If you think regular online dating is still too slow and inconvenient, SpeedDate.com might just be the thing for you. The San Mateo based online dating service just raised $6 million in a Series B round from Menlo Ventures after raising a Series A round for the same amount in January 2007. SpeedDate.com sets itself apart from its competitors by allowing its users to quickly set up short webcam conversations.
According to SpeedDate.com, it hosts over 100,000 online speed dates a day. Part of this growth is surely due to the fact that SpeedDate.com is also a very popular application on MySpace, Beebo, and Facebook (though it was banned there for a while in July). Because of this, it is hard to track exactly how popular the site is, but according to Google Trends for Websites, the site is indeed growing at a rapid clip and a lot of its growth seems to come from outside of the United States.
While the press release doesn’t go into any detail, it seems safe to assume that the company needed a new infusion of money to sustain its rapid growth. While a lot of its competitors are for-pay, SpeedDate has adopted a free model, though it is considering the addition of a premium as well.
Online dating is a competitive field, where large entities like Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo Personals seem to dominate, but at the same time, other sites like Randomate, WooMe, or OmniDate have been able to carve out a niche for themselves by putting different twists on the online dating model. SpeedDate.com, though, with its instant webcam conversations, looks like it stands a good chance to continue growing in this competitive field.
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