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True.com has reached the 10 million member mark. In other news, pigs are flying and the troops are coming home.
Members must mean free and paid. And while we’re at it, let’s be clear, Myspace traffic is not the type of demographic that is shelling out cash at True, so the quality of the database is pretty low. No offense to True members, but after perusing the search engine for a bit, I came away nonplussed.
Bill Tancer, why Hitwise is calling True the #1 dating site for three months in a row? Top 100 sites I can believe, that’s what Myspace advertising will do for you.
True has two distinctly different demographics. On one hand, you have the serious daters drawn to the promise that there are no felons or marrieds on the site. This have proven not to be the case, and now the site is filling up with 20-something Myspacers who could care less if the people on the site are verified. What does this mean for people coming to the site and not meeting the types of people they expected?
True is supposedly signing up 1,000 people an hour. 720,000 new “members” a month. In a year they will have more members than Yahoo, Match and eHarmony combined. Who wants to bet this growth-by-advertising-on-stratospheric-growth-social-networks model will fall apart before then?
It would be interesting to compare the traffic and conversion rates of Mate1 traffic with True.com as both are in the midst of a heavy ad spend cycle.
Speaking of eHarmony, the venerable scientific-matching introduction service is six years old and boasts 12 million members. Ninety people get married daily after meeting someone on eharmony. That’s remarkable when you think about it.
I think 436 questions is a bit much, and they are giving away cheap memberships so the revenue stream isn’t anything near what it would be if they were charging full price to everyone (which they can’t), but otherwise, the company appears healthy and the advertising blitz seems to have paid off.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
* Who is the actual Chief Psychologist Officer at True?
* What happened with Sexploration? Did they discover something new & interesting that could be reported to the Kinsey Institute?
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True & eHarmony:
* Are there any new papers on dyadic success (satisfaction - stability) of the couples they had previously matched (e.g. since a year ago) ?
Kindest Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
I’d be curious to know True’s conversion as well. Based on the publically available information I’d say their traffic and conversion has to be very similar to ours.