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The New York Times has a fascinating article about Netflix, which is offering $1 million to anyone who can improve their Cinematch recommendation engine by 10%. It turns out that improving movie recommendations by 9% was pretty straightforward, it’s the last percent or so that’s proving to be almost impossible. Netflix knows that a 10% improvement is worth much more than a million dollars, so the competition makes good business sense.
Wouldn’t it be great if a dating site offered a similar prize? They could make a sample database available of anonymized profiles of people who have seriously dated or gotten married. Let’s ignore the fact that this is never going to happen for the sake of discussion. Anyone could download the data-set and begin developing a better matching system. Perfection is not the goal, but, like Netflix, the online dating industry could use a better matching system.
It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation though. eHarmony has by far the most effective matching system, but yet their reputation in the marketplace is far from positive. They have the basis for a good matching system, and not enough people are willing to use it to make it truly useful. I’m talking big picture here. eHarmony makes a lot of money and they marry off supposedly 236 people a day on average, but that’s nothing when it comes to the 90 million singles in the US. That’s 86,140 people per year. That’s something like one tenth of a percent success rate. That’s north of $200 million in revenue, which is great for eHarmony but not so good for singles.
Besides eHarmony’s Compatibility Matching System, Chemistry’s Personality Profile and PerfectMatch’s Dues Totaly Compatibility System, dating sites are ignoring matching algorithms. So Much for innovation. Several large sites are in fact large because they focused on large marketing spends and scamming people out of their money with sketchy communications features.
Nexflix has other ideas as well.
[Netflix] is even considering hiring cinephiles to watch all 100,000 movies in the Netflix library and write up, by hand, pages of adjectives describing each movie, a cloud of tags that would offer a subjective view of what makes films similar or dissimilar.
This is similar to the popular Pandora music recommendation system. I saw Pandora’s Founder, Tim Westergren, give a talk at MIT last year. Westergren has great stories about musicologists trying to identify music within specific genres. Rock and classical songs are identified by a standard taxonomy, but rap forced the team to create a much larger taxonomy. This video of Westergren succinctly explains the concept behind musical DNA much better than I can.
The past several years have seen the dating industry progress from generic profile search to compatibility systems of various complexity and effectiveness, back to generic profiles and now the new new thing is to bring people together in real life.
Why is this? Why are dating sites stuck in a rut, relying on marketing dollars instead of compatibility matching?
Recently a number of compatibility matching guru’s talked about a comparison shootout to find out who’s system was the best. That idea died pretty quickly. Between clashing, personalities and outrageous claims, it quickly became clear that this was never going to happen.
Or we can skip the whole matching system thing and wear Emotiv neuroheadsets, which are precisely the kind of feedback mechanisms we will use while browsing profiles in a decade.
Let’s close with the closing quote from the NY Times article, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings:
Human beings are very quirky and individualistic, and wonderfully idiosyncratic, and while I love that about human beings, it makes it hard to figure out what they like.
That sums up online dating pretty well, don’t you think?
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and “Why are dating sites stuck in a rut, relying on marketing dollars instead of compatibility matching?”
It is exactly the same problem on how to break sound barrier.
Discard piston engines and adopt jet engines.
Online dating sites with *piston engines* means a compatibility matching method with a whole precision less than anyone could achieve by searching on one’s own! (3 or 4 persons high compatible per 1,000 persons, so in a 10,000,000 persons database, you have as many as 30,000 to 40,000 persons to contact/date, it is like the population of an average small city)
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When you choose a movie, or other thing, they are not “asked” if they would have chosen you, so the match is unidirectional.
Suppose you give a ten star to a movie and also more than 500,000 persons give a ten star to that movie.
For Online Dating, if you choose a list of women, perhaps the women on that list, do not like you at all, or do not like you as intense as you like them.
The match should be bidirectional.
Suppose you give a ten star to a woman and also more than 200 men in a big database give her a ten star too, but perhaps that woman give a ten star to other differents men.
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“The Cinematch system, like any recommendation engine, assumes that your taste is static and unchanging. The computer looks at all the movies you’ve rated in the past, finds the trend and uses that to guide you. But the reality is that our cultural tastes evolve, and they change in part because we interact with others.”
Cinematch recommendation engine is based solely on how much persons liked or disliked other movies. It is not always valid to convert past/previous indicators in results forecast for future sales.
I will contact Netflix to suggest include a normative personality test and combine it with Cinematch for better prediction purposes.
Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
My Best to you,
Adam
If the Netflix competition that is showing issues gaining a 10% improvement with something as inanimate as a movie, I don’t have high hopes for the same system applied to complex human beings.
It just seems to me that some sites and commentators are more than a little obsessed with creating or discovering the perfect formula for matching folks together – attempting to boil the whole process down to some magical universal constant, which does feel a little impersonal at best!
Moreover, it almost sounds like some people aren’t prepared to do the legwork involved in meeting your perfect person. I know we’re all busy, but surely in our current society with increased rapid communications and transport, we are better placed than ever to discover our perfect person as we can cast the net much wider than in the days when people rarely ventured outside their immediate district?
So personally there’s a big part of me that’s happy to not be given ‘the one’ – I feel I need to have a few disasterous or dull dates to fully appreciate what I’m looking for. By accepting that dating sites are simply going to reveal to me a pool of reasonably likeminded folks who too are motivated to go on date, then I think I’m a lot more at ease with what I’m getting for my money. I’ve paid for an introduction and I’ll take it from here, enjoying all the experiences and secure I’m making my decision rather than what a psychologist, doctor or algorithm tells me I should decide :-)
Innovation with testing is happening all the time, but only with those organizations that actually invest in the proper resources to break new ground. Typically, this doesn’t describe the industry’s approach to compatibility systems — much less eHarmony’s matching system (they’re no gold standard).
Legitimate compatibility testing is easy to overlook or dismiss given all the hyped, flash in the pan, unsubstantiated and “cutesy” approaches on the market today by unqualified people (and yes, even relationship therapists and general psychologists can be unqualified). Moreover, users are not consistently educated on how to properly use compatibility testing. And finally, many commentators seem obsessed with defining or equating “relationship success” in terms of “marriage” — a questionable benchmark at best. There are different types of relationships and measures of “success” so matching systems should adapt to the motives of the individual users.
Here’s some suggested reading on the benefits and limitations of compatibility testing:
http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/features/compatibilitytesting.html
http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/datingoffice08/compatibilitytesting.html
Thanks,
James Houran, Ph.D.
http://www.OnlineDatingMagazine.com
Let us not forget, online dating is just one way to help you meet people. Too many people have bad experiences with people, and reflect their disappointment on the dating site, which is not always warranted.