Online Dating Insider » Marketing

Dating Industry News 5-21-12

David Evans — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:44:12 +0000

I love love love HowAboutWe’s Flash Contest from March (lag, I know!). No question, the HowAboutWe marketing department runs circles around the rest of the online dating industry and their goofy 20-something’s blog is pretty awesome (says the older guy who doesn’t get 1/2 of what they post there but hey it seems like the kids love it.)

The contest was to promote the launch of HowAboutWe Couples, which I guess is couples suggesting date ideas to each other over the interweb, with some sponsored date ideas or something. Hasn’t launched yet so who knows.

Google Updates its search index every few months with names like Panda or Caffeine, which changes just like Android release names: Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, etc. Match branded their algorithm Synapse (great Slate article). Very snappy, sounds like great name for an electric car. I haven’t seen any indications of the Google Dance when Match updates its algorithm, have you?

Check out Match’s mobile app loading screen. Each of these photos should be a link to their profile, and I would pay big bucks to be featured on it for a day in my area code. Instead of 75 little photos, just have a gallery of 10 or so and sell the space to members. Badoo makes $150 million a year doing this, it does work. Yes its a loading screen, masking a lot of things going on in the background and being downloaded to your phone. Instagram is masterful at how they mask whats going on behind the scenes, which is why the app seems so responsive. Their presentation on designing for mobile is a must-read.

POF is getting serious about their Freemium offer. 530% increase in the chance that someone will respond to me? I’ll take it.

Then I see that OKCupid says that their Test results are up to 1594% accurate. Thats almost 2,345.67% more accurate than POF. That OkCupid Staff Robot is hilarious. Almost as funny as the Freddie the Mailchimp monkey.

Oh SNAP!

SNAP Interactive, makers of Are You Interested, says revenue increased for the 12th consecutive quarter.

Quarterly revenue increased 54 percent to $5.7 million compared to $3.7 million for the comparable period in 2011;
Net loss for the quarter increased to $1.7 million compared to a net loss of $0.9 million for the comparable period in 2011;
Deferred revenue increased 9 percent to $3.4 million at March 31, 2012 compared to $3.1 million at December 31, 2011;
Diluted loss per share for the quarter was $0.04 compared to a loss of $0.02 for the comparable period in 2011; and
SNAP’s balance sheet position continues to be strong, with $7.4 million of available sources of liquidity (includes cash and cash equivalents plus investments) at March 31, 2012.

First Quarter 2012	$ 5.7 million
Fourth Quarter 2011	$ 5.5 million
Third Quarter 2011	$ 5.1 million
Second Quarter 2011	$ 4.8 million
First Quarter 2011	$ 3.7 million
Fourth Quarter 2010	$ 2.8 million
Third Quarter 2010	$ 1.7 million
Second Quarter 2010	$ 1.2 million
First Quarter 2010	$ 0.9 million

Product Highlights for Q1 2012

Added 3.8 million new profiles to the AreYouInterested.com brand;
The AreYouInterested.com iPhone application was downloaded approximately 750,000 times from the iPhone App Store;
Increased mobile engagement to 15% of all unique logins during March 2012 from 13% in December 2011; and
During March 2012, we averaged over 550,000 daily sessions or visits to our mobile AreYouInterested.com platform (including iPhone, mobile web, and Android sessions)

More at Dailymarkets.

Here’s an in-depth article about Skout, which recently raised a whopping $22 million for their growing mobile social app.

Fab, the failed gay social network that pivoted to online shopping, is launching its third iteration, improving upon social shopping. This is the best “We failed at a relationship site but lets try something else” story I’ve ever heard. Big success, big revenue, an all around win. More at VentureBeat.

Zoosk has more than 50m users in more than 60 countries. The service is available in 20 languages. Social-dating site Zoosk makes jump from retail colo to wholesale, moving to a turn-key wholesale data center solution in San Jose operated by Fortune. A year ago, Spark Networks filed a lawsuit against Zoosk, OKCupid and other dating sites. What ever happened with that? I have a big piece of Zoosk in the hopper, will launch that next week, heading to Boston for a few days.

TechCrunch says Cheek’d is online dating in reverse.

