Why is this (Google) news?

My usual scan of Google news brought up an article telling marketers why they should consider advertising on dating sites.

Online dating is an incredibly fast-growing segment of the Internet. Dating sites received more than 2 million unique visitors from the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in Q1 alone. But, is that a good enough reason to advertise within dating sites?

Yes. If the ad is targeted correctly.

Well duh! I’ve never heard of that site, so it might tbe one of those sites that group weak content around adverts, but come on.

I mean, I know some agencies have a hard time getting the idea into their heads that dating sites are good for brand association, because I’ve worked with some agencies that were meant to sell ads on our sites and just never bothered to actually try to sell the space. I also know that because of the long session times and the fact that there are a lot of page views per unique visitors then the amount of money you can get for the traffic is not as high as it could be.

But, with that said, any decent dating site could do some serious, serious targeting - more so than most types of sites out there - simply because of the amount of information they collect about the users (age, sex, location, ethnicity, income, children, education, etc.). People share all that information publicly on their profiles, where they normally wouldn’t put those details into any other website.

Apart from allowing advertisers to get a good idea of the demographics for branding, this is great for direct response stuff, as in actually getting people to click through and buy stuff. I find it hard to believe that there are still people out there who don’t get that. I’d much rather thing it’s just some of the people who write about the industry that are that backwards!