Beer Goggles are For Realz

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I’m sitting here jailbreaking my iPhone while I install some cool new applications that Steve Jobs isn’t ready to officially approve, which means they are better than what’s in the iPhone, or have created an additional revenue stream that Apple has no control over, or something as simple as cut-and-paste, which Apple evidently decided wasn’t important enough to include as a feature.

A highly placed official in a large dating site sent me the following, People Really Do Look Better When You Drink. For everyone trying to cure AIDS or cancer, someone else is earning credits for studying horny bar behavior. I guess we should be grateful for the opportunity to learn about human nature.

The research study is right, I’m looking at some profiles on dating sites and the woman look much better after a few drinks.

A close friend got dumped by his fiance, second time she’s performed that particular move, ouch. He’s on Match and sometimes we compare the women in our hotlist and who contact us. He is a good sport when I go into research mode.

He’s nowhere near as good looking as I am (ha), makes a lot more money and is gung-ho about having kids, so we see decidedly different search results.

When I went to the Match.com search page tonight, I see it’s changed. Looks like they moved the search fields from the sidebar to the bottom of the screen. Knowing Match, there is a perfectly good reason for doing this. Or is there?

Match has all the answers but I’m not sure they know which questions to ask anymore. What’s it like to grow to be arguably number one then hit the wall? More revenue per member, sure thats great for shareholder value but it sucks for the rest of us members.

PlentyOffish and SinglesNet are going to crush Match in terms of traffic over time, but boy is that traffic getting expensive.

Look at the difference between unique visitors and visits per month. There are almost three times as many visits to Singlesnet as to PlentyOfFish, and many of them are paying members. See the growth of unique members on PoF? Nice and steady, avoiding the stutter steps and fluctuations that most sites exhibit over time.

Don’t let Guy Kawasaki and the affiliate marketing people like Shoemoney distract you, Markus at PoF pays a hell of a lot of money to get 30+ million visitors a month. Once you know what the competition pays so it’s pretty easy to figure out the rest of the equation.

Markus didn’t need to be at the Affiliate Summit in Boston this week. The people that make a lot of money affiliate marketing and advertising don’t go to the shows and they don’t talk.

OkCupid has grown buy a hundred thousand visitors and total visits went from 1.7 million to 4.5 million in the last year. People really like taking tests!

Funny thing about the online dating industry, it’s all about online marketing, nothing more, nothing less. Anyone else tells you different they are too passionate about the market or ignorant. Passion for online dating doesn’t make money or success, in fact it hurts you, just like it can in real life. Huge marketing budgets, absolute mastery of metrics and analytics and top-notch marketing leadership are required for success.

Time to go shoot some videos on my iPhone.