I appreciate the comments people have been leaving. Nothing bad happened to me, in fact it’s all good. From what I can tell, iDate continues to be a decent show. Attendance was slightly down from last year, which doesn’t surprise me. As usual, the interesting stuff was happening in the hallways. Lot’s of people bailing on presentations to go do deals by the pool, even though the weather wasn’t stellar.
Send In Those Presentations: Same as last year, I would like to post links to as many presentations as people are comfortable making public. Last year, most presenters simply emailed me their Powerpoints. A few opted to cleanse them first by deleting a few slides. Send them to devans at corante dot com.
Evan Katz getting stuck in the elevator seems to be the most traumatic portion of the event. He has a recap of the show at his blog, http://www.e-cyrano.com/blogger/blogger.html.
Bill Broadbent mentioned that background checks and legislation were not mentioned this year. What then were some of the major themes?
I wish they had done a podcast of the event. I would have paid a few hundred bucks for that, no problem. Maybe next year.
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I don’t really like these conferences. You basically pay $1,000 to hear commercials and pitches for 2 days.
You have the absurd from hitwise telling you to spend 25 grand a year with them. In exchange they will tell you that true.com is now the #2 dating site. Comscore wants 40 grand to tell you what the top dating sites are. It just happens to be the same sites that advertised heavilly on peer to peer networks where marketscore/netsetter was distributed.
Then you have endless background checks/safetly people trying to sell you a product that solves a problem that doesn’t exist.
I would much rather have a developer conference with sessions like.
1. Alorithms to detect Scammers
2. network infustructure frameworks.
3. Social networking/dating trends.
4. Cost/benfits of various programming platforms
etc
I thought the theme of the show was supposed to be customer conversion and retention, was this addressed?
I have to agree that these rankings are not doing much for the industry in present form. I still get a lot of people crowing about their Alexa rankings. I thought hitwise was going to come up with some less expensive reports.
Scott Butler, who gave the best presentation last year, is now working for Paradise Poker. Talk about following the money.
Disagree about the background checks, definitely a huge problem that needs to be addresses, the vendors are not pitching it well enough and the dating sites don’t want to crack open their systems and most have demographics of casual daters that are not as interested in safety features. I say it’s still too early.
I didn’t go to the show either, and background checks are a moot point for me as it is illegal to conduct them.
http://www.gmi-mr.com/gmipoll/pr_20060131.phtml
This recent study says that only 9% of daters are “serious”. Sites like eharmony don’t have a business model in mature markets like canada or the England.
“only 32 percent of Americans viewing online dating as “somewhat” or “extremely” important, versus the global average of 45 percent, the U.S. is the least likely country to consider online dating important”
“Similarly, over half of Americans (60 %) answered a resounding “no” when asked if they had any friends who found significant relationships through online dating, which is significantly higher (20 percentage points) than the global average for this finding.”
The great thing about percentages with no trend context is that you can spin them however you wish to fit your argument. Is the percentage of daters that are considered serious going up or down? Is the percentage of Americans viewing online dating as “somewhat” or “extremely” important going up or down? Trends matters. Considering how far online dating has come in the U.S. in recent years in terms of being socially acceptable, I would think that the trend is up. Also, the fact that 60% answered “no” when asked if they had any friends who found significant relationships through online dating to me means that there is room for improvement and growth.
I want to see stats. Lots and lots of stats. Telling me who the top sites are doesn’t mean anything. Top what? Number of member accounts, (usually meaningless b/c they’ll count every account since conception in their DB)? Number of active accounts, (leaves a highly subjective number to be based on the definition of active)? Hearing that a site has facilitated in 33,000 people getting married is a great number.
Let’s hear about conversions. Let’s hear about marketing strategies, cost- benefit analysis on the different marketing mediums, etc. As the well all sites draw from begins to stabilize (and recede if my predictions are right), it will fall to the “middle class” of sites to pull together to revitalize the image of online dating and what it can REALLY do for users. That requires organization, some marginal level of cooperation (which is what I think these conferences should be about), and some fresh thinking.
I’ve been a lurker on this blog for a while; I guess I thought this was my time to come out and throw my two cents in. BTW: I agree with markus that there should be dev-specific seminars as well.
Another report came out citing the decline of the paid dating industry.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060208/20060208005537.html?.v=1
Match.com and diller yesterday droped the gauntlet on the conference call. They are focusing all their energy into expanding marketshare and they said not to expect much profit in the first quarter. I suppose that means they will put in an additional 5 million in marketing per month.
2006 Will be the year of the big squeeze in the american market.
To me that report shows that daters are willing to pay, but less and less are willing to pay for what is currently being offered. They aren’t moving to free services, they are moving back offline. In the short term paid dating sites can continue to offer the same features at higher prices, but in the long term they need to evolve. Unless there is evolution Markus will end up being right.
BW,
That “Analyist” is just someone who looks at comscore data for 5% of his time and releases a report. Comscore says my site has 200k uniques/month Google Analyitics says i have 3 million. Completely worthless in my opinion.
Match.com just reported a year over year rise of 7% in US based subscribers. Eharmony definately has a rise in subscribers to. Those 2 companies account for 50% plus of the paid market so that means everyone else lost at least 10% of their paid members..
Marquise Bryan Rodrigo Triston Sebastian Myles