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Last summer there was some talk about advertising to singles on dating sites. If your site offers free membership, thats about the only choice you have to monetize those eyeballs.
Most of the larger sites that take ads have deals with advertising networks, or in the case of a site like Date.com, use 24/7 Real Media’s AdStream local ad serving solution. Date.com highlighted audience segmentation as one of the significant factors behind its decision to use 24/7. Behavioral targeting enables a site like Date.com to sell and deliver advertising to specific market segments.
As far as I can tell, most impressions don’t seem to be targeted past “single people.” As a dating site operator, you know their age, sex, race and financial situation, information most advertisers would kill for. Is anyone using profile information to further target ad messages? I know that Match members have a 10 digit code associated with their profile, which represent a wealth of information about the person. I’m not sure how much of that they leverage in the IAC advertising department, but you can bet they’re thinking about it. Dating sites could charge a lot more to advertisers if they could utilize the information in their own databases.
One problem is that most dating sites are run by engineers who are too busy protecting their domain to warm up to targeted advertising, even though a wealth of personalized information is a few mouse-clicks away. Consumers are also wary of their personal information being used to sell them stuff they may have no interest in, not to mention the privacy issues.
Would you offer targeted advertising if an ad network made it easy to leverage your customer data?
