I’ve been checking out the Basisnote Chemistry Check system running on Swissfriends.ch. Here are some screenshots I took of the testing process.

Related posts:

1. I got your non-DNA-based Scientific Matching System Right Here
2. Online Dating Industry Weekly Wrapup: 12-11-09
3. No Match Found

Black Box Republic has launched a new personal relationship oriented members-only community. If you run a dating site or social network or are considering starting one, you should pay close attention to the Blackbox Republic launch.

Case in point, last week I was at a Mega-Tweetup at Microsoft in Cambridge and I ran into Stowe Boyd, who I used to work with back when this blog was part of the Corante network. Today, while putting together something for the launch and doing some searches, I see that Stowe, who is not only a guru of social tools and a great writer, is also a friend of Sam Lawrence and April Donato, Blackbox Republic founders.

Stowe says:

This is a community that is likely to have specific needs that will be underserved by other solutions, specifically the eHarmony and other dating services, geared toward the American dream of finding Mr or Ms Right, and promptly getting married.

Read Stowe Boyd’s review of BlackBox Republic. His post is eloquent, informative and far more articulate and thorough than I’m capable of.

If that wasn’t enough, a whole slew of people, from social media guru Chris Brogan to Oliver Marks at collaboration 2.0, are writing about the launch.

Oliver says:

Blackbox Republic is arguably an Apple product to Facebook’s Windows look & feel: a much more intimately crafted, fuller featured personal user interface which should appeal to Apple generation sensibilities.

That sums up my feelings about how PlentyofFish compares to OKCupid.

BBR has room for everyone, but is not for everyone. Definitely catering to non-mainstream folks, it will soon feature a constellation of micro-communities, or groups, called Camps. BBR doesn’t don’t tell people how to organize their camps; we’ll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

There are four corners to the (black) box: vouching, gifting, irl (iphone et al, short-range networking) and events (promoters and yourself). Kind of a cross between the old Matchmaker communities and Facebook groups or fan pages. Some of the functionality is rolling out after the launch, which is more targeted towards founders (if you find me, say hello).

BlackBox Republic’s reputation system, called vouching, makes Adult Friend Finder, Fling and the rest of the adult dating sites seem all the more like the hooker and spam-filled scamlands they really are. I am not mounting my high horse here. There are many, many people who will join these sites and have no intention of actually meeting anyone. They get their thrills from being voyeurs and sending a few emails to women (or men, or transgendered folks) they never in a million years would talk to otherwise. Fling and AFF have correctly identified this market and gone after it with gusto.

But for the rest of us, Blackbox Republic’s vouching makes it easier to trust people you’ve just met, either across town or across the globe. Like testimonials that matter, and we’re written by the marketing department.

Blockbox Republic features three levels of privacy controls. Sliders display your current status, a nice touch. A lot of these features simply need to be experienced to understand how powerful they could be. Notice how I say could be. BBR was not conceived in a vacuum, but it’s always a crapshoot whether or not the public will react favorably once the early adopters have gotten their fill and the masses start to show up. Just look at Google Wave.

Gifting is, well, gifting, with a twist. You don’t simply consume your gifts; they can be displayed for all to see on your Gift Shelf. Your gifts might reflect a certain aspect of your personality. A hello kitty figure would say one thing; a ticket to a burlesque show would say something else about you entirely. Virtual for now, gifts will be more “real” in the future.

As for eHarmony and any sort of scientific matching, Blackbox says, No Thanks. They will be providing all the features they feel necessary to accurately reflect a person’s tastes and preferences and the associated communications channels to connect people. All without the questions, tests and science that’s come to signify serious dating. Remember this isn’t a dating site, it’s more of a social network where dating can happen.

I have never seen so many Internet/socialmedia people writing about a new social/dating hybrid. Part of that is because Sam is a known entity in the first degree of BurningMan/Internet circles. Sam was CMO at Jive Software, SVP GAD at McCann Erickson, VP Business Development at EURO RSCG, VP of Operations at 3Com, VP of Marketing at CNET, and Director of Dell’s Online Consumer Business. He was named a INVESP top 100 Influential Marketer in 2008.

Everyone I’ve talked to about BBR has nothing but glowing remarks for both founders. This goes a long way towards their credibility. It doesn’t hurt that they reached out to the blogosphere many months ago, gave a stellar briefing and made it easy for us to want to help them out. Their pre-launch press section is chock-full of exactly what bloggers and media need to write a story.

