It’s great to be back in New York City for a few days. Yesterday Tom Jaffee and I spoke to a packed house of restaurant owners about creative strategies for social media. I enjoy spending time talking to people in industries other than dating. Immersing ones self into different industries is invaluable in terms of broadening my perspective and ability to problem-solve. Plus, the food at the show was excellent.
The Online Dating Recession, as told by paidContent:
comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) figures show double-digit year-over-year declines in unique visitors worldwide at big paid subscriber sites like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Personals (down 34 percent), Match.com (down 37 percent), and Singlesnet (down 27 percent). Notable exceptions include eHarmony (up 31 percent), social dating site Zoosk (which has very impressively seen its traffic surpass that of Match and Singlesnet in the U.S.) and PlentyOfFish (up 26 percent), which happens to be the only free site among the top ten.
This backs up not only my conviction that the recession was good to a few dating sites and the rest suffered mightily but the fact that online dating needs to clean up it’s act and become more effective if it wants to enjoy any sort of industry-wide growth.
Upstarts like Zoosk (and let’s not forget Are You Interested, the lesser-known Zoosk Rival), have made serious inroads into the online dating industry, although their casual nature just means they have to spent insane amounts of money to drive fickle traffic. When Zoosk reduces it’s current marketing spend it’s numbers are going to drop off, and to make it worse,
Smartdate secures €2m so you can date friends of your Facebook friends. Smartdate was founded by Fabrice Le Parc, who also launched be2.com. Story at TechCrunch, thanks to Nick Tsinonis.
Surprised the author didn’t mention Thread or Gelato, which, while much smaller than Zoosk, are more closely aligned with the concept of your dating network being comprised of your social graph (friends of friends and so on.)
We’ll have to see how the “pay as you go” pricing model works out. People are not used to paying for services based on Facebook for the most part.
Grindr’s Innovative Paywall: In A Nightclub, A Phone And a Hookup, I talked about using location-based services to identify single people in a Boston nightclub. While using Grindr with a friend, I found that the service has a new type of freemium offering. To fill the need of Grindr users who want even more access to guys nearby—there is now a premium (extra) version for only $2.99 a month. Grindr X(tra) lets users see up to 200 more guys who are close-by (100 more than the free version allows) and it’s ad free.
I’ll be talking with Grindr soon about their business and mobile success.
Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational Blog. Dan has done research on virtual dating with Omnidate. This post made me lol. What Husbands and Wives Search for on Google.
VisualDNA has a new partner, 12like.com.
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Paid dating sites will always get hit harder in a recession as their core userbase is low income, and free dating sites cater towards those with mid level income.
The problem began a long time ago even before the economic trouble.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=102&date=12%2F2006%2038m&cmpt=q
Dating is running out of new people to try it.
I was surprised at your statement as well. I would think free dating caters more to low income levels.
I also think the major dating sites are marketed better now days (than in 2007) so people have refined their searches more.
Also if you look at the keyword “dating sites” it doesn’t post such a gloomy picture.
While I agree that paid dating gets hit harder, I have a difficult time thinking that people who pay for dating make less than those on free dating sites. I’d need to see some numbers to back that up. Feels counter-intuitive.
Dating isn’t running out of new people, dating is not living up to expectations. Big difference there. Deliver a better service and you’ll have more members, guaranteed.
People may be searching less on terms like “dating”, however, niche terms are steady, or increasing, e.g. try it with Christian dating terms, e.g.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/?hl=en-US#cat=102&q=christian%20dating&geo=US&date=12%2F2006%2038m&cmpt=q
or
http://www.google.com/insights/search/?hl=en-US#cat=102&q=christian%20singles&geo=US&date=12%2F2006%2038m&cmpt=q
So, you can’t make sweeping judgements. You have to break things out.
You can also argue that users are now more sophisticated and will serach for a brand like plentyoffish or match.com.
See: http://bit.ly/datebrands
Pretty stable graph for both.
There’s no shortage of single people out there – the recession doesn’t change that. Online dating is still alive and well (and will be for a long time), but I think these trends reflect a change in PPC marketing dollars being spent. The differentiating factor is that big dating sites spend thousands of dollars every day, forcing the smaller boutique sites to pay as much as $4-$7 per click. When you’re first getting started and offering free memberships, you can’t compete with that. But, as specialty dating site owners figure out other ways to market their sites, they (we) will see an uptick in new members. The key is targeting a specific niche market instead of trying to appeal to everyone.