Great article about OKCupid in the New York Times, Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data.
In its fight against much bigger competitors like Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony, it has tried a number of marketing techniques, often with little success. But the blog, which OkCupid started in October, has helped get the company’s name out on other blogs and social networks. A post last month that set out to debunk conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups, according to the company.
The research obviously took a lot of time and resources, but If this doesn’t once and for all show the dating industry that there is a huge upside to being more open and informative while helping members make the most out of the online dating experience, I don’t know what will. 750,000 visitors based on a blog post!
These days I am inundated with dating site social media spam clogging up Twitter with cloaked affiliate links and T&A photo enticements. This sort of lowest-common-denominator marketing will continue because it’s cheap traffic, but I like to think that sites taking more focused on branding and efficiently are the ones who will grow the most and succeed in the long run.
Someone should do a comparison between social media traffic results and generic dating site marketing like Adwords. It would be fascinating to see comparisons between cost and effectiveness.
The OKCupid article went viral primarily because it’s something people had never read about before. It was re-tweeted many times, and media attention begets more media attention. It wasn’t 101-level dating advice like “brush your teeth before a date” like so many dating site magazines publish (with a few exceptions, which I will be talking about in coming weeks.) The tone of the blog post was not that of an academic paper, which would never have gotten the same level of exposure.
Greg Waldorf, chief executive of eHarmony, which says it has more than 20 million registered users, was dismissive of the marketing power of OkCupid’s blog reports.
Of course he was. Waldorf’s quote is garden variety CEO-speak. I understand media quotes that position a brand against competitors, but that level of snarkiness in unnecessary. eHarmony clearly doesn’t understand the importance of great profile photos, which is inexplicable.
And what’s with the 20 million registered users comment? There are lawsuits brewing over statements like that. Shame on eHarmony and Match for using these irrelevant numbers in the media. They are both going to get spanked over these statements, just you wait and see. Monthly logins is a number I’d like to see used instead.
Eharmony doesn’t have to be concerned about OKCupid, but to be dismissive of the research is an indicator of just how out of touch eHarmony has become. The trend is toward openness and empowering singles, and that’s the polar opposite of how eHarmony works.
EHarmony doesn’t share anything. They are like the North Korea of the online dating industry. A big black box and a giant marketing machine. They have their top-5 position in the marketplace and will be there for many, many years to come. It’s imperative to understand how brilliantly eHarmony built the company, from the $100 million dollar early fundraising, to the commercials, and the fact that eHarmony is perfect for busy and lazy people who don’t feel like spending five hours a week on Match and need a lot of handholding.
Eharmony’s empire is built on a matching system that nobody really understands outside of the company. It’s probably the best black-box compatibility system available and there is nothing any competitors can do about it. Except Chemistry, which is spending tens of millions of dollars to take the edgy/urban/alternative people away from eHarmony, with varying degrees of success.
I wish someone could compare eHarmony to Chemistry.com and Perfectmatch. In the meantime, the Catalyst Group in New York has done an exhaustive comparison of Match and eHarmony, A Usability Study of Online Dating is the best review of two dating sites I’ve ever seen. Every dating industry executive should read the entire report.
Read a Usability Study of Online Dating
While I’m at it, I would also like to see IAC break out Match and Chemistry financials and to report each PeopleMedia property on it’s own. Hey, we can dream.
PlentyOfFish thinks I’ve got a crush on OKCupid, and it’s true. I will not hide the fact that I believe that OKCupid is hands-down the best introduction site for urban, sex-positive, educated, liberated and worldly singles. No other site even comes close.
In fact, I unsubscribed from PlentyOfFish today. Longtime readers know that I subscribe and unsubscribe from dating sites all the time, and this time it’s POF. I’ve been on numerous great OKCupid dates recently and for me, personally, POF just isn’t delivering. And it’s not like PlentyOfFish is going to change anytime soon, at least from the member perspective. So I’m out, at least for a while. I’m going to replace POF with Match.
Maybe I’ll re-join eHarmony, but I’ve been on that ride before, not expecting a different experience, but it’s good to go through the signup process every once in a while to see what’s changed.
Note: not belonging to a dating site doesn’t mean I ignore it. I have logins all over the place, and my favorite market research has always been pulling out the laptop with friends and having them log into their favorite sites and search and emailing people together.
One final bit about PlentyofFish before I sign off. I’m sure that people in the dating industry have discussed these topics ad nausea, but I ran into POF execs at iDate and wanted to clarify my thoughts.
For a handful of people up in Canada running an international site nearing 100 million monthly logins, their stratospheric grow is unprecedented and worthy of a business school case study someday.