Dating and social startups should take away some free pointers here. BBR did a brilliant job with their pre-launch publicity and it shows, just watch how much press they receive in coming weeks.

Speaking of helping them out, go join Blackbox Republic. It’s only $5 and you’re going to see how a site goes from zero members to thousands in a very short time. This could be a great case study for the online dating industry. Great exposure from Spark PR and bloggers all lined up to the point of breaking embargo.

Why is everyone excited about BBR? It’s because the service is interesting, run by amazingly talented people and there is an actual story here. This isn’t some new generic site copying everyone else with zero budget and little understanding of how community, marketing, and technology need to effortlessly combine to drive a successful startup.

Blackbox Republic is a big zag to the dating/social industry’s usual zigs. It’s the anti-Match/PeopleMedia/eHarmony/Meetic/POF.

The last time I remember a site launching like this was Suicide Girls, still one of the best art-sleaze sites out there. Blackbox Republic feels like it’s shooting for the lofty goal of Nerve.com 2.0, with a unique twist, or kink, as it may be.

Where it ends up nobody knows. What we do know is that balancing sex and society and social networking and dating has never quite been done like this and it’s going to be fun to watch.

Now go sign up. Consider it your new community (welcome home), market research (expense it) or just something new to try if you’re tired of general dating and social networking sites and consider yourself outside of the mainstream.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Industry Weekly Wrapup: 12-11-09
2. Twitter-based Dating with Luvtweets
3. Facebook Gifts: Pushing the Limits of Rationality

My friend Dave at EatMedia send me the following from WIRED:

Seamless ad trading may turn out to be just the start. Google could also encourage buyers and sellers to exploit the hidden value of inventory by blending their clickstream databases with data gleaned from the likes of Experian and Acxiom as well as social networking sites.

Make no mistake: Google intends to move beyond behavioural advertising to much more profound levels of insight about web users. Overlaid with externally-sourced data and allied with Google’s knowledge of search, large-scale automated trading could be a game changer.

A successful ad exchange will also open up opportunities for arbitrage – spotting value, buying it cheap and selling dear. Some anticipate secondary derivatives markets based around a big, central exchange.

This TechCrunch post, Job Boards Are So Over. TalentSeekr Targets And Recruits Through Ads Instead, talks about how TalentSeekr is:

…an ad network for jobs. Companies fill out what jobs they are trying to fill in what locations, then TalentSeekr creates and tests multiple ads across the Web—social networks, blogs, forums, search engines, you name it. Based on the response rate and quality of the applicants that come through the ads, TalentSeekr optimizes the mix of ad types (banner, text, video, creative elements) and placement. (Watch the video below to see how it works). If more qualified applicants are coming in through LinkedIn than Facebook, it readjusts the mix. (In fact, LinkedIn makes a lot of money through recruitment ads on its own site in much the same manner. TalentSeeker is attempting to apply the same principles in a more distributed manner across the Web).

Question of the day: Why don’t dating sites use actual profile photos in their social networking ads?

Related posts:

1. Job:VP of Advertising Sales at OKCupid
2. Dating Industry Jobs
3. CollectiveX

During the past year or so I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the role Facebook could play in online dating.

I’ve received a lot of feedback from the online dating industry about the possibility of Facebook becoming the worlds largest dating site. Typically I hear that:

- Facebook needs to focus on monitization strategies
- Facebook needs to focus on managing it’s tremendous growth
- There is not enough money in dating for Facebook get involved
- Privacy issues (See Dating Profiles Will Get Their Data From Facebook)
- And lots of other fear-driven reasons why Facebook will never becomes a serious dating platform.

I’m the first to agree that Facebook in it’s current form is not positioned to be a dating site. See You Got Your Match in My Facebook for more on this.

Searching for singles on Facebook around your age in your area code is difficult unless you spend some time figuring out how search works across networks (I may be missing something obvious here). Facebook says there are zero single women looking for men in Boston unless I search in the Boston, MA network. I don’t seem to be able to filter on Boston in the search results. I also can’t filter by age using the high school or college graduation date. I blame all of this on the fact that 200,000 join Facebook every day. They have better things to worry about than search functionality (but not for long).

