Listening to Markus at Plenty Of Fish spread his doom and gloom message about the paid dating market is depressing. Time to change the channel for a moment.
Spark Networks and Match are doing quite well. Go browse the financials, it’s all there. If you ignore the overall flatlining subscriber growth in some sectors, more revenue is coming in at the top dating sites. Most of the people I talk with who run popular dating sites say something along the lines of “revenue is king, we don’t care how we get it.” For one, the Asian market is going to be enormous, and it’s only just getting tapped.
Go see how Match and Spark and Yahoo are building out new platforms, reducing acquisition costs to underperforming properties and raising prices. Well, Yahoo is writing a lot of code, but I’m not sold that a new infrastructure is what’s going to save them. Just look at the turmoil the entire company has been in the last few years. Institutional issues like that are pervasive, affecting all business units.
I am surprised that the online dating industry has not been able to grow more in the US. Three million paid subscribers, is that all the industry can muster? Advertising scantily-clad co-eds on Myspace certainly drove some traffic to dating sites like True, Match and Mate1, but to what end?
I view that sort of advertising as counter-productive to bringing the industry to the next level. But it’s all about the allmighty dollar. These are corporations beholden to shareholders. Show more cleavage, watch the numbers go up. Sounds pretty short-sighted in a “I told you so” sort of way, time will tell.
Until now, spending $20-100 million a year on unfocused advertising was the only way large sites could get to new consumers. I think that kind of unfocused spending is coming to an end. It’s an issue of the advertising networks sharpening their ability to gauge a viewers intent and what they are paying attention to. Thats your Web 3.0 right there.
Sidebar: I write about attention, reputation and identity, the foundation for what people now call Web 3.0, at my other blog, The Progress Bar.
Forget a larger ad campaign, focus instead on ruthlessly hunting down potential customers and work like hell to differentiate yourself from the competition and gain their trust.
This is where niche dating sites have the upper hand on large date warehouses like Match and Yahoo. Smaller, nimble, creative marketing campaigns that don’t cost a fortune. Hey I got sucked into the eHarmony groundswell, and my wallet is $170 lighter. If they are able to suck me into the vortex and get me to try to cool-aid, middle America doesn’t stand a chance.
Dating sites lose members after three months for a reason, and that reason is that they are on unable to retain the trust of the member. Too many people get screwed over or emotionally hurt because there are few safeguards in place at dating sites or the database of people doesn’t match what the person is looking for. This is changing, as several large Texas and California-based dating sites are in the process of implementing background checks. All I can say is that it sure took them long enough.
When Tim Price was at Date.com he said that dating sites are in the business of selling hope. I thought that was a great statement then, and hope that dating sites keep that in mind as traffic numbers have overtaken metrics like effectiveness and quality and customer satisfaction.
I’m off to see what’s going on with my dating profile on Facebook.
