Compete says DownToEarth, Match.com’s free dating site, is up to 188,000 members. DTE tells me they are not aggressively advertising the site, which is even more impressive.
Observations:
- At least 50% of the women don’t have photos.
- The majority of women in the Boston area I haven’t seen on other sites.
- I am tiring of seeing dating sites advertising other dating sites. These “webrings” are good for traffic but in terms of branding, this is the kind of marketing that makes those outside the industry scratch their head. This would never work in another sector.
- Adjusting search criteria is *much* easier than on Match. Old Y! Personals search is still the best by far though.
- Tension between Christians and Myspacers is interesting. Jesus saves, check out my cleavage.
- Some photos are empty, some are grey, what’s up with that?
I’m chatting with a few women from Are You Interested and PlentyOfFish who are on DTE, they see the site as just another opportunity to get their face out there. All generally express low expectations. They are burnt out, as am I. Of course those are my connections, but nobody is seems excited about a new site. It’s “here we go again”. In this case, churn is good, singles new to online dating may show up all bright-eyed, optimistic and excited about a new site.
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Down To Earth, Let’s get Down With Math
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
DowntoEarth was invented to leverage Match, but if a lot of users perceive DowntoEarth as good as Match, perhaps tired members of Match could migrate to DowntoEarth and revenue suddenly fall down.
Alexa says
DowntoEarth users come from these countries:
United States 86.4%
Nigeria 4.1%
Canada 2.7%
United Kingdom 1.3%
Ukraine 0.9%
Other countries 4.6%
DowntoEarth traffic rank in other countries:
Nigeria 1,587
United States 6,622
Canada 18,973
Ukraine 20,112
United Kingdom 118,272
Nigeria 4.1% ???
Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
Nice catch. Was just talking to someone about Nigerian 419 scams on Twitter, or the temporary lack thereof.
What’s interesting is that I registered as soon as the site went live. Since then, I have only gotten flirts from people that mysteriously disappear when I log-in. Basically, there is nothing in my ‘Little black book’. Could it be that the emails I get are just ‘nudges’ to get me back on the site? I have written to them (DTE) numerous times for fake profiles, no responses yet to either one of my reports. Looks like someone is not living up to their slogan “100 Real People”
I started playing around with a heatmap of DTE today. Totally unscientific mind you, and not taking any sort of predefined marketing which would result in higher densities in Texas or major metro areas for example, but if you overlay 200k dots on a map of the US a lot more than a few hundred people should show up in Boston where I live.
DTE is a free site, don’t expect a response. You get what you pay for, which is why Match is subscription based and has rooms of people ready to take your email/call.
On “Adjusting search criteria is *much* easier than on Match.” This reminds me of the quip, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”. Of course, it’s easier; there is nothing to setup other than location, age and gender.