All of this supports the fact that Facebook itself isn’t going to push into the dating space itself. It’s a platform and it’s job is to make it easy for third-party applications to provide features and functionalty the Facebook won’t/can’t take the time to develop.

Today, fbFund REV 2009 Finalist Thread, Formerly Frintro, Raises $1.2 Million (thanks to Inside Facebook). Thread is a Facebook Connect enabled dating site that allows users to meet friends of friends and/or play matchmaker by making introductions between your friends.

My neighbor Leah Busque, founder of RunMyErrand, turned me on to Thread. Leah was at the fbFund incubator this summer, along with Thread and many other amazing startups based on Facebook. Facebook is evolving as a platform, not only as a destination, and the incubator was a great way to support and fund the companies building out services based on FacebookConnect and the Facebook API.

Here is a Facebook Blog post from Brian Phillips, co-founder of Thread.

The basis for your company, Thread, is to introduce friends-of-friends on Facebook. How did you come up with the idea?
Personal experience. One of our co-founders, Skye Lee, is a consummate matchmaker. She loves nothing more than to set me up. A typical day: I’ll get a phone call from her before we even start thinking about business. “I just found this really cute girl on the street, and she’s single. You should take her to coffee next week. I told her all about you.” When we started to think about business ideas, it hit us — we should just make it easier to introduce people by applying cool technology like Facebook Connect.

Sound familiar? It’s Engage, built on top of Facebook. What Engage spent over $6 million dollars to develop, Thread can do for a million, actually a lot less.

Real online dating is coming to Facebook and it looks like Engage/Kismeet with Facebook Connect added to ease the signup process.

Back in December 2007 even Match got interested in friends matching friends. See Best Friends and Lovers for the latest serious Facebook dating application. Cablight is another “friends matching friends” application on Facebook.

For more on Thread see TechCrunch.

There are thousands of dating applications on Facebook. I’ve written about two of the most successful, Zoosk ($6 million raised) and Are You Interested (partnered with Match) many times. I like the companies, their management team and their shared passion for helping online dating evolve past the current static profile model of dating.

The problem is, the majority of serious daters are not using these applications, and the number of casual daters, while impressive when looking at Powerpoint slides in terms of adoption rates are tiny compared to Match or eHarmony and Yahoo Personals. Zoosk and Are You Interested talk about millions of installs and monthly users, but what of effectiveness? I don’t have numbers in front of me about how many successful relationships have occurred on either application, which I would presume would bolster my argument further. The reality is that when it comes to results, singles have fared better on traditional dating sites than social networks.

The argument quite often centers around Facebook dating applications copying the old Matchmaker model- many geogpaphic, political, religious and sexual-orientation niches within a large dating site. Don’t forget layering in features to make members anonymous during the matching process, because nobody wants to mix their personal peanut butter with their business chocolate.

There is little doubt in my mind that companies like Thread are going to figure this out, paving the way for more robust dating services built on Facebook that serious singles will warm to over time. How can you argue for the status quo big box dating sites and scores of unprofitable niche dating sites when Facebook has over 250 million users to choose from?

Related posts:

1. SecondLove Launches On Facebook
2. Thread Slowly Rolling out New Features
3. Facebook has 40 Dating Applications

As a consultant, it’s important for me to be friendly and familiar with several vendors in any category, from advertising to graphic design to people who optimize databases for profile search. Lately I have been interviewing usability testing companies for a variety of clients.

All clients are not in the same place at the same time. Startups need best practices and a cheap solution. A site with 50,000 users is at a different place, and so is a site with 200,000 daily logins. One shop will not fit all of the requirements, timeline and working style of all clients. I’m akin to a general contractor in these situations. I work with dating sites to figure out what they need, then I go out and find the vendors that match their particular requirements.

Things get really interesting when talking with user experience companies. Some take a project, run with it, and deliver the results. Nobody really knows why a certain design was delivered, it’s just “the right way to do it.” This works for some clients, who just want to see the needle move in a positive direction, regardless of how it happens.

Others are more data-driven. Their bookshelves, like mine, are filled with books like Always Be testing, Web Analytics and Call to Action. Multivariate testing, A/B testing and lots of other tests and procedures and metrics are used to optimize the user experience and get visitors to turn into members and members to extend their memberships or go for an up-sell.

Today I read a fascinating article at GigaOM called Hacking Traction: The Dark Side of Marketing Optimization.