As a business, POF is trying to break through to the next level. The company is doing everything it can to monetize the stupefying number of logins it receives each month. Word on the street is that in Canada POF is landing higher-class advertisers, which I don’t see when I log in here in Boston. Anything they can do to lessen the number of slutty ads will be a bonus for all users and raise revenue accordingly.
Problem is, the company is too small, not to mention the fact that reliance on advertising is never going to get them to that magical $30-$50 million in revenue. What was once a bragging right has become a hindrance. To begin with, they need to broaden the team. Five people can’t possibly build out the strategy and execution plan that gets a free dating site from $15 million to $30 million. Not being critical of management, just realistic of the efforts involved and how revenue growth tends to swell the ranks.
While I’m certainly an avid OKCupid fan, PlentyofFish has a much larger opportunity to grow, especially internationally. Markus and the team need to focus on evolving the definition of the company from “we’re popular” to “we’re successful,” and that is no small feat.
No related posts.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
“EHarmony doesn’t share anything. They are like the North Korea of the online dating industry. ”
“Eharmony’s empire is built on a matching system that nobody really understands outside of the company. It’s probably the best black-box compatibility system available and there is nothing any competitors can do about it. ”
Ha, ha, ha, ha, you innocent dove!
Dave:
Why don’t you grab the nearest phone and call Greg Waldorf to ask him if eHarmony was boosted by Christian Fundamentalists with USD 110 millions, if eHarmony’s mission is try to be the “next Mayflower” in order to improve the American Society, as were the founders of a glorious nation, who arrived on the first Mayflower ?
Because, what did eHarmony’s investors see it is Compatibility Matching Algorithm based on personality similarity with the Big5 normative personality test and Dyadic Adjustment Scale (invented by Dr. Graham B. Spanier in 1976) as its core, something anybody can calculate with a 1984 model Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum home computer ?
—————————-
Just by little, the CATALYSTGROUP had not re-discovered “the online dating sound barrier”
They would had needed numbers to quantify their findings!!!
During 2003 I had discovered “the online dating sound barrier” for Compatibility Matching Algorithms. They are all like placebo, because they have less or at least the same precision as searching on one’s own. [in the range of 3 or 4 persons compatible per 1,000 persons screened]
Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
The 2010 is the year of Online Dating Fatigue!
Daters leaving in droves from old paid sites like Match, Chemistry, True, eHarmony, PerfectMatch, Be2, Parship, Meetic and others.
You make far to many assumptions, first pof at this point only has a operations manager and someone running ad sales as execs. Also whose is to say we aren’t already at 30M ? I’m not saying we are or aren’t but 30M in revenue is only a $1.00/CPM with our traffic.
A dating site consists of maybe 8 pages that are actually used by people, you don’t need to hire 100 staff to figure out what to put on those pages and there are only so many ways to reorder the search results.
For plentyoffish.com i still exclusively handle all core drivers of growth, strategy, product, marketing, and programming/matchmaking. The only thing i’ve handed off in the last year has been ad sales, the programming of our new adserver and system admin duties. My biggest problem isn’t hiring a bunch of people to tell me what my strategy and execution plan should be. My biggest problem is hiring people to carry out my strategy..
Stay tuned for a big long delayed announcement next week.
Markus, good point about the eight pages of core functionality and thanks for the clarifications. Let us know about the announcement next week.
Fernando, the situation around the funding and the founding of the company has been talked to death. That was almost a decade ago and now it’s simply another big dating site driven by enormous marketing budgets. Nice reference to the Commodore 64. I was more of a TRS-80 and Apple II.
Markus, what was your first computer?
Yes, many successful dating sites are run one or two partners. You don’t need lot of resources to run an online dating site. You only need to setup, promote, and manage your site.
Johnny
Datingsitebuilder.com
What about:
Technical infrastructure
Designers/UI
HTML coders
Writers
SEO/SEM
Marketing/advertising/PR
Affiliate program setup and management
Customer service
Financing
Operations
If two people can mange this 24x7x365 then perhaps you are correct. It’s rare to find two people who have the expertise to do all of these things well.
Markus, in one of your most recent articles you noted that you were doing 2.3B page views a month. That would equate to $69M a year no?
2.3*12=27.6 not 69.
My first computer was in 95 or 94. It was a 486. As for all those professions the mast majority will make absolutely no difference to the success of your website. ONly things that truely matter are technical and actually having a dating site built and marketing.
My bad, x by 30 for some reason. Too bad eh!
i have sent over 8 emails to evow. i cannot login. even though i know my user name and password . then i hit forget password ,and it dont send me any emails. i want to delet emyself from the site . my user name is ******bishop****** . my password is 12081974. i need this resolved asap