Use your LoveID code number to SMS, call or email people. You have total control and can block anyone at the click of a button or SMS. None of your regular contact details will be passed on. You decide when to share your more intimate details.

Love this Andrew Chen article about him doubting Facebook could build a billion dollar business. Reminded me a lot of the dating companies I come across every day. Ninety-eight point zero five percent of them will never go anywhere, so how do you identify the outliers that will pop and go big time? Is it features? Rarely. People argue with me all the time that their features are what differentiate them from their competitors.

The value of a dating site is the people on the site. Either they are your people (relevant to you in some way), or they aren’t. Doesn’t matter how good your matching algorithm is if its not using a base of your people to begin with.

People on eHarmony are generally not a good fit for Match people. OkCupid people are not likely to date POF people. Datehookup people and Mate1 people are probably not going to meet up with HowAboutWe people.

Little else matters except a matching system that surfaces a handfull of likely candidates every day. And now we have any number of mobile, social dating, friends matching friends, verified people type sites launching. If 25 sites launch that justify their existence on low customer acquisition costs based on spamming your Facebook friends, only a few are going to make it, the rest will run out of cash too soon. So how do we identify the few companies that are going to make it? This is exactly what Andrew talks about in his blog post. The winners exhibit certain non-typical attributes, which are incredibly difficult to suss out, but doing so is part of the fun. Thats why I talk to at least 10 dating startups every week.

Every once in a while companies will send me samples of their products. I am contractually obligated to tell you that as someone who demands high performance products to enhance their love life, Astroglide Personal Lubricants such as Astroglide X enhance the comfort and ease of all of my intimate physical activities.

There are several social dating startups that my spider-sense tells me have something going for them worth talking about, so thats what I’ll be doing next week.

Dating Site Bloggers Need To Step Up Their Game

David Evans — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:55:57 +0000

Its amazing how many dating sites don’t take the time to write a blog or post up social media content. For all the grief I give HowAboutWe on the premise of their business model, their blog kicks the cr@p out of just about every other dating site blog (I don’t spent every waking day looking at dating site blogs, and I’m sure I’m missing some great ones).

HowAboutWe is all about the under-30 (35?) crowd, and the blog accurately reflects the reading habits of this demographic, for the most part at least. I’m jaded because after reading the same Valentine’s Day polls and first date best practices I want to fall on my sword, but HAW keeps things fresh and should be commended for their efforts.

For a comparison, go to the Match blog. Its 90% success stories, which must work for them, because when you’re the 800-pound gorilla/Amazon/big-box retailer in the dating industry, you don’t really have a niche, can’t be edgy, have to cater to flyover red states, and all sorts of people who would probably bail the moment a photo with too much cleavage showed up on the blog. Or God forbid successful gay relationships.

But Match probably makes more in an day than HAW makes in a year, so there’s that to consider. What other awesome dating site blogs are out there? I need you to recommend your favorites.

7 Reasons To Attend Online Dating Summit Barcelona This Weekend

David Evans — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:48:14 +0000

For those of you who were unable to attend eAmore last night, here’s another dating industry event for you.

The main conference days (3 & 4 March) are fully orientated to bringing you more traffic. The goal is to create a dynamic business atmosphere in which you can grow your business, cement your existing relationships as well as keeping up with new, emerging trends.

The educational part of the Summit features two separate seminar tracks, a B2B and affiliate seminar.

With an expected turn-out of 300-350 dating industry professionals (over 210 already registered 4 weeks pre-show) the Online Dating Summit promises to be a must attend event.

Here’s 7 more reasons to go:

1. CEO’s from some of the largest sites on the planet are speaking at the Summit

2. Meet top tier performance networks to drive your growth

3. Be ready for the revolution of mobile dating apps

4. Network with the crème de la crème of the industry

5. Be on the inside track with the latest developments “straight from the horse’s mouth”

6. The right mix of business and pleasure. See the hospitality events here.

7. Get in touch with the future of the online dating industry – it’s in Barcelona

If you attend, please let me know what you thought of the event. I’m knee-deep in 14 inches of snow and could use some warm weather stories and event reviews.

