Ad Age on talks about singles flocking to Myspace from Match.com. The novelty has worn off and dating sites have not stepped up to the plate with new features to keep up with consumers. BindMindFind and $200 couple’s therapy do not a healthy industry make. Couples counseling is more of a Google Local kind of service, but if you want to pay a dating site more money to stack the deck in your favor, go for it.
Lisa Skriloff states that CL is drawing away daters from traditional sites. Lisa, I don’t see Craigslist taking much away from traditional dating sites, where’s the data to back that assertion up? Unsubstantiated claims drive me crazy.
Then we have Teamdating, where you get to meet their friends and their friends get to meet your friends, or something to that effect. Are people demanding they want to go out on a first date with their friends around? This is new to me.
Good intel: Match.com spent $54.2 million on ads last year, while eHarmony spent $61.6 million, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
More than 1/5 of the entire dating industry revenue went to ads for both companies, and Yahoo wasn’t even mentioned.
Yahoo Personals Premiere had “solid early growth over the past 18 months.” I assume that is shorthand for “early interest has flattened out.”
Jim Safka was telling people that Chemistry.com is “intended to draw in affluent individuals who haven’t online dated before.” I have not heard this “affluent individuals” phrase from Match, Chemistry is Match’s response to eHarmony walking away with their customers, affluent has nothing to do with it. Rich people like to take tests and middle-class rely on intuition?
New advertising campaigns? I haven’t seen them. All my brain registers are Eharmony ads and those Mate1 ads popping up everywhere. I wish for all the money they are spending that Mate1 would make them more memorable. They are advertising for brand impressions, not call-to-action. Big mistake.
Pretty soon people will have their dating site running in their taskbar with presence detection, voice and third-party enhancements like testing and search. We will look back and wonder why we had to actually visit a website to view profiles and search for people. See Meetro as an example.
Technorati Tags: match.com, mate1, teamdating
Related Posts
Dating Service Ad Spending GrowthDating Sites Don’t get Branding Yet
Niche Dating Sites Offering White Label Solutions
eHarmony Marries Off 90 Members Daily
eHarmony’s media spending and membership stats
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting. The concensus around the time of iDate (2 months ago) was that the MySpace crowd was a very different audience and wasn’t actually creating any direct competition for the dating space.
I guess that thinking has changed?
I don’t think it has changed. The Ad Age article seems to be more unsubstantiated claims than assertions backed up with data. No one that has been a subscriber to a paid dating site and was unhappy with it is switching over to Myspace. Maybe some are trying out Plentyoffish or a niche site, but most are giving up on online dating and going back offline.
I have watched so many mushroom dating sites come and go. Like anything else, whatever is declared to be a moneymaker, suddenly attracts a ton of lackluster players. Online dating is still going through changes, still being experimented upon by the public. For the most part, it’s a disappointment for most people.
I conducted a research recently, and wrote an article about it.
Men’s golden rule of online dating – Patience begets Trust.
Basically, I found out that most women are happy to chat online, but wary of meeting offline. So, even though there are tons of single men and women out there, the hookups just aren’t happening.
I have tried Match.com and Yahoo with pretty bad results.
I think one of the big issues is that the style of dating for guys is generally different than that of girls – we like to chat online and keep things a little anonymous at first, and we have more specific criteria. Men tend to want to jump to the face-to-face meeting not too long after looking at photos.
eHarmony at least forces everyone to go through the same hoops from the start. Too bad it’s mostly women that use it!
i just launched a dating site that does offer something new….a sleek, snappy, intuitive platform for posting interesting content regarding dates and dating. i.e., menschmatch.com aims to become the 1st mainstream dating site to feature date reviews & ratings and personal testimonials….as well as other enhancements to the conventional one dimensional personal profile. please check it out, sign up for free, play, and let me know what you think!
I think that this TeamDating.com site is AWESOME! It’s not that we women NEED to take our friends, it’s that it just feels more natural and a safer way to mete people off of the Internet. PLus, if there is no love connection, who cares, my blid date just turned into girls night!
I’m sick of online dating because it’s not a natural way to meet people. I want to meet people online the way I do when I am out, and that for the most part is with my friends.