Online Dating Insider » Dating Profiles

Rocket Ninja Launches Lightweight Dating App Be3D

David Evans — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:19:58 +0000

While we wait for society and dating sites to figure out how to do video profiles and videochat, the dating industry has had one option when it comes to getting past static profiles.

OmniDate, which many readers will remember from iDates past, was the only pure-play avatar-based dating system. When I first tried Omnidate I sketched out exactly what they had to do to get to the point where they could comfortably say they had a minimum viable product for the dating industry. The problem was throwing up a background jpeg and some cutesy avatar gestures wasn’t enough to catch the eye of the dating industry. It turns out that you get just about as much emotive bandwidth out of IMVU or Yahoo Messenger. Try as they might, the founders ended up selling the company.

With 50 million registered users, 10+ million unique visitors per month and a $50+ million annualized revenue run rate, IMVU has long been a leader in the avatar chat space. But there is always room for improvement, because its all about increasing emotive bandwidth. I just wish these apps were built in HTML5 and not Flash.

Developer Rocket Ninja has created a Facebook app called Be3D. The app will “Transform yourself into your ultimate 3D persona and express your personality, humor, and style while developing relationships, old and new.”

Inside Social Games says:

The present build ofBe3D allows users to engage in pre-scripted actions, such as dancing or high five-ing with members of their 3D networks and gift virtual goods to one another. Pelled explains that users will be able to find and add new friends to their network via search parameters like gender, age and location — as one might with an online dating service. Pelled explains Be3D will monetize through a combination of video ads, hard currency, virtual goods — like clothing and the aforementioned facial customization — and product placement. Pelled also says there are plans for an affiliate referral program in the works, but the system isn’t in place yet.

Be3D is in beta, and missing serious social or dating features. Rocket Ninja raised $7.5 million in funding last November, and promises to deliver custom avatars, games and chat.

The bigger picture here is that more companies are bringing deeper immersive experiences to Facebook. Mostly in the casual chat category, expect new dating-focused chat apps to emerge this year. All I want to do is record a 2-minute video and attach it to my dating profile. Is that so much to ask?

Profile Sellers, The Dating Industry’s Bad Actors

David Evans — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:24:31 +0000

Photo credit: betabeat.com

Anyone who’s been on a dating site has seen them. She’s a beautiful girl with poor grammar skills. She wants to talk via her Yahoo email account and within a few emails she’s often asking for money to come visit you. Thats a clear indication of a dating site scammer, and just about everyone who’s ever joined a dating site has experienced a similar situation.

The dating industry is finally starting to come around to protecting the safety of their members in a meaningful way, but only after much legal pressure and several waves of recent bad press. Just Google “Match lawsuits” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

However, a newer, and more insidious problem has emerged in recent years, and its one that, while not an immediate threat to one’s personal safety or bank account, is no less nefarious in my opinion.

More and more dating site startups that are buying dating profiles in bulk to bolster their user databases. On one hand they purport to take your safety and well-being seriously, while in the back room they’re wheeling and dealing with profile vendors, and other dating sites, to acquire profiles to fill in troublespots, where there’s not enough density for the site to be competitive. It could be a geographic area, or it could be a lack of lesbians or bikers.

The reason that profiles-for-sale have become a topic of discussion is because its expensive to acquire new members for dating site startups, and there is a huge jump in dating startups this year centered around mobile and social dating. I’m often asked about whether or not a site should acquire dating profiles to avoid the empty database problem. Each and every time my recommendation is no. Put on your big-boy pants and do what everyone else does, sign up new members, one at a time.

My reasoning is simple. If you can’t grow a site from zero to several thousand members in a few months through Google, Facebook or ads on POF, you probably shouldn’t be in the business. Dating sites are 100% driven by ad spend and affiliate marketing and as I tell new startups, you’re not in the dating business, you’re in the Internet marketing business now. The fact of the matter is that it takes thousands of dollars to acquire enough customers in a specific geographic area to “take off”, and there’s no way around it.

To dig into the cloaked world of dating profile sales, BetaBeat purchased dating site profiles from one of the companies that offers them.

Betabeat emailed 208 men and women whose profiles are being sold on SaleDatingProfiles. Most didn’t reply; 35 emails bounced. Only five people responded, none of whom knew their profiles were for sale. Harry Lin, a 61-year-old in Switzerland, noticed that a profile he started at Jumpdates.com had somehow made its way to Mega Dating and the now-defunct Sensual-Attraction.com. “They have my email, user name, birthday and *former* Jumpdates password!” he wrote in an email.