Dating Industry Under Fire For Dubious Matchmaking Claims

David Evans — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:27:59 +0000

Today’s New York Times has an article about The Dubious Science of Online Dating. While I was reading it, Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish (recently rebranded as POF), sent me ELI J. FINKEL AND BENJAMIN R. KARNEY are wrong at least when it comes to POF. Markus was responding to a research report by Eli Finkel, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Northwestern University, that says dating site matching systems are Doing It Wrong. Read the full report here (PDF). Markus feels that POF is doing things with matching that the dating industry doesn’t even think is possible. I can’t comment on that claim, but every single person on the planet should be glad he’s made it. Perhaps we are witnessing the point in time where the dating industry, with prodding from academics, the media, and singles, starts to realize how important matching systems really are. Not to mention how a great matching system can reduce customer acquisition costs and churn, and perhaps get some of those 70 million US singles not on dating sites to try online dating.

As Sam Yagan of OKCupid told me once (paraphrasing), a good matching algorithm isn’t only about making great matches, its also about hiding the people from you that you don’t want to see on the site.

The online dating industry has generally been focused on marketing for a decade. Now, the industry is being forced to acknowledge that the playing field has shifted to the matching algorithms used to put quality people in front of each other . Game on!

But first, lets take a step back and look at a decade of online matchmaking. For the early part of the decade the algorithms matching people were, how can I say this politely, less than useful. For the majority of sites, matching on anything more complicated than age/sex/location was a shot in the dark. EHarmony was the first site to bring psychology into the mix. EHarmony, which has from day one put its reputation on the line as the number one site for quality matches, was just starting to figure out what they had gotten themselves into with their 240-question signup process. (Sidebar: I wonder what the minimum number of questions will be to make a successful match, or will matches be based more on behavior, or something completely different?)

Along came OkCupid, which was quietly building a system based on ascertaining compatibility based on its social questions features (and I’m sure a lot of other proprietary magic pixie dust). Singles appreciated the nature of the questions, which were fun, and most importantly, social. No big long tests, results hidden away in some database. You answered a question, and could make that answer public. Exposing and leveraging people’s answers to questions about their personal beliefs in a way that no other dating site was doing at the time. Brilliant. OKCupid was the first site that made dating more social, just not in the way the latest crop of sites is doing it (friends matching friends via Facebook social graph).

Around this time, dating site started realizing that trying to match people together from a pool of 5 million people was a considerable challenge. If there are 5,000 singles in a major metropolitan area, how in the world were they going to show you the handful of people that might be a quality match? This wasn’t so much of a problem for smaller areas, because sooner or later you’re going to see everyone around you, and the thinking was “let the customer figure it out.” I don’t blame them, matching people on a dating site is an incredibly complex undertaking.

The online dating industry is still in the Paleolithic era. They are just starting to figure out how to take your profile, your test and question results and your behavior into consideration while building matching systems. Figuring out what kind of car to buy on Cars.com is straightforward, but us humans are messy bags of flesh, full of ego, bias and emotional detritus that makes the job of pairing us up with life partners (and to some extent one-night stands) seemingly impossible. Just ask any jaded online dater.

I’m not going to compare matching systems here, because there is absolutely no way to compare the effectiveness of dating sites. The methodology of measurement is flawed, the sample sizes are flawed and the folllow-up process isn’t stringent enough to warrant a serious discussion about whether or not say a POF or a Match or an eHarmony are “better” dating sites. Better for what? One-night stands? Long-term relationships? Casual dating? Dating sites may have this data internally, but until now they sure haven’t wanted you to know about it.

Markus has a chart in his blog post showing how many people are in successful relationships after meeting on POF. the caveat here is that the people left the site and never came back, which doesn’t take into consideration that the people might have gone to another dating site. See, messy.

Talking about big top-10 dating sites is one thing, but what about the white label dating services, which deploy, host, run and manage tens of thousands of dating sites? Nobody seems to ever question the matching algorithms on these sites. The focus has been on the speed and simplicity of getting a dating site up and running in a matter of days. Turn on the revenue spigot and go, go, go.

