After spending several years advising and consulting with dating sites, I am seeing a slowdown in the number of dating site startups. On top of that, the companies that are launching are for the most part underfunded, which makes it difficult to work with all the talented, driven and fun people I talk to every week.
Over the summer I was fortunate to work on several great projects with established mid-tier dating sites. The fruits of those labors will become evident next quarter.
These days, most of the new business calls I’m on are with companies looking to partner with dating sites and social networks. Thusly, I find my focus shifting from dating site startup consulting to business development.
The majority of my focus and clients operate in three areas:
- Fraud detection
- Content management
- Dating site/social networking platforms
I continue to pay attention to various background check companies and continue to watch with interest as larger dating sites and social networks continue to see the value in identity verification and background checks.
Reducing fraud and inappropriate content is an efficient way to increase the value of your service. But it can be a hard sell at times to executives focused on conversion rates and reducing customer acquisition costs. That’s a conversation I’m preparing several companies to have with dating sites and it will be interesting to see the outcome of our discussions.
Speaking of discussions, I would love to hear from dating sites about their fraud issues, including payments, profiles, photos, spam and member communications. Remember a few years ago when there were spammers on Match that all used he same paragraph about Twizzlers? What’s happening on your site(s)? Seeing any trends, new types of fraud and spam? What are you doing to manage it all? Proactive or reactive, in-house or outsourced solutions? Is there a reasonable amount of fraud/spam that you are willing to live with? What’s the threshold?
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
The spam issue is definitely a problem and even after partnering with Iovation we’re still seeing spammers getting through.
The easiest first step is to block access from countries that you won’t get a decent amount of custom from anyway. For us, anyone outside UK, USA, Canada, South Africa or Australia are automatically blocked.
We don’t monetize visitors from other countries yet they could be a spammer.
We use Iovation to deal with most scammers and have full time staff at our HQ to remove scammers.
Profile approval is a definitely help in dealing with scammers – no profiles can go live or messages sent without a profile being manually approved.
The only downside of this approach is that you can’t monetize a member until the profile has been approved which isn’t ideal as their excitement from the first visit may have diminished.
We get a positive response from our members as we deal with scammers.
It’s also a benefit of paid sites that can afford to employ full time staff to deal with the problem of scammers – by paying a subscription, members know that they’ll get a half decent service rather than a free site full of scammers.
Ross