As BetaBeat found out, its the small questionable niche sites which tend to utilize purchased profiles. The majority of singles don’t use these sites, which is why the topic hasn’t been that big of a deal. A side bar discussion about how white label dating sites share profiles among its customers is mentioned as well.

Personally I don’t understand why more sites don’t band together and offer Mega-subscriptions, where you can sign up once for many sites, potentially across multiple brands. There has got to be a way to do this that makes sense for both dating sites and singles.

Mark Brooks, a popular figurehead in the online dating industry says he once fired a client for buying profiles. That is a great sound bite, but if we’re talking about firing clients for poor behavior, why stop at those that buy profiles? What about the illegal billing practices, the lack of ID verification, the sites full of scammers, the utter lack of any decent verified matching systems and the automated enticement emails from fake members sent to people who’s billing cycle is about to end?

Online dating, like any Internet-based industry, exists because of years of positive efforts attributable to a small number of fantastic companies run by people I admire personally and professionally. Unfortunately these shining examples in the sector are heavily outnumbered by the sheer amount of tenacity of bad actors which continue to make enormous amounts of money by fleecing singles by means of any number of unsavory business practices.

Every so often someone accuses me of focusing on the negative aspects of the dating industry too much. Of that I am guilty as charged. My goal has always been to elevate the business of online dating and help it grow as a whole. Sometimes that means calling out bad behavior in the hopes that new companies will focus on the big picture and opportunity instead of the intoxicating and heady get-rich-quick by any means necessary mindset thats so pervasive in the online dating market. Online dating is never going to be a utopian and perfect industry, but we should at least talk about what is possible and fair and right, for both dating site operators and single alike.

Read Is Your Dating Site Selling Your Profile? To Keep Membership High, Niche Sites Get Sly at Betabeat for the rest of the story.

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.

Online Dating Eye-Tracking Study

David Evans — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:00:45 +0000

Eye-tracking studies and neuromarketing has always fascinated me. Just last week I was looking at the Emotiv EEG headset (me want!), which is getting into reading brainwaves and eye-tracking at the same time, which excited me to no end.

Why should the dating industry care? Today we see that Tobii Technology and AnswerLab announcing the results of an eye-tracking study showing that men spend 65 percent more time reviewing photos in online dating profiles than women do. Alternatively, women spend 50 percent more time than men reading profile information about their prospective partner’s background and interests.

The study included 39 participants, 18 female and 21 male, who each were interviewed before and after viewing dating profiles on both Match and eHarmony. From the gaze patterns collected, it was discovered that male subjects spend 65 percent more time viewing their potential partner’s photo and 50 percent less time analyzing the profile overall, when compared with the gaze data of female subjects.

40 participants in a random cafe in San Francisco is hardly a scientific study, but I believe the results jive with another eye-tracking study from a few years ago. Most of the results are common sense/knowledge, but its always good to add additional information to the pile.

Lets get to the findings:

Women spent an average of 84 seconds evaluating a profile to assess if it was a match, while men spent an average of 58 seconds.

Men tend to focus on the profile photo.

In some instances, men spent as much as 65 percent more of their time than women looking at the profile photos.

There is also some good information for dating sites to consider.

A profile that showcased personality at the top of the page was perceived as more personal.

A profile that prominently displayed a list of traits was perceived as more businesslike.

I like that Tobii gave out some free advice for dating sites. This is mostly 101-level User Interface/User Experience stuff but good to remember. Far too many dating sites have awfully-designed templates that often do nothing to improve conversions (People Media comes to mind, but at least a few of their sites seem to be improving and looking better).

Implement a streamlined navigation: Avoid too many calls-to-action in the top navigation that can confuse users and distract them from the main profile and its key interactive elements.

Highlight key profile information: Reduce clutter and streamline key profile information (name, location, etc.) to make it easily discoverable.

Carefully weigh your monetization strategies with the user experience: Minimize the disruptions your advertising and subscription models have upon profile viewing. Assess the placement, frequency and style of ads or up-sells to reduce distractions and enhance effectiveness.

If you want to try eye-tracking on your site, contact Tobii. Another thing to check out is Clicktale, which monitores where the mouse is on a web page. There are plenty of smaller open-source options like Text2.0 thing that does eye tracking right in the browser.

One can hope that these new technologies will supplant the old “stick people in a room and videotape them looking at your dating site” way that everyone from Match to eHarmony has been doing for years.

After all, A/B testing is smart, multivariate testing is complicated and amazingly powerful (you can also shoot yourself in the foot), but plugging people’s brains and eyes into your laptop and finding out what works best for your dating site, thats just awesome.

Most sites just want to increase conversions, but knowing why one design tests better than another is the next frontier for online marketing, opening up a whole new world of possibilities for keeping that sales funnel as slippery as possible.

