latest ranking done today. The higher the Alexa Rank, the more popular the site is with the most popular site on the internet having a rank of one. The PageRank varies from 0 to 10 with 10 being the most important site.

This month I’ve taken Informed Consent out of the rankings - it’s a brilliant site but it’s not a swingers site so it doesn’t really belong here. I’ve added UK Swingers.

It’s been great progress with Fab Swingers moving from a PageRank of 0 to 3 and the Alexa Rank moving from 802,365 to 417,388. All of the other competitor sites we are tracking have fallen down the rankings - I’d love to believe that we’re responsible!

This Christmas I asked for the gift of traffic, and I’m quite pleased with what I got! Here’s my update of the Alexa traffic rankings. The Google Toolbar hasn’t been updated with the latest PageRanks so they are unchanged from my last post.

The Alexa Ranks quoted are the 3 month averages. Fab Swingers’ 1 week average is 165,318 so I’d certainly hope that we’ll overtake Swing2us early in 2007.

I’ve written a criticism of Swinging Heaven. I find it really annoying the way that they imply that the site is free when it isn’t. For example the opening sentence on their homepage is “It is completely free to register as a member of this site” which is true in the sense although it is extremely misleading as free members can’t do anything at all!

I really wish that Swinging Heaven would just take the honest approach and
say that it is a subscription site - why not be honest when people are going to
find out very quickly what’s going on?

I came across an interesting MySpace Case Study. It lists four factors that were key to MySpace’s success:

• Give users more control over their MySpace pages. At the moment I’m not allowing Fab Swingers users a huge amount of control over their homepages but I’m really not sure how important this is. I think my users are more interested in other things.
• Rapidly adapted product to desires of user base. Well I certainly hope to be able to do this. This is why I chose to write the code from scratch rather than using an off the shelf package.
• Used combination of viral tactics, offline advertising, and online distribution partnerships to seed initial MySpace community with users. Currently I’m mainly using email and search engine marketing. I’m lucky that my competition is much weaker than MySpace’s so I’m hopeful that these tactics will work.
• Made product and policy decisions to ensure MySpace site performance. I’ve chosen much higher performance technologies than MySpace did but it’s a good point that I will need to keep on top of performance issues as the site grows.