Let’s take a look at how DownToEarth is doing in the Boston area. There are 250,000 DownToEarth members according to Compete.
Within 50 miles of Boston, has photos:
220 Women between 18-30
80 women between 30-40
140 women over 40.
Within 250 miles of Boston, has photos:
500 Women between 18-30
360 women between 30-40
470 women over 40.
I especially liked the woman who’s photo featured her firing a machine gun. I hope she writes back.
250,000 / 50 States = 5,000 per state. Obviously there should be a higher density in urban areas and I only searched for women, but why aren’t there more people showing up? My 250 search *should* have covered all of New England and Metro New York/Tri-State area, eight states in all.
Where are these people? It would be great to see a heatmap of density so you could pick the dating site which has the most people in your particular area. I’ve lived in suburbs and cities all my life and have no idea which dating site is best for Montana or North Dakota.
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Yikes, a machine gun! I wonder what Eric Resnick from Profilehelper.com would have to say about people listing their personal profile pics with their favorite machines guns.
That site and PersonalsTrainer, which (used?) to do profiles for Yahoo, have seen their traffic drop well off from where it should be. Match has their profile help system now, reviews have been mixed. It’s the people that need the help, not the profiles. I can’t believe I just said that but its true. Well that and the fact that most online dating profile systems are terrible and search is an afterthought, but I digress.
Profile help is an example of the cottage industry that grew up around online dating that never quite performed up to expectations, my own efforts included.
I think the killer app is the third-party service that picks out people for you. I’m not talking a matchmaker, I’m talking a new algorithm that works across many dating sites. That is a business right there.
Good point Eric. She scared away most of the Eastern seaboard.
Well, Machine gun girl will definitely draw a lot of attention from everyone at first. That said, beyond the initial curiosity factor of the photo, she’ll probably see less of a general response from the average user… but that is a good thing. Without seeing the profile, I’ll have to guess that this woman is an actual gun enthusiast and the photo is not just there for comedic value. If that is the case it will work quickly to scare away gun control advocates and pacifists, which may be exactly what she is trying to do. That is a pretty smart move. After all, why waste energy trying to attract people you’d never want to meet in person.
Dave,
I can’t speak for other profile assistance companies, but sometimes traffic and sales don’t correlate. ProfileHelper has shown great growth over the last several years. Not only do we get a much more targeted traffic than in our early days, but we also get a good amount of sales via word of mouth referrals.
Dave, that may be exactly what she was hoping to do.
David,
Just curious how are you correlating Compete.com’s estimated unique visit #s to actually user accounts? I’d guess that the real # of conversions is probably somewhere between 1-5% of their uniques. My guess is that their DB has at most 20k-30k registered users and I feel I’m being VERY generous (8%-12% conversion)
Tobin
Good point, I’m not correlating anything publicly. Only saying that coverage is thin for 250k visitors. I think you’re being generous with your numbers.
I decided to spend an hour doing some homework. I’m positive that their registered user base exceeds 40k users. I spent a little bit of time to put together some data from a script I wrote that queried information from them. The script went through a zip code database and queried their search results to find out how many users there are in their DB. The script selected zip codes in such a way that it will help minimize overlaps in search results.
I’d like to note is that they limit their search results to 500 results. So even if you increase your radius to 1000 miles, you’re only going to get 500 results back. You’ll need to shorten your range and hop around zip codes to do an accurate count. From a VERY preliminary level here are some numbers I pulled from doing 50 miles across a few major cities. In my results I include Women looking for Men (wm), Men looking for Women (mw), Women looking for Women (ww), and Men looking for Men (mm).
Here is a sampling of zip codes from a few major cities in the US. I removed the zip codes & city names from my findings as I spent time curating this data and don’t want to just hand it out. (=
305(wm) 447(mw) 11(mm) 14(ww)
500+(wm) 500+(mw) 32(mm) 66(ww)
277(wm) 466(mw) 6(mm) 18(ww)
314(wm) 500+(mw) 6(mm) 22(ww)
380(wm) 500+(mw) 10(mm) 24(ww)
254(wm) 397(mw) 9(mm) 10(ww)
250(wm) 457(mw) 10(mm) 12(ww)
141(wm) 263(mw) 3(mm) 8(ww)
191(wm) 381(mw) 13(mm) 15(ww)
470(wm) 500+(mw) 29(mm) 28(ww)
237(wm) 341(mw) 2(mm) 7(ww)
180(wm) 260(mw) 5(mm) 6(ww)
Although it’s not accurate, I ended up capping off the 500+ to just 500. Here are the individual category totals from my sampling:
3,499(wm) 5,012(mw) 136(mm) 230(ww)
Total users in 12 US cities: 8,877
I will have a more accurate set of data tomorrow morning when my script completes it’s run. I’m assume there will be some variance and I may rerun the #s for the 500+ areas for a shorter range to get a more accurate count.
Either way the data may not be accurate, but it would give a good baseline of what the total user count is (among other things).
Cheers.
They have 142,000 users….
I guess the official number is 100k
http://twitter.com/RGBeffects
Nice job Tobin, thanks for the data wrangling.
@ RGBeffects sounds like someone doing external marketing for DTE.
We’re all quick to judge DTE, aren’t we? Most dating sites take months if not years to reach these levels and they’ve done it in a few months.
I judge a site by the quality of the people. After sending out 20-30 emails I finally got a response from someone today. Turns out the woman with the machine gun didn’t think we were a good fit.
I saw another Match ad on tv tonight, the new ads are ok but what what interesting is that Match is stating they get 20,000 new visitors each day. I take this to mean in North America only.
Their churn rate is incredibly high, imagine if they could get more of those people to stick around.
Hey Dave, I honestly don’t think a 3rd party app will be allowed access to the dating sites profiles. I mean that is their bread and butter and where the money is coming from, why would any company give away its profiles. Maybe if there was a good financial deal between the app and the dating site it could work. But at the same time Match.com has a good slogan where it can say that “everyone single is here” and daters will know that they have the largest database. Besides there are a lot of scammer issues when you try to cross-register dating sites. If one site does background or ID checks and another doesn’t, then where does the liability fall upon for the 3rd party app. A site like eHarmony can vouch for ID through payment and the survey, and women and men use that site because of the trust factor. I think there was a dating site that searched social networks and dating sites. Of course, if you want to contact the girl, you would need to pay for the dating site.
Joe, several large dating sites have, or in the process of opening up their databased with API’s.
I had a great lunch meeting today with a company that is solving the persistent portable credential issue across dating sites. More on this later.
Meta-search sites that include social networks are a waste of time, saw a new one today, not impressed. It’s got to be for daters and have pricing and features for serious daters included.
Doing a shared feed of stale profiles on broken dating sites has been the norm, until now.
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