Misunderstanding the objective of traction, a number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have mastered the art of driving millions of people to a site or application regardless of whether the product solves a real problem or not. At best, this approach skews the data used to discover if a product is getting the kind of usage that would indicate there’s a big enough market for it. At worst, it’s spam.

Hackers hack everything, not just code

That things would go down this path should have been obvious. I’m not sure who kicked off this hacking traction phenomenon, but a small group of extremely bright entrepreneurs now use a very sophisticated form of multivariate testing. For example, they simultaneously test an extremely large number of variables on a registration page in order to maximize registration (the copy, size, color, font and placement of data fields; the format and text of buttons; the flow of pages), then do the same thing on the “invite friends” page (the text of the body and subject of the invite email), and so on.

This method takes advantage of latent human behaviors to drive registrations and visits — and in terms of those goals, it’s unbelievably effective. While this knowledge is still relatively well guarded, it is slowly making its way through Silicon Valley.

This is how dating sites seemingly come from nowhere to to top of the charts. There are many tricks to be learned ranging from adding yellow coloring near signup forms to disingenuous interstitial landing pages created by affiliates leading to unrelated dating sites.

Landing page optimization is the next big arena of exploration for dating sites. As GigaOM states, this is a black art. To me, it’s the logical progression of SEO. Landing page optimization firms, like SEO companies, have been around for years, but have you noticed the plethora of SEO firms that have sprouted up recently? It’s like they just learned that Google rank relies heavily on inbound links.

It’s amazing the stuff that passes for a home page these days. Big co’s like Match and eHarmony and OKCupid test things each and every day, but the majority of dating sites have a “set it and forget it” mentality. They are glad their site is up and running they often don’t want to try anything new, in fear of their house of cards coming down at the slightest touch.

Nothing could be farther from reality. A dating site and it’s marketing campaign need constant attention, tweaks and testing. The companies that figure this out can make millions, the rest toil along in relative obscurity. What kind of dating site do you want to be?

User experience/testing/analytics is incredibly rich area of focus and I’m enjoying absorbing as much as possible right now. I’m not a user experience expert, although I make it my business to understand at a fairly deep level what all of my vendors are capable of, what they are good at and most importantly, what they don’t do as well as they should. Maybe in a few months I’ll understand 10% behind the principles of what they do and what works for dating sites.

ClickTale is a company I came across recently. Their service enables you to see where people hover their mouse over your pages. On signup forms and landing pages this is absolutely amazing to see. I’m starting to get comfortable with the service, running it on this blog and looking forward to seeing the results of the analysis. Click their ad in the sidebar to and see for yourself, it’s fascinating and actionable stuff and you can start learning how users navigate your site immediately.

I’m going to start doing some tests here, because I have years of Google Analytics data that I want to comb through and identify trends in search terms and the most (and least) popular areas of the site. I’d like by this autumn for the blog to greet you and configure itself based on your preferences. Personalized content is key and it all begins with knowing what people are doing (or not doing) on your site.

Dating site owners: How important is usability testing to the success of your site? Is it something you live and breath by, or do you rely on intuition, waving rubber chickens over the servers, or something in between? If you regularly run user testing labs, what do you measure and what are you finding?

Something tells me usability testing is going to get a boost once companies like ClickTale figure out how to create services that automate the process and tie into solution providers, which is a missing link right now. Otherwise this knowledge stays up in the expensive seats and most companies are left to their own devices, guesstimating instead of acting on concrete metrics and research. Google has done a lot of the hard work but it’s still far too difficult for most companies to implement understand and act on without expensive consultants (think SEO firms).

Hopefully this will change over time and someday dating site will judged by their effectiveness and efficiency and customer satisfaction instead of who can afford the most junk social networking and questionable affiliate traffic.

Related posts:

1. Landing Page Optimization Webinar A Success
2. Reminder: Online Dating Industry Landing Page Optimization Webinar
3. Reminder: Online Dating Industry Landing Page Optimization Webinar

From Online Personals Watch: Omnidate is conducting a study with Professor Dan Ariely into the effectiveness of virtual dating and is looking for dating sites to participate in this research. That’s a smart move to align with Professor Ariely. I’ve read his research and seen some of the demos of their virtual dating application, fascinating stuff and the professor is definitely becoming a known entity in the dating space.