If this is the least bit interesting, check out neuromarketing as well, a fascinating rabbit hole to dive into for a few hours.

Love at First Byte: The Secret Science of Online Dating

David Evans — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:59:00 +0000

For the past few months I’ve been working with CNBC on a new dating special that airs next week. Here’s a clip, which features OKCupid’s Sam Yagan, Match and a few other dating sites.

From the show’s website: NBC News and Today Show Correspondent Amy Robach reveals how online daters are using cutting-edge technology in search of love and how digital entrepreneurs are getting rich helping them do it.

You’ll meet scientists, mathematicians and psychologists who claim they can draw revealing conclusions about you from what you do — and don’t do — on their websites. Can online dating really deliver what it promises? CNBC takes you inside a business trying to unlock the secrets of the human heart with science.

Love at First Byte: The Secret Science of Online Dating
Premieres Thursday, February 9th 9p | 10p | 12a | 1a ET

What Are Dating Sites Doing With Your Facebook Information?

David Evans — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 20:21:20 +0000

Lately I’ve become more and more concerned with what websites and apps are doing with my personal information on Facebook. As previously noted, I have disconnected just about every single dating app, Facebook and website/web service from Facebook, because I had absolutely no idea what any of these companies were doing with my information and I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of value from these deep connections with my “social exhaust”.

Leveraging Facebook Connect to streamline the customer signup process can be quite useful to dating sites and singles alike, but leaving that connection in place doesn’t make much sense if the dating site isn’t doing anything useful with your information. And guess what, most sites don’t. They can vacuum up your information all day long, and to what purpose? Where is the transparency past the generic “Facebook wants to access your wall, Likes, Friends, Etc, click here or be gone.”

I’ve long been a proponent of Facebook-based dating apps and Facebook Connect, and still, nobody is doing anything very interesting with your Facebook data. Lots of companies claim to be revolutionizing online dating with Facebook. Exactly three companies are doing this, Zoosk, Are You Interested and Badoo. Where is the innovation here?

Innovative matching based on FB interests? Nobody is doing that. Posting interesting stuff on my wall? Nobody is doing that. Knowing the names of everyone in my family on Facebook? No thanks. The granularity of sharing your personal information on Facebook is way to loose-goosey for my tastes.

To make matters more complicated, dating sites need to earn my trust before I allow them access to my feed and its associated data (photos, likes, etc). From now on, I’m signing up for all new services , not just dating sites, with an old-school username and password. I’m happy to connect via Facebook if the site in question can prove that doing so will be more beneficial than not. But you have to earn my trust, its not going to be implicit and “one click and here we go” any longer.

I shouldn’t be so hard on dating sites. This is big complicated stuff that has nothing to do with lowering customer acquisition costs, anti-fraud and credit card billing. But then I wouldn’t be doing my job.

So, when are we going to see a dating site do something cool with Facebook? Throwing your dating site in an iFrame is not exactly leveraging Facebook for all its worth. I do receive periodic emails from people claiming to be at the brink of revolutionizing online dating. Thats great, I’m ready to have a look when you are. Don’t forget the boatload of cash you’ll need to get traction and the cautionary tales of the scores of companies that crashed and burned trying similar things on Facebook before you.

While thinking about this post, I went to sign up for Grouper, and it turns out that the only way one can join is via Facebook. Grouper is a Facebook-based social application, so the Facebook signup makes sense, but they should absolutely let people sign up with a traditional username/password combo. I wonder how many people bounce off the home page at the sight of the Facebook Join button? Here’s an Interview with Grouper founder Jerry Guo.

Group dating, social dating, entrepreneurs are doing anything they can to get away from “traditional” dating sites. They know they can’t beat Match in a fair fight, and niche (pretty much done and done at this point) and social are really the only options unless you want to go big and create a more effective matching algorithm which isn’t for the faint of heart, or pocketbook. Oh and mobile too. Same story there. A handful of apps that are 1/2-decent, with 50 copycats and a bunch of other apps that never got anywhere and disappeared before anyone could find out about them. Talk about a tough market to win in. Thank God for Huffington Post, otherwise most of these apps would remain in obscurity.

What new and cool dating apps are you using in conjunction with Facebook? I’m sure I’m missing some hot number that has just launched.

No related posts.

The State Of Online Dating Academic Research

David Evans — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:21:37 +0000

New York Times has compiled a Latest Hits of online dating and relationship research. As with a new John Mayer or Coldplay album, with most dating research you already know what you’re going to get even before you dig into the data.

While somewhat enlightening, I’ve been listening to the same people say the same thing for a almost a decade now. The only difference is the nuance and surprise that researches tend to exhibit when it comes to the most basic stats that anyone who’s been on a dating site for more than a week would know.

