Markus at PlentyofFish says:
I’m at affiliate summit this week, its amazing that the only other dating site here is match.com There are 3,500 affiliates here and dating sites are paying them 10’s of millions of dollars. The dating industry is kind of backwards why wouldn’t more dating sites attend an event where people who are responsible for such a massive part of their revenues attend ?
At any rate the conference has been a huge success for us, we met thousands of affiliates many of which buys ads on our platform. What other marketing conferences are worth attending? The only other conference we are going to attend the next few months will be ad tech.
Of those 3,500 affiliates, it seems there are only a handful who that aren’t scammy, spammy or simply don’t perform well. Sure top 10 dating sites and adult/casual sites make a boatload of money of affiliates, but for the rest of the dating industry, the reality is that so many of those leads are bogus, it’s a tangled web that most dating sites don’t bother unraveling. Send me traffic, if I make money I don’t’ care how it got to my site, seems to be the prevailing mindset.
I can’t believe that dating review sites are still pimping out American Singles, and a few other sites. The dating affiliate market needs to catch up and more dating sites need solid affiliate programs. Feels like the sector is stuck in 2005.
Funny that I got an email from Shoemoney while writing this.
I did a project this summer to build up an affiliate network, the most absolutely miserable project I’ve ever done. Talking to a bunch of sleazbags operators shucking crap traffic while trying to figure out the real deal behind their offers was a complete night. The few people who are expert affiliates keep their mouths shut and those who talk the loudest tend to underperform, at least in my experience.
POF will not be at iDate next week. That’s another big site not attending this year.
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It’s a good point and I agree that more dating sites should be attending and exhibiting. I think the dating industry is understanding that is generally a marketing optimisation – buying traffic for one fee and generating a free from the monetisation of that traffic through the services it offers.
I’ve spoken to a lot of fellow dating CEOs who are moving away from industry events like iDate and towards marketing-orientated events such as Affiliate Summit and ad:tech – as it’s these kind of events which help our business.
We’ve been attending ad:tech London for the last few years as exhibitors and it’s always been far more successful than industry-specific events.
The point about quality of affiliates is critical – far too many dating companies allow affiliates to send poor quality traffic in an effort to make their database “the biggest and the best” but the result is that not only does affiliate-generated traffic not convert well, but it also pollutes the database so traffic from their direct advertising converts poorly as well.
Dating companies who invest in the quality of their database, strive for 0% scammers and focus on the user will be the ones left standing this time next year.
I’d say over 30% of all dating revenues are tied to affiliates. Who do you think is actually buying the traffic off facebook and myspace pof etc? Its all middle men. We have affiliates making over 100k profit a month arbitraging traffic between POF and paid dating sites.
There are benefits to showing restraint, something the online dating industry is not very good at.
Agree about striving for 0% scammers but plenty of top site don’t do much in this regard and still around. Nice sentiment though. Crazy that more sites don’t use iovation or similar services.
$100k payouts sounds about right.
I figure POF spends more than $300k/month to acquire all that traffic.
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