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Lately I’ve had several discussions with people about the future of the dating industry. Niche portals, open profiles, customer acquisition costs, personality testing, conversion rates (thanks bob!), enhanced search, blogs and advertising seem to be the topics that pop up most frequently. I’ll tackle a few topics now and base additional posts on feedback from you loyal readers.
Niche Portals
The dating site becomes a branded niche portal, in a way that the large date warehouses never will. We’re back to the SpringStreet model, but it’s been a few years and the industry has has time to learn from SpringStreet’s mistakes and improve on the model of a shared database. Brand the interface however you want, NASCAR, NFL, Starbucks, etc. Provide members with great customer service and an experience they can’t get anywhere else. When is the last time you heard two people at a bar say how fantastic their online dating site is?
Lower customer acquisition costs
There is much discuss about rising customer acquisition costs ($40!). What if sites made it easier for people to come and go? Would more people leave existing sites for other sites, thinning the crowd of sites out there that are barely hanging on? Or with the right marketing, would more people try online dating, raising up the entire industry?
Towards a single profile
I am tired of maintaining multiple profiles on scores of dating sites. I had 20 at one point, now I’m down to a handful. In my mind, more than one is too much. I have a master document with all my profile text on all the services. It’s something like 25 pages long. A total nightmare to maintain. I love the idea of a single profile. Easy to maintain, portable and upgradable. Try doing that with your current dating profiles. Never happen. Sooner or later, people will get sick of filling out and maintaining all these profiles.
Large date warehouses like Match and Yahoo! don’t want to talk about “open profiles” which can be shared across several sites. Why make it easy for the customer to leave? The value becomes apparent when looking at smaller dating sites.
An initial step towards a single profile is a FOAF (friend of a friend) file. A FOAF file is human-readable XML file containing personal as well as professional information. For example, my FOAF file is located at http://www.socialpeople.com/foaf/foaf.rdf. Most web browsers are unable to read the file unless the server has been configured to display the information so you can read it. FoaF Explorer is a discovery service that searches FOAF files of your friends. XFN (XHTML Friends Network and FOAF together provide the building blocks for remarkable services that provide new contexts, features and services that will make look today’s dating sites look like stone tablets.
Think of all the different profile a user may have:
personal ads
business networking
social networking
banking
medical
e-commerce
What if there was a central repository where you could manage your profiles? The service would serve up profiles based on the context of the interaction. In my mind, a new player is going to have to enter the space, offering profile management, reputation management, taxonomies for tagging entities to indicate relationships (friend of, works for, dates, knows, belongs to) and other essential services and security infrastructure to support a working system based on contextually relevant profiles.
Mark Eisenstadt writes more on the subject.
{ 4 comments }
If you look in the plentyoffish forums most members use yahoo, match and myspace for dating. Basically paid services are flatlining and about to go into decline and free services such as myspace hi5 etc are skyrocketing. In the last 5 years hardware has really advanced, and costs have fallen so low that nearly anyone can create a dating site that serves millions for under $10 grand/month.
Dating is about to become a commodity with very little to no margin, sites like eharmony which are based on premium “relationship” services are the ones that will make the money in the end…
The free sites make money by selling something - advertising, mailing lists, Email marketing, whatever. Often, paid sites (or paid areas of sites) will not subject the user to all those ads. Of course, this isn’t true of every site - but many.
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