The majority of my business is connecting companies with dating sites. I spend a lot of time getting companies ready to talk to business development executives at dating sites. Value proposition, pricing, features and functionality and many other areas must be addressed before a company is ready to put themselves out there.

Like many of my clients, Omnidate wants dating sites to become customers. The problem is, The ROI on virtual dating, both for singles and dating sites, is unclear. While getting mentioned in a research report is a good idea, it’s perhaps less effective as a business development tool when the company itself is paying(?) for the research. And then there is the issue of research as opposed to real life usage. Do you think any of the applications on Facebook with over 10 million installs would have shown up in a research report as a sure bet? No way.

Usually these types of research reports begin like this:

Company: Here’s a bag of money, go talk to a bunch of people and make sure they say good things about our brand and make sure high ROI is a key finding.

Academic: Ok.

Not necessarily the case here but you get the picture.

Ed. note: Omnidate is not paying for the study.

Omnidate has chosen to put the future of their business in the hands of the online dating sites, much like how the lamprey eel feeds off of host fish. Instead of dating site partnerships, Omnidate should consider marketing direct to consumers, build out a Facebook app, etc. They *could* become a valuable traffic source for dating sites.

SpeedDate relied partially on acquisitions of Facebook applications to drive growth, and Woome relies on direct traffic. The numbers tell the story. Both companies have raised something like $15 million in total, which makes a big difference in terms of marketing and development.
Besides figuring out the channel situation, Omnidate needs to address issues with usability and user experience. All the talk about user engagement, age and gender data means little if people aren’t head over heels about the service.

Here’s what else needs to be addressed at Omnidate in order for it to get traction:

• More fun things to do on dates: games, quizzes and music. License from entertainment companies.
• Additional reputation and ratings features. Keep the scammers away.
• Product placement for additional revenue streams. This date sponsored by Heineken.

Just look at the drop-off in the number of dating sites that use chat. If the experience isn’t fun, safe and effective people won’t use it.

There are lots of great ideas out there that don’t necessarily translate into successful businesses. Perhaps it’s an issue with timing, consumers simply aren’t primed for virtual dating. For example, I’ve been videoconferencing since 1994 and it’s only recently that the concept has become widespread.

I’m curious about your thoughts on the outcome of the study. What do you think they’re going to find?

Related posts:

1. Virtual Dating Comes to AnotherFriend
2. Online Dating Insider Links for 1-14-2009
3. Vivaty, Great for Virtual Dating?

Niche dating sites can be incredibly effective if you’re Jewish, Black, Gay, Athletic or belong to any number of groups where it makes sense to self-identify as part of a particular group of people. Matchmaker was the first site to have many different demographic areas broken out inside a single dating site, but Date.com merged everything into one database when they acquired the site.

These days I’m increasingly interested in how large dating sites are taking advantage of the staggering amount of information the collect about their users. Large dating sites are spending tens of millions of dollars logging, storing, analyzing and refining compatibility algorithms on multi-terabyte data sets based on what users is doing on their sites. Data such as the number of emails being sent and responded to daily and hundreds of other metrics and measurements are being captured, at least I hope they are.

Smaller sub-500,000 member niche dating sites are simply not able to compete when it comes to designing compatibility algorithms and dynamic content display. They have to think smarter about which data to collect and how to feed back what they learn about how people use their site in an ongoing incremental update process. Dating sites are not set-it-and-forget-it enterprises, although this is how much of the industry views itself.

Building a quick site turning on the marketing dollars and watching the money pour in works for a few sites, but is not the golden rule by any means when it comes to competing in today’s crowded marketplace.

The widening gap between niche sites and mainstream dating sites reminds me of when Google was starting to get traction. There was Alta Vista, HotBot, Dogpile and 25 other search engines. In the past 5-7 years the majority of them having fallen by the wayside as Google has risen to prominence. This has not been the case in the online dating industry, yet.

Downloading a dating platform and rolling the dice with a few thousand dollars is almost certainly a recipe for disaster in today’s market. This is not to denigrate dating platform providers. On the contrary, I think there is a lot of room for groundbreaking sites to rise up and take market share from slack dating site operators. but what I’m hearing from people day in and day out is a lack of innovative though in regards to what singles are looking for in a dating site these days and the platform providers are simply providing just that, a platform. That’s where I come in as a consultant.

