Your best best is sticking with the major players like Yahoo, Match, and eHarmony (personally I dislike eHarmony, but it works for a lot of people). Some of the niche sites are OK too, like JDate.

After holding steady for most of 2008, Yahoo’s share of all search engine advertisers dropped like a rock in October, November and December — plummeting from 30.4% to 19.4% at the end of Q4, according to search marketing firm AdGooroo.

How do you explain this? Everyone else is gaining share and they’re losing it. This is very sad to see. I’ve always liked Yahoo!

Late last night, broadband-connected TiVo Series2/3/HD owners may have stumbled upon the new Domino’s widget. While we first caught wind of this in regards to the Austrailian TiVo service, US TiVo subscribers are first to tap into Domino’s online ordering system – requesting pizza from the comfort of their couch.

This is exactly the type of thing that TiVo needs to be doing to stay relevant and add value to both advertisers and viewers. It’s another step along the path towards building the “sofa web.”

Om Malik at GigaOM discusses the new game consoles and the contribution they might make to Internet browsing. He refers to it as the “sofa web.”

It was announced that TiVo and Amazon Team Up – NYTimes.com. This is a positive step towards TiVo becoming part of the sofa web. I can’t wait to see more deals.

But more to the point, there’s more going on at Yahoo than just search and PPC advertising. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has written a great piece on where Yahoo stands as a whole.

Kick-Ass Properties: Yahoo has fantastic properties. Time magazine this week awarded Yahoo two of the 10 picks for its “10 Essential Sites” special feature. Yahoo Finance and Flickr both got nods. No other company got recognized more than once (for the record, the others were Wikipedia, Craigslist, ESPN, Yelp, Facebook, Digg, Google, and TMZ. And yeah, I know, some of those hardly seem essential. And hey Time, next time give me one frakking page listing everyone. Geez!).

Let me add to Time’s picks a few more properties that do well for Yahoo. Delicious. Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Mail. Yahoo News. Oh, Yahoo Search. All of these are either the leaders or strong players in their categories.

There’s more, so click over to the article to see what else Yahoo has going for it.

Using the strategy put forth by the author, a start-up would be building a business around content and traffic from third parties and monetizing everything via Google AdWords or some other advertising network. Examples cited by the author include:

* YouTube makes it flash video player available via embed code on MySpace and their traffic takes off.
* TripAdvisor search engine optimizes its service and becomes one of the most popular travel services.
* Technorati hits delicious’ api for its tags and builds the web’s most succesful tag search service.
* Indeed crawls the Internet for jobs and builds a popular job service overnight.
* Kayak crawls the Internet for flights, hotes, and cars, and builds a popular travel service overnight.
* Qoop takes Flickr’s API and builds a Flickr printing service without ever engaging with Flickr’s team.
* Netvibes takes a few RSS feeds and builds a start page that looks as complete as MyYahoo overnight.

Nice for a business that has a handful of employees and no expenses, but it isn’t sustainable. Here’s the problem:

1.     No barriers to entry. Anyone can copy your business. Think about the example of the start page. Netvibes is competing with every major portal, as well as start-ups like Pageflakes, webwag, and protopage, with more popping up every day.
2.     No barriers to exit. Users can easily leave your business for the next big thing. Remember Friendster?
3.     Nothing of value is owned. You don’t own the content, nor do you own the advertisers. The eyeballs are yours, but without the content the eyeballs will go away. Without the advertisers, the money will go away.
4.     No control over your own destiny. Being completely dependent on “partners” (I use this term loosely) that have no contractual obligations to each other is dangerous. Content, traffic, or advertising “partners” could cut you off at anytime for any reason, like being acquired by a competitor, entering into an exclusive partnership with a competitor, suddenly viewing you as a competitor, or simply getting mad about something you’re doing with their content. Recent examples include YouTube entering into competition with Facebook, MySpace threatening YouTube, and Craigslist getting pissed at Oodle. If you’ve ever read Google or Yahoo’s terms of service for their advertising distribution programs, you know that they can pretty much change how their program works or cut you off at any time.

Biz Dev Classic may be slower, but it affords much more protection and stability for your business.