Same goes for niche sites. Match bought People Media and their suite of niche sites for $90 million dollars. Spark Networks falls into this category as well, although JDate is considered the grown jewel of the Spark empire. The idea behind these niche site networks was to build a dating platform and then roll out multiple sites by cloning the look and feel and tailor the graphics for each specific niche (mature, asian, Christian, Jewish, black, etc.). But nobody ever talks about how they match people up, everyone was so excited that there was a site for them, because they didn’t want to be lost in a sea of millions of generic singles.

Further, we have the “dating site in a box” vendors like SkaDate and Boonex (disclaimer: you’ll see their ads in the sidebar on this blog.) What is their matching system based on? Most dating site entrepreneurs didn’t worry to much about the matching system. It was all about getting up and running quickly on a site where they controlled how the site functioned, and more importantly, keeping all of the revenue. Remember, white label dating providers take anywhere from 25-70% of a sites’ revenue in return for managing the site.

Lets not forget Chemistry.com, Match’s answer to eHarmony. Dr. Helen Fisher and her group at Chemistry have worked for years on a matching system that purports to be more efficient and effective than other dating site. But do we really know if Chemistry matches people better than the competition? Chemistry, like all big dating sites, has spent tens of millions on marketing, because as I said, dating site superiority has been a marketing exercise for the better part of the decade.

I have a folder full of research pertaining to compatibility matching. I talk to Very Smart People all the time about psychology tests and deep math, none of which I claim to understand at more than a superficial level. What I do know is that dating site rankings based on traffic alone are useless, and its been a popularity contest until now. If you don’t have quality singles in my area code, it doesn’t matter how large you are. Maybe someday dating sites will use heat-maps to show the density of their users based on a specific location, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the last year or so, dating sites have started to announce the number of successful relationships started on sites, ranging from 3-months in duration to marriage. This is a Good Thing and a step in the right direction.

I wonder how long dating site marriages last compared to meeting someone through friends, a bar, church, etc.? This is a good start, but it still smells to my like a variation of How to Lie With Maps, who’s author wanted to “make readers aware that maps, like speeches and paintings, are authored collections of information and also are also subject to distortions arising from ignorance, greed, ideological blindness, or malice.”

Getting the online dating industry to move the battle towards effective matching is good news for all parties involved and I am excited to see how this all plays out. There are also many new dating startups trying out new matching systems which I hope will play an important role in forcing the dating industry to step up its game.

To see what POF has learned (love their transparency!), you should definitely go read Markus’ post, its a good one and sure to fire up a lot of people, dating industry insiders and singles alike.

Single Edition Media Connects Brands With Singles

David Evans — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:17:39 +0000

A few years ago I was in New York City visiting friends, clients and family. After a long day of meetings with clients, visiting OkCupid and a few other dating site offices, I was thirsty and in need of good company.

Thankfully, I ended up meeting Sherri Langburt for a glass wine wine at a fantastic bistro on the upper west side of Manhattan. Sheri is the founder of Single Edition.

Single Edition is the premier lifestyle destination for singles: women and men of all ages who have never been married as well as those who are divorced, solo parents or suddenly single.

At the time, Sherri she was doing content and some marketing for People Media, and branched out from there, providing content to a number of dating sites.

Last year, Sherri created Single Edition Media. Today she sent out an email update that I wanted to share with you.

This February marks the one year anniversary for Single Edition Media….Over the last 12 months, we worked overtime building a social marketing agency, secured over 100 single female bloggers along the way, and we keep growing. We helped companies such as Jeep, The Fresh Diet, Ice.com, Vitamin Shoppe, AOL, Bai Beverages, Naked Winery, Biofilm, Amazon.com, Tabatchnick Fine Foods, BistroMD, Silk’n and others, differentiate themselves by delivering engaging content for their brands on blogs, websites, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Why should dating sites and dating bloggers care? A record number of people in the U.S. now live by themselves — and they spend $1.9 trillion a year. Businesses are beginning to take notice.

I waited for years for a singles-only advertising network to show up. It never happened on a large scale. Then Sherri came around and started putting together big singles events in NYC, content for dating sites, fun events like trunk shows and parties.

Not content with glitzy parties and selling high-quality blog posts to top-10 dating sites, she went on to create her own network of top dating bloggers and figured out a way to bring brands and bloggers together for the purpose of marketing to singles.