Dating sites are simply starting up all over the place these days as they try and cash in on the recession-based surge the media has done such a good job mis-reporting.

Lately I’ve noticed that most dating software vendors are reticent about discussing their businesses and that more and more people are building sites themselves, either through software platforms or White Label Dating. I still get 10-20 emails a week from startups, but now they are looking for free feedback on their concept, not the multi-month engagements of the past where I work with them to refine their business models and deal with the 87 issues any dating site startup needs to address in order to be successful.

If the industry is at the point where anyone can launch a dating site or become a pseudo-affiliate of White Label Dating, where is the interesting stuff happening? These days the action and interesting stuff tends to be happening at the top ten dating sites. Thats where the real innovation and growth is occurring, along with one heck of a steep learning curve. And that’s where my focus is moving towards as well.

Lately I’ve been reading more stories like these:

Is Big Data at a tipping point?

Online dating: Your profile’s long, scary shelf life

How Google and Facebook are using R:

Itamar Rosenn at Facebook conveyed how Facebook’s Data Team used R in 2007 to answer two questions about new users: (i) which data points predict whether a user will stay? and (ii) if they stay, which data points predict how active they’ll be after three months?

For the first question, Itamar’s team used recursive partitioning (via the rpart package) to infer that just two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook: (i) having more than one session as a new user, and (ii) entering basic profile information.

For the second question, they fit the data to a logistic model using a least angle regression approach (via the lars package), and found that activity at three months was predicted by variables related to three classes of behavior: (i) how often a user was reached out to by others, (ii) frequency of third party application use, and (iii) what Itamar termed “receptiveness” — related to how forthcoming a user was on the site.

Facebook’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior

These stories may seem to have little to do with online dating, but as a whole they can be seen as incredibly inspiring when viewed from the perspective of someone running an established dating site or looking to start one.

One one end of the spectrum we have bare-bones sites like SinglesNet at the top of the charts, both for traffic and consumer complaints. On the other end we have analysis-driven dating sites like Chemistry and eHarmony (both with their share of complaints as well) leading the charge into massively scalable dating sites able to match members heuristically.

In between we have the niche sites making a tidy profit for a handful of companies focused on satisfying customer demand and hopefully having a good time while they do it.

Then we have the startups, which range from naive to incredibly thoughtful when it comes to business models, marketing plans and expectations. See above.

Each sector of the online dating industry has is own set of issues and objectives but all share these common goals: Attracting members, converting them and then retaining them for as long as possible. This in effect is the essence of online dating and of the work I perform, day in and day out, for five years and counting. These goals will not change anytime soon, but the strategy, execution and resources required the achieve them are evolving drastically. That’s what I attempt to discuss here in the hopes that the online dating industry values my effort and insight enough to warrant hiring me.

As compatibility matching and the systems required to support millions of members continue to increase in complexity, the number of dating site able to compete is going to shrink. This will lead to consolidation, with a few Googles MSN Seach and Ask.com’s in play and then a tier of niche sites catering to 500,000-people communities based on age, sexuality and interest. The rest of the market will solider along, strong enough to live on shoestring budgets and clever marketing campaigns. I think this is exactly where the market needs to go, but the timeline in which this will happen is anyone’s guess.

Anyone who disagrees should go read up on Facebook’s growth, the small number of social networks and the consumer revolt against myriad profiles and demand for simplicity. Online dating is different from social networking in many ways, but the writing is on the wall. What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Dating Industry Market Size
2. Thoughts on Niche Dating Sites
3. MySpace Launches “My Ads” Self Serve Ad Platform

Marc Andreessen, the inventor of the web browser and founder of Netscape, was on Charlie Rose talking about the past, present and future of the internet. The pair discuss the people and the companies that are driving innovation as well as the fact that innovation is not dead, as some silicon valley pundits are predicting. If your business runs on silicon and is used by people, you should watch Charlie Rose Interview Marc Andreessen.

Related posts:

1. Can Credit Card Comanies Predict Compatibility Better That Tests?
2. US and EU Dating Companies Differ
3. Online Dating Industry Links for Friday April 3rd

Match.com, the world’s largest online dating company, today announced the launch of DownToEarth, an innovative free online dating site. Last week I spoke with Jacob Solotaroff, the former Director of Product Management and Member Integrity at Match.com, who is tasked with running Down To Earth. Steve Hammer, who heads up marketing for Down To Earth, was on the call as well.

