The Chellaul Corporation
The Chellaul Corporation is an internet-based social networking and multimedia entertainment company comprising several websites and projects. The company's primary projects are Afroromance.com and InterracialDatingCentral.com, both of which are online dating websites designed specifically to match single men and women with each other for long-term relationships. InterracialDatingCentral.com bills itself as "the internet’s largest and most influential interracial dating community," and as of March 2011 the two sites had 1.1 million users combined. Headquartered in Reno, Nevada, The Chellaul Corporation also operates Swirlr, a dating website and reality web series. Swirl is executive produced by Shawn Miles, also known as the co-executive producer of the E! Network series Ice Loves Coco.
History
Founding
The Southern California dating service Socal Interracial Dating.com was founded in 2005. Unlike most competitors at the time, the website offered free chat rooms and advance searches before paying monthly fees. As of September 2005, the website had around 35 million web site hits per month. The website's mottot was "bring together the human race." The company was under the auspices of the Chellaul Corporation, which at that point also owned and operated a family of websites in the InterracialDatingCentral.com community.
In 2009, the Chellaul Corporation began using ThreatMetrix to reduce online fraud. The device identification software was used to prevent fake accounts and stop previous offenders from returning to the websites.
As of 2011, the company was operating two interracial dating websites, both headquartered in Nevada: Afroromance.com and Interracialdatingcentral.com. InterracialDatingCentral.com bills itself as "the internet’s largest and most influential interracial dating community." As of March 2011, the two sites had 1.1 million users combined. On August 30, 2011, the company registered "Afroromance" with the United States federal trademark database (USPTO). Ath that point the Chellaul Corporation was headquartered in Reno, Nevada. The company has created apps for Interracial Dating Central Lite and AfroRomance Lite.
Afroromance.com
AfroRomance.com was started because the founders found it "difficult to tell who was truly interested in interracial relationships on conventional sites." A March 2011 University of California-Berkeley study of 1 million online daters, found that when dating online "more than 80 percent of whites - even the 48 percent of males and 28 percent of females who said they were indifferent to race - sent messages to whites, and just 3 percent contacted blacks." Also, "Black members of the same site were more open to dating whites and were ten times more likely to contact whites. Black men were actually slightly more likely to initiate contact with white women than black women." {{-}}
InterracialDatingCentral.com
As of June 27, 2014, InterracialDatingCentral.com had more than 900,000 active Facebook members. According to InterracialDatingCentral, the website is "the Internet's largest community for singles who are open to dating outside of their race or culture in the search for love. The website offers a detailed searchable database of with tens of thousands of single members." InterracialDatingCentral.com's motto is "Where love is more than skin deep."
In June 2014 InterracialDatingCentral.com was a sponsor of the Loving Day Flagship Celebration. Held in New York City, the 11th annual event celebrated the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia, where Virginia legalized interracial marriage. Over 1,000 people attended, with many getting their faces painted courtesy of InterracialDatingCentral.com.
Swirlr.com
In 2014 the Chellaul Corporation was behind the founding of Swirlr.com, a website and reality web series. Billed as the "first interracial dating reality show," Swirlr's executive producer is Shawn Miles, best known as the co-executive producer of the E! Network series Ice Loves Coco. Miles had been unsuccessfully pitching an interracial dating show to various major networks, who had turned it down, when he met the executive producer of Swirlr, also the co-founder of Chellaul. Hosts of the web series include Christelyn Karazin, author of the book Swirling: How to Date, Mate and Relate – mixing race, culture & creed, published by Simon and Schuster. The other host is body language expert Jordan Harbinger. Hosted at the Swirl.com website and the Swirlr YouTube channel, the first eight episodes in season one were all available online as of March 2014.
See also
- Comparison of online dating websites