LYCOS Europe and Meetic Announce Cooperation in Online-Dating Sector

Gütersloh/ Paris, France (PRWEB) May 27, 2004 –- Within the scope of a two-year co-operation agreement concluded by LYCOS Europe, one of the leading European internet portal providers, and Meetic, the biggest dating-community in Europe with 5 million members, LYCOS Europe will integrate the Meetic database as an additional service for the online dating-platform Love@LYCOS and meetic will become the premium dating partner of Lycos. With more than 4 million registered users, Love@LYCOS is among the most prominent dating-platforms in Europe.

Search queries within the dating-service Love@LYCOS will also show consistent profiles of the Meetic database additionally to the Love@LYCOS search results. These search results will be marked as so called “sponsored links� and will provide highly relevant results for users. Direct marketing measures, e.g. newsletters, and the opportunity to co-register when registering for Love@LYCOS, will inform the users about the new service. Besides a co-branded dating service an online-media campaign will promote the new service-offering by means of target group specific addressing of the users on the Lycos portal.

The launch of this unique service will start midyear 2004 in Germany, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Denmark, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands. The total volume of this cooperation amounts to a medium seven figure number.

“With the integration of Meetic, we are happy to offer an attractive added-value service for our users. As serious dating is Meetic’s clear focus, its services are an excellent amplification of our dating-platform Love@LYCOS, which is mainly positioned as a fun and flirting community�, says Michael Rohowski, Head of European Business Development/Sales LYCOS Europe.

Marc Simoncini, CEO Meetic, states: �With this full integration into the advanced dating product Love@LYCOS including co-branding and a media campaign promoted on the entire LYCOS network Meetic becomes the premium dating partner of LYCOS. In this regard the integration of sponsored links in a context other than the classical search surrounding is a downright novelty. In the past, context-sensitive keyword advertising has proven to be an extraordinarily successful vehicle for advertisers, that also exhibits high user acceptance. We expect this over-all advertisement arrangement to be very promising.