We’ve all been waiting for Match to launch a free dating service. In the past they have discussed acquiring free dating sites, and last summer decided to forge ahead and build their own. Match realized there is room for a new free dating site which is clean and simple, a clear and direct response to PlentyofFish and to some extent OKCupid. Down To Earth went live in December 2008, signing up 1,000 daily. Looks like around 20,000 people have joined the sites in the last few weeks, at least according to Compete, although you know how I feel about third-party analytics, the trends are usually spot on, the actual number, not so much. As a measure of success, Down To Earth is targeting 250k members by the end of 2009.

DownToEarth.com’s cornerstone feature, RealRatings™, encourages daters, after meeting in person, to rate the accuracy of the information provided in the other person’s profile. The five-star rating system allows daters to score the other person’s accuracy from ‘Not Even Close’ (one star) to ‘True to Life’ (five stars). Through actively encouraging daters to participate, DownToEarth.com empowers its community to create the dating environment they’re seeking.

How RealRatings Works: After you’ve communicated with someone, you are asked if you’ve met face-to-face. If so, Down To Earth encourages you to rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, where 1 star means “not even close” and 5 “true to life.” Real Ratings let’s you sort search results by reputation, login, newest users first.

Based on respectability and reliability, down To Earth believes that if people know they’ll be called out on outdated pictures and little white lies in their profiles, they’ll be less likely to post them. As part of the community you can help Down To Earth keep the site full of honest and respectful singles.

Down To Earth will have a lot of new features coming down the pike to prove our users are who they say they are. Finally, a dating site that is taking ratings and reputation seriously! I have been rated yet, will be interesting to see how that works. Update, I just got rated, by a female friend. Where’s the ability to add testimonials?

I asked Jacob about how Down To Earth fits in with Match corporate. Currently less than 10 people. Development was outsourced, running the same Microsoft system as Match. The company is located in the same building as Match and Chemistry to optimize workflow. They are getting lots of advice from Match, which has been around for 13 years.

When asked about profile approval and customer service, I was told that Down To Earth has no customer service, instead relying on community-based policing. Members can report each other via links on profiles and messaging threads. Married people get kicked. Not sure how they will accomplish this. Jacob says identity checking is “interesting”.

Who’s on First? Signups to day have seen a large number of 18 year-olds. The site is not specifically targeting a particular market segment at this time. The site is seeing strong numbers of signups from the south and southwest. Most of them women I’ve talked to are vocally Christian and divorced. See below for a possible explanation.
We talked about opening a bar and how some bars aim to be a neighborhood bar, only to turn gay after a few months. Or a gay bar that turns into an after work hangout or sports bar. My point is, you can only do so much to guarantee the demographics your want on your site are actually the ones that show up.

Down To Earth used a 30 year-old woman as guide. A single mother goes to church every week. Composite. Funny that I personally know 5 of the women on the site in my area.

The Down To Earth team pays close attention to YouTube, eBay and social networks for inspiration. Right now they are focused on building the community, not monetization. Notice the focus on community. I don’t see a single reference as being a dating site.

We spent a lot of time talking about how Down To Earth has the freedom to innovate. The philosophy guiding the team is highly experimental, test-and-measure. As a small, nimble group inside the Match empire, they pay close attention to customer feedback and are able to add new features quickly, avoiding much of the traditional big-company red tape that had traditionally hampered Match.

Down to Earth is being marketing using both traditional and untraditional means. The pay-per-post tactic that I previously blasted them for was a simple test. Money is being spent on search engine and word of mouth marketing.

I HATE ads like this, which look like features of the site you’re on, but are actually links to other dating sites. The Federal Trade Commission is all over this unsavory marketing practice.

I’ve been sending out lots of emails and winks, will report back with the results. One thing I don’t understand is why all my photos have a “Down To Earth” badge on them, and the majority of other people don’t.

Down To Earth has done a good job with the photo management page, very clean and simple to use and promoting a photo as the primary one is simple.

Markus at PlentyofFish talks about DownToEarth. He says the site looks really good. I disagree though that Match is abandoning paid dating. This is about going after another market sector. Ross Williams leaves a great comment about PoF starting a paid dating site and it’s reliance on other paid dating sites for revenue.