This required Sherri to provide the strategy and support required to make major brands comfortable with handing over their money and brand so she could put them in front of millions of singles. No easy task if you’re ever worked with large consumer brands. Nobody was doing this in the singles space in any meaningful way until Sherri came around.

So, if you’re a dating blogger, a dating coach or work with singles, check out the Single Edition Media Network. Brands wanting to connect with singles should go here. Make sure to tell her I sent you, maybe she’ll add me to her network :-)

Check out this great article in Forbes about the Solo Economy that mentions Single Edition. Us singles, we’re a multi-trillion-dollar market baby!

Christiancafe.com Mentioned on Britain’s Got Talent

David Evans — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:17:32 +0000

During a Skype chat with Sam Moorcroft of Christiancafe.com yesterday, he mentioned that they received a great shout-out on Britain’s Got Talent. Referencing Simon’s Cowell’s break with fiance Mezhgan Hussainy, when a pair of contestants said they had met on a website called Christiancafe.com, host David Walliams said: “There you go Simon, you could find a wife on there.”This is a good as a free plug as you’re going to get on television. Read more.

Match and eHarmony spend millions on tv ads, OkCupid has a deal with Bravo and POF spent a few hundred grand to be in a recent Lady Gaga video. Wonder how much traffic these efforts drive to the sites, or is it more about brand lift/awareness?

Online Dating Industry News January 6, 2012

David Evans — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:42:14 +0000

After a bummer of a sale to FriendFinder Networks, which has proven adept at killing off perfectly good acquisitions, Nerve.com has launched a new dating site.

Many people, myself included, consider Nerve/SpringStreet to have been the best “first wave” dating site. Anyone who knows me personally knows how much I like OkCupid and Match, which I tend to write about more than any other sites, but thats because they are doing more than any other sites! Lots of contenders to round out the top five of course, thats for another post.

Speaking of Nerve Personals/FastCupid, back in 2006 I learned that if you spend 100 points a day you become a featured member on search page or that if you spend 2000 points you get your profile highlighted for one month. Sounds like Badoo, right?

Look at eHarmony trying to be all hip and cool. This is what a brand expert would call brand dissonance.

According to Urban Dictionary, The Wingman will always be there to “occupy” least attractive girl of the pair so that you may engage in the “hotty”. If it didn’t say eHarmony, I would have guessed the ad was for HowAboutWe. No word if eHarmony also acts as a “pre-wing“.

Look at this Christian Mingle ad. Cute “Church Girls” that look like they just got out of Bible study class and decided to sit in each other’s laps for a while, how nice. Proves that Christian sites are no different from any other dating sites and will do whatever it takes for more clicks.

Students in The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology completed a study that takes a closer look at the success stories of online daters. Reminds me of the Online Booty Call claim from years ago, “Reaching the one million member mark with only a single reported marriage is a tremendous accomplishment.”

A summary of what they found:

1. eHarmony – Success = marriage (in 84 percent of success stories reported on the site)

2. Match.com – Success = dating (49.2 percent of success stories are about getting a date)

3. OkCupid – Success = something other than marriage (only 23 percent of success stories on this site are about marriage)

Moonit’s new Social iPhone App is free and offers valuable insights into your romantic relationships. Users can view their percentage compatibility and a short, entertaining paragraph of tangible advice on what to appreciate, what to look out for, and what to work on for that particular pairing.

After receiving their relationship compatibility results, users can continue the dialogue by chatting with each other using the messaging functionality right inside the app and make plans to meet up in person.

RedLightCenter.com, the world’s premier adult virtual world, and UtherConvention.com, the world’s only convention planning and execution company that holds fully interactive virtual conventions, announced they will join together to host the first-ever Adult Entertainment Virtual Convention on Feb. 25 and 26, 2012. Event organizers confirmed this week that Seka (talk about old-school!), the mega-porn star of the 1970s and 80s, will be speaking at the Expo.

Work at OkCupid: They have been growing rapidly, and their team needs the best and brightest to help solve some of the most challenging problems in the field. Want to join ’em?

