Look at how SinglesNet velocity has gone down. Velocity reports the relative change in daily Attention and is used to determine the relative growth of a domain over a particular timeframe or compared to other sites. this is usually what happens when your traffic is banned from social networks, or ad spend drops, or something generally goes wrong in the marketing channel.
I could look at these charts all day, so many interesting trends start to emerge, especially when looking at multiple sites. For example, dating site traffic dips experiences a dip in October. Is this because they are conserving ad spend for the busy season, or social networking advertising is more expensive or something else? Most large dating sites are down down down in terms of traffic. The recession growth is still a lot of hype in my mind and besides a strong November/December for all of online dating, things remain the same for the most part.
I look for trends, not exact numbers. It’s amazing to see major sites losing millions of users over time. Here’s to massive customer churn. Thanks to my special friend up north for the heads-up.
No related posts.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I still see dating ads on Facebook, what’s the deal there?
The dating industry is always down after Valentines. What do their year over year numbers look like. Hitwise, comScore and Nielson number are out soon so it will be interesting to look over and report on the post Valentines numbers to see if the industryis up, or has finally succumb to the same economic woes as most other industries.
The larger story here is the reliance on cheap social networking ad traffic to drive growth. Social network dating traffic is mostly casual daters, not serious. These people might sign up, but they tend to bounce off the site quickly.
What do dating sites have to say about chargeback rates for social network traffic? Higher or lower than targeted traffic? What about length of stay?
The dating site ad ban was very specific, it’s not an across-the-board issue.
Large dating sites are forced to rely on enormous ad spend to stay competitive, this is not going to change for quite some time.
I’m not seeing dating ads of Facebook today, but that could be anomaly.
Obviously ad spend is down, but if you look year to year some of the larger sites are down by several million visitors a month.
Anyone can have a few million profiles if they spend their ad budget wisely.
I predict a downturn.
The larger story here is the reliance on cheap social networking ad traffic to drive growth. Social network dating traffic is mostly casual daters, not serious. These people might sign up, but they tend to bounce off the site quickly.
What do dating sites have to say about chargeback rates for social network traffic? Higher or lower than targeted traffic? What about length of stay?
The dating site ad ban was very specific, it’s not an across-the-board issue.
Large dating sites are forced to rely on enormous ad spend to stay competitive, this is not going to change for quite some time.
I’m not seeing dating ads of Facebook today, but that could be anomaly.
Obviously ad spend is down, but if you look year to year some of the larger sites are down by several million visitors a month.
Anyone can have a few million profiles if they spend their ad budget wisely.
I predict a downturn.
P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!
My previous comment didn’t make it. I am still seeing mate1.com and russian bride ads. Screenshot here (some ads removed): SCREENSHOT
I’ve always been skeptical of the accuracy of these rankings. For example, I compared unique visitors, monthly for AmericanSingles at 336,018 and JDate at 182,596.
But their own websites refute this! AS has 3139 members online whereas JDate has 9389. That’s 3 to 1 in the other direction and sometimes the ratio is higher.
Something’s fishy about that, no?
If you look at the Compete figures, the giant among the dating site, Match, has registered a fall of (approx.) 2 millions in months of February 2009 compared to February 2008. It you keep aside the months of June and July (2008), the traffic remained at a low all the months and dipping further.
The recession is truly making its presence felt. Or, is there something more to this than meet the eye, David?
There are many moving parts when it comes to measuring traffic. First off, all traffic stats are wrong and should not be trusted. However, the general trends, if correlated between several monitoring services, can generally be used as a guide.
Nobody knows if the recession is driving people to online dating. I have not seen one single reliable source that states this is a fact.
I’ve said many times over that ad spend has a lot to do with traffic. If a company spends 2X more during the online dating busy season, of course their traffic is going to go up.