Stir Has Trouble Letting Go, Why Match is King, Recession Dating

by David Evans on January 18, 2010 in Marketing

Today I did my semi-annual “unsubscribe from 50 newsletters and dating sites and replace with new ones” purge. I visit Stir somewhat regularly as part of demos I give and decided to unsub from the newsletter. This is what I saw. It’s this kind of technical fail that directly influences how I perceive a site. This could be a one-time problem, but Match.com should not let these sort of basic failures happen.

It’s remarkable to see the new dating sites I’m joining now, most weren’t around a year ago. Fun to say out with the old and in with the new.

Regardless of all the startup dating sites I’m joining, I’m going to re-join Match soon. I had an account for five years and took a year off. In Boston, everyone is on Match. Nobody ever talks about any other site besides PlentyofFish and OKCupid, at least in my group of friends and their friends. Not saying people aren’t using sites but the sheer amount of people on the site is the primary reason why Match is so popular. I don’t know a lot of people who would prefer niche sites except for my black, asian and Jewish friends, and most of them are on Match to begin with.

The recession has been great for PlentyofFish, all those out of work people busy belt-tightening seem to have flocked to the free site.

I would like to see dating sites pool their databases together, create an API and let companies built their own sites based on top of the monolithic database. Some permutation of this is where dating is going, I don’t know when, but it simply must happen.

The dating industry is made up of five sites, 25 matter and the rest chug along with varying results. Can you imagine if there were 50 flavors of Google depending on what you were looking for? Insanity!

I realize this consolidation is considered craziness in the industry for the most part, but the fact that the entire dating industry is reverting to the webrings of 1999 seems to prove me right. If you think of ads as niches and categories links, that’s basically where are today and I see no signs of this abating.

I wish I was smart enough to come up with some economic models of the traffic exchange harmonics in the industry. These $15-$25 acquisition costs for paying customers offset by incoming traffic from other dating sites *must* have been reduced with all of the inter-site link love, right? Maybe the viral marketing gurus out there could attempt to de-mystify this. Lot’s of sites have their own internal stats, but it would be very cool to see someone analyze the entire industry and see how marketing spend and link sharing affects the industry as a whole (from a branding perspective as well.)

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