Recently Date.com rolled out virtual gifts and wanted share a bit about how the program is doing.
- Version 1.0 is doing well. It’s a learning experience for both Date and it’s members.
- Features lower-priced inventory in order to gauge interest and better understand the dynamics of virtual gifting.
- Token-based, 10 for $1, highest priced item is about $5. Wonder if this will change as some people probably want to send more expensive gifts.
- Gifts are static for now, animation and Flash coming soon.
- Work in progress, more to come as they learn from the experience. Tweaking system often, tight feeback loop.
Leave a comment if your dating site is trying out virtual gifts, with viximo or developed in house.
Related Posts
Date.com Offering Virtual GiftsVirtual Gifts Hurting Flower Sales
The Virtual Lover
Plentyoffish Offering Paid Virtual Goods
Virtual idate and Social Networking Conference
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Virtual gifts have been a good source of revenue and higher user engagement on web properties for years now and I am glad dating sites are finally catching on to it. As Jeremy Liew put it and our experiments at Zoosk show, there are a lot of good ways to increase the effect of virtual gifts. It’s not easy to get them right, but once you do, they can be a good addition to your bottom line.
Thanks Shayan. I’m always fascinated by the lag time between innovation and adoption in the online dating space. I do what I can to bridge the gap but in the end its up to people like you to take ideas and run with them. Please share whatever you can publicly about adoption rates and more importantly how virtual goods affect communication on at Zoosk (and whatever tidbits you might think of.)
We have very popular 3 local dating sites in Turkey, apx. 3 million members. Virtual gifts work very well on our sites. 3 percent of total income comes from gifts.We give 3 free gifts to paid members and then sell one gift for 1 TL (1 TL = 1.6 USD). Also there is a package with 10 gifts for 6.90 TL.
Thanks Ersan. Do you have any idea about gender usage of virtual gifts on your site?
At http://www.whitelabeldating.com, we’ve offered virtual gifts as a feature on our platform for quite a while now, having originally launched in December 2007. They’re proving a profitable income stream for our partners averaging US$30,000 per month additional revenue. We’ve found that members find this a valuable asset in making themselves stand out from the crowd through a different form of expression.
David, actually we were thinking that women might be potential customers for virtual gifts but it doesn’t work as we guessed. I just checked: We’ve sold 11.380 gifts on January and only 234 was sent by women. Like all dating sites women are receiving too much message. As whitelabeldating.com said, men use virtual gifts to draw attention of women, they want to meet much.