I like to see that Steve has a public blog, it’s full of interesting information. Did you know that Down To Earth was called free-singles.com during the initial testing phase? Initial testing was done with churches. Interesting that links to Jacob and Steve’s blogs from Markus’ blog redirect to DownToEarth (sigh).

The Little Black Book is basically the Match Connections page. Much less clutter.

The partner page at Down To Earth features 20+ competing dating sites, most of which contain affiliate links. Very nice job with the help section.

I worked with Dating Ad Network last summer. Many people said “oh, banner networks, how quaint”, but this is effectively how Down To Earth, PlentyOfFish and many other dating sites drive traffic. What’s old is new again.

I give Down To Earth a B+ for now. A very nice effort right out of the gate. Just wait until the marketing dollars start flowing, I’m sure things are going to evolve in coming months. We’ll see what the primary demographic of the service turns out to be, right now it’s feeling a bit too divorced hard-core Christian for me. Nothing wrong with that, it’s still early days and there’s always OKCupid, the “other” cleanly designed free dating site.

Go sign up and check out Down To Earth, I think you’ll like what you see. Regardless, I urge you to leave a comment about your experience signing up and your first impressions of the service and it’s members.

Related posts:

1. DownToEarth Traffic Update
2. Down To Earth, Let’s get Down With Math
3. Careful What you Say on TechCrunch

Over the past month or two Match has been rolling out a number of design and functionality updates. To begin with, the familiar black header has been replaced with a blue one. Match has thrown out any sort of cohesive design pattern, everything looks like it’s being modularized, perhaps to make it easier to work with third-parties like MSN.

The Connections page has been redone. Now we can see less of our “dashboard” view than before. Main view has been reduced to two columns, pretty much the same functionality, I thought the way was fine.

Once you breath a sigh of relief over the loss of the black graphics, clicking on the What’s New tab is where things start to get interesting. Match has found inspiration in Facebook’s Wall and built one of their own by reformatting the content from your Connections tab and turning it into a wall, or lifestream. As far as I can tell your wall displays who has emailed, winked and viewed your profile, as well as that your and your favorite’s profiles have been updated as well as who I have added as a favorite.

The profile update note is a half-measure which should display something about what was changed, which is much more interesting. It’s all about driving engagement and pageviews, best to tease people into clicking.

Match was smart to insert items like “Want updates sent to your mobile phone?” with a link to pay them $4.99 to get emails on the go. Who pays for that?

Another item is a call to action to “Meet your best matches. Based on profile details, you’re looking for each other.”

What happens in six months when the Wall feature is not new anymore? I’d like to make the Wall my default view. And why can’t I drag-n-drop Connections in the order I want?

Match has always done a lackluster job of explaining how their site works and what’s changed. I guess they feel that they can expose people to features and functionality and make a few bucks (albeit on features that I don’t feel are worth charging for) at the same time.

All social networking make their walls accessible as an RSS feed. I’m sure Match has concerns about average folks figuring out how to read the feed and third parties doing nefarious things with your private data. Still, as a power user, give me the tools I need to use Match the way I want to use it instead of the watered-down, generic please-everyone features they have to offer middle America. Just don’t make it as complicated as Facebook.

I for one hope the overlords at Match will create a dating application for my iPhone. I would pay $4.99 for that in a heartbeat. Build the flirting app on top of Viximo’s new development platform, sweet.

The ads continue to be un-targeted junk. K&B Toys and Olive Garden? Sigh. Where’s the targeted ads coming from IAC’s new uber-ad platform? Ads are obviously low on the list of priorities.

I like that they have added a note at the bottom of the page that the privacy policy was updated on November 5. Where they fail is that they do not list what changed at the top of the privacy policy.

You can compare dating sites, Match vs. eHarmony and Yahoo Personals. A generic feature matrix based on three-year old data. Absolutely useless. How about comparing how many people are in your area-code?

The other feature addition worth mentioning is the Daily5, which is another way to put people in front of you that Match thinks are a good match for you. This is just like OKCupid’s Quiver. They relax your search criteria constraints by a few years and 50 miles or so. I’ve written about this a lot.

Results are all over the map, some people love it, others are getting people 200 miles away and 10 years older. Match says they will continue to improve it. I hope they do.

Next up, my conversation with Mandy Ginsberg, General Manager of Match North America.

Related posts:

1. New Match feature
2. Dating sites adding new features
3. Facebook’s New Privacy Settings