Welcome to Miami

Ok! So I made it into Miami. We fly South African Airways. Ok, so not the best, but the only South African airline to fly into the USA. Their customer service is shoddy, and their staff aren’t that bright – ahhh…the inefficiencies of monopolies. Hopefully the Airports Compay of South Africa will take the country’s best interest to heart and give a license to British Airways to fly the transatlantic route. Sad to think that in today’s world, you have a bunch of monkey’s running around and creating monopolies to line their own pockets. Anyways, enough airline bashing…

You may be wondering why I am even bothering, well I just have some gripes with SAA and I hope my blog gets to the top of their keywords just to tick them off. They shafted me out of an upgrade to business class on my last trip, and then stole my miles and wouldn’t refund me. So I didn’t get a free flight from Voyager and I don’t have the miles back in my account, because they say I flew in business class, although my boarding pass says otherwise!!!

Miami’s weather has been pretty crappy lately – so I don’t know what the big deal is about this place, however, it’s got a nice enough nightlife here in South Beach.

This last flight was pretty decent. I met Felicia Mabuze-Suttle, a local Talkshow host in South Africa. Had a short chat with her about my views on the overvalued property market in South Africa.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Vodacom has launched 3G in South Africa, with super fast BROADBAND WIRELESS INTERNET!!! I’m just loving it! Now I can lie on the beach and work as if I was in the office! The wonders of modern telecoms!

In terms of website launches, we launched BidThenBuy.net, BidThenBuy UK, HotelSquire UK and Revenue Index.

Google recently released it’s new policy on affiliate marketing. Our company has been quietly developing the next generation of affiliate marketing tools and software, and luckily, our launch is but a few weeks away. The official launch of Revenue Index will not detail exactly what the plans are, but I can tell you this, it going to ease the pain for thousands of affiliates out there, who are stuck between a rock and a hard place with Google’s new policy.

We’re attending the iDate conference here in Miami, and I must say, the numbers are quite sad. We operate a dating site, DigiFlirt, and I thought that we were just poor at marketing dating sites, but it seems that the gross revenue size for the online dating market is only $500 million per annum, and growth is expected to be a single digit this year.

Let’s do the math:

Approximately $40m per month, industry average of $20 per user per month. That’s 2 million paid users of online dating (on a monthly basis including attrition). Divide that by 1000 websites and the average is probably only 2000 paying users per month per dating site. Yup, sounds about right! The bigger gorillas out there, excluding eHarmony and Yahoo, are racking up losses. We decided to cut our losses and get out, so to speak, so we’re working in the room for the rest of this conference! At the very least, I met my fiance online – so we know it does work!