The Georgia company distributes ASP code to webmasters who can then customize their own dating portals. Unlike other dating portals, the niche of the website determines the niche of the dating pool.
DateApp now draws from a database of about 150,000 names, CEO John-Michael Cataldi told XBiz. The company started as a stand alone dating site called Adult Sky in 2003, but realized it could not compete with larger competitors like AdultFriendFinder and Lavalife. “So we retooled for about nine months,” he said.
Cataldi reasoned that the existing database could be salvaged rather than scrapped. The five-person company spent 2,000 hours revamping its database, farming work to India for its Graphic User Interface, China for upcoming wireless additions and Russia for Linux/Unix support and PHP coding. The company purchased a 1500-lb. server from NASA at a government auction. “This thing once checked telemetries for the Challenger program,” Cataldi said, “and now it finds people dates.”
The result of the company’s recalibration is DateApp 3.0. Webmasters use a WYSIWYG menu to customize their own dating portals with parameters attractive to their sites’ demographic. Whether the fields are sexual orientation, location, age or interest, a site visitor is then taken to DateApp’s domain without losing the experience of the original site, thanks to the branding work of the host webmaster.
Further, interaction with the DateApp portals of other sites increases traffic back to the original host. “It’s captive traffic,” Cataldi said. “People have called it ‘viral’ or ‘parasitic.’ I take that as a compliment.”
Cataldi calls the DateApp service “relational” rather than a dating site. He cites “NASCAR dads who want to find other NASCAR dads to get away from their wives” or “gay people who like to go to movies in New York” as niches that can be catered to on a variety of sites that have nothing to do with adult or singles. In the future, DateApp will feature blogs, video uploads and some language customization, along with an integrated instant messaging feature.