Match Launches Customized Display Ads

David Evans — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:20:38 +0000

When I logged into Match this morning I saw an ad for Verizon. At first I groaned at yet another wasted ad impression, not to mention that FiOS is not available here. Looking closer, I saw that Verizon has embedded several references to Match in the ad. Thats pretty cool. Dating site ads should all be customized like this. Now that we know that OkCupid shares a member’s drug use with advertisers, I wonder what Match is sending to their ad networks to personalize display ads?

No related posts.

Dating Sites Are Selling Your Private Information

David Evans — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:12:30 +0000

Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone, but a new study is out that shows how much personal information is shared and sold between website and data aggregators. Especially interesting is what dating sites like OkCupid make available to vendors.

Stanford University computer scientist Jonathan Mayer has released a study concerning behavioral targeting and tracking people across the Internet.

As expected, he found that many companies are involved with monitoring every click and then selling and sharing that information to advertisers so they can target you specifically.

Click a local ad on HomeDepot.com and 13 companies get your name and email address. Type the wrong password into WSJ.com and seven companies get your email. Click the validation link in the signup email for a Reuters newsletter and 5 companies get your email.

Interact with classmates.com and 22 companies get your full name; Bleacher Report sends it to 15 companies.

OkCupid, a free online dating website, appears to sell user information to the data providers BlueKai and Lotame, including gender, age, ZIP code, relationship status, and drug use frequency. (emphasis ed.)

I’m all for trading privacy for convenience and tracking people and their actions across the Internet for things like e-commerce, but there is a fine line where tracking becomes an invasion of privacy. Websites and large data providers’ efforts are not widely regulated here in the US (as it is in EU). The ACLU is concerned, as you should be as well.

Besides tracking pot usage (what advertiser needs to know that?), OkCupid tracks pretty basic stuff. If you want to scare yourself, go look at Rapleaf or read how credit card companies are using your purchase history to target your ads.

No related posts.

Online Dating Industry News 9-12-11

David Evans — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:29:43 +0000

OKCupid Asking About Background Checks: By asking members questions about background checks, OkCupid can effectively poll people without seeming too much like an intrusive survey. Interestingly enough, this question appeared right after I was asked how freaky I am.

Dating Site Dominator is a subscription-site dating site aggregator that filters through top personals & dating websites like Match, PlentyOfFish, and OKCupid. Looks like $19.95 a month and its Windows-only download. Can’t imagine anyone would let them do this, we’ll see.

In honor of National Singles Week (Sept 18 to 24) Michelle Cove of Seeking Happily Every After is making the first 20 minutes of their feature-length documentary Seeking Happily Ever After (distributed by Lionsgate) available for FREE. The way to access it will be to go to the “Free on iTunes” section on iTunes only during National Singles Week. As if you needed further enticement, I’m in the documentary going on a recorded date.

Capples, Apps for Couples: Ofir from Israel has invented the first ever relationship status for iPhone which helps couples show each other how they feel in the beginning of their relationship.

The first Capple is called “Just Us”. Basically, when you show your friend at the bar how hot your girlfriend is, she gets a message saying “Your bf is thinking about you.” Check out Capple Factory to see the latest assortment of Capples.

Brandon Wade owns SeekingArrangement, SeekingMillionaire and WhatsYourPrice. Thats quite a collection of money-focused daters. Check this out, single college students registering on WhatsYourPrice as Attractive members using their dot-EDU email address will automatically receive a free upgrade and become certified as an Attractive College Co-Ed (Details). Brandon even came up with Labor Day Dating Tips for Unemployed Singles.

Chinese dating site Jiayuan is growing quickly, with second-quarter revenue more than doubling from a year earlier to $12.9 million and earnings growing at a similar pace. Jiayuan’s shares were up 21% Friday from when they listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market on May 11. More at the WSJ.

Badoo is up to 120 million members. It is the latest site, besides OkCupid (pictured) to take inspiration from HowAboutWe.

Understatement of the week: “However some users have reported copping sex-related spam through the service as the company’s 200 moderators fail to keep up with the growing hoard of users.”

Humorous Comcast “Dating On Demand” videos.

While poking around on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (crowdsourced small tasks) and came across many requests for profiles reviews. Prices ranged from .05-.20 cents per profile.

People have all sorts of clever ways to propose: StumbleUpon Helps Coordinate a Marriage Proposal.