Dating Links For Sunday June 29, 2008

by David Evans on June 29, 2008 in Features, Identity, Marketing, speeddating

Match.com will start advertising to affluent singles.

I grow weary of signing up for new dating sites. Does anyone actually think to ask if their questions are any good? Why don’t dating sites link to popular photo-sharing sites? I have to open up iPhoto, find a photo crop/export it to desktop, then upload it. This is 2008 people and I don’t have a lot of time.

Any dating site that lets someone join without a photo is doing them a disservice. I don’t care if you’re a CEO or look like a troll, you need a photo. Life isn’t You’ve Got Mail, dating sites need to wake up and start building in privacy tools like eHarmony to gradually reveal yourself. Punish people without photos by limiting search results or something, anything to avoid the dreaded blank grey picture box. If I was buying a dating site, I wouldn’t accept profiles without photos.

Why aren’t you letting me mention my social network pages? If your site is too idea-poor to come up with interesting and useful profile fields, leverage what others have done. Walled garden dating sites s**k big time and I’m tired of them. I do the majority of my dating on Facebook now. Facebook let’s you find niche’s like no dating site can. Results may be spotty but it’s what’s happening right now and people actually write you back. Good looking funny people that are cool enough to be on Facebook. I like it, not for everyone, but it works for me.

This week I came across Fantomaster, which I know nothing about, but they introduced me to the term cloaking, which is my favorite word of the week. I bet Markus is doing this, and so is SinglesNet. This is way ahead of what most people think about when it comes to SEO and gets me all excited. The 5,000 landing pages thing is popular too, part of me hopes Google doesn’t like that. Search engine games are disingenuous for the most part, but thats part of the fun. You see what you can get away with until Google spanks you and you start losing $10,000 a day because your SEO/SEM guys pushed things just a bit too far.

TechCrunch on Modeling the Real Market Value Of Social Networks. Wonder how we could do this for dating sites? Traffic isn’t the only metric, what about time spent on site, customer satisfaction and successful matching? Some people say it should be number of emails sent, which I’ll add to the list.

Number of successful relationships will never be known. I’m waiting for someone to do a study of the number of eHarmony divorces. Probably pretty low but still how interesting would it be to know the performance of the site over time?

I heard that True.com uses Ivy Tower Media. Does anyone know anything about the company?

Does anyone have experience with Evercurrent? Leave a comment or contact me directly.

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