I’d like to see a single research report that has led to innovation, increased efficiency a higher happiness quotient for dating site members.

I’m still waiting…

Major dating sites had more than 593 million visits in the United States last month. Now that gave me pause. That’s probably about 500 million for Match properties and the remainder spread around to The Niches.

Someone should do a study on the number of people who met their mate online and see what their happiness and divorce rates are. In particular, eHarmony, Plentyoffish (or do we call it POF now, I don’t get it.)

Here’s my favorite campaign-season stat. Let’s mine the most generic profile stats and pretend we are amazed that people’s politics actually makes a difference in picking a mate. Of course trotting out the only bi-party relationship in the world, James Carville and Mary Matalin. I vote that no one ever mentions those two again in regards to relationships ever again.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the most important finding in the article:

What people say they want in a mate and what qualities they actually seek don’t tend to correspond,” said Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the School of Information at Berkeley who has studied this with Mr. Fiore, Professor Mendelsohn and Lindsay Shaw Taylor, a member of the school’s self, identity and relationships lab.

Finally, an interesting point is (re-)made, Bravo. This is a key point behind behavioral matching. What you think you want and what you actually need are often two totally different things. Dating sites like Match and OKCupid and POF get this, and are (one hopes) continuing to evolve their matching systems to take user behavior into consideration.

I find this absolutely fascinating and could talk about it all day. Unfortunately there are few people in the industry that a) believe and b) understand this stuff enough to put it into action on dating sites. And even less that want to have a beer and dig into the details.

If Zoosk made $100 million this year and they have the Zoosk matching system thats so powerful, then how come its not mentioned here?

Badoo reads this stuff and laughs. Matching systems, we don’t need to stinkin’ matching systems. Oops, we just billed your credit card another $25, enjoy talking to the 436,632 non-english speaking people (that aren’t really) in your area.

Everyone knows that dating profiles bring a bare minimum of insight into one’s personality. Where’s the fascinating research into facial coding, astrology, and a few other Big Important Useful things that would make online dating so much easier and effective? The resistance of the online dating industry to even express a modicum of interest in these ideas remains a sad point. If there was no Netflix prize, I doubt anyone would be doing behavioral matching in online dating at this time.

Look at how Google and Facebook innovate, each and every month. Go look at 10 niche dating sites. All owned by the same few companies, running the same 5-year-old templates, with seriously underpowered search engines. Now we’re going to go through niche site saturation, which is going to kill off a whole bunch of dating sites over the next few years, but that’s a story for another time.

The Times article goes on to say that The Journal of Communication used computer analysis to show that four linguistic indictors can help detect lying in the personal essay of a dating profile. I thought we had figured this out a long time ago? That’s what I was working on at Profile Doctor back in 2004.

Overweight and short people lie on dating sites all the time. The dating industry needs to stop talking about how people lie, take some pride and responsibility and do a better job creating more dynamic profiles that accurately reflect a person’s tastes and preferences, regardless of the teeth-grinding dullness they fill their profile essays with.

Why not offer verified photos and an identity check and remove the problem from the table? Oh wait, that hasn’t worked so far, let those fat short old people lie to their heart’s content. Ka-ching!

Researchers found a very high rate of same-ethnicity dating. Just like they did last year, and the year before that (They also found that people breath air). This is where (sadly) someone reading this is thinking, “ZOMG! I need to start a white-only niche dating site.” Actually that’s a great idea for the home-wreckers at Ashely Madi$on. Go for it guys, make us proud.

Thanks to our merry band of intrepid researchers and the NY Times, we know all too well what opaque (not our fault blame the dating site!) and sad liars online daters are (your truly included). Now its time to do something about it. I had no idea that I could go ask the National Science Foundation for a grant to do some research that actually improves online dating.

I wonder who’s press release kicked this story off?

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Facebook Makes Online Dating Easier

David Evans — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:18:29 +0000

Admin update: having some trouble with the blog, hopefully get it sorted out soon.

Have you looked at the new Subscribe button on Facebook? Among other things it lets people read your updates without being your friend. This, my friends, is yet another indication that Facebook is rolling out features that can ostensibly be used for dating. They just need to read the rest of this post and figure out if more granular subscription options or group invites is the best way to go about sharing specific Facebook data with romantic strangers.

This week I’ve had a number of people tell me about their experiences sharing their Facebook profiles with potential dates. Here’s one way to make Facebook for you in your dating life: Create a new group called AboutMe or something similar, post items you want potential dates to be able to view, and share your facebook url with them (I have a custom url, don’t you?).

What would be even cooler is a link that decays over time, becoming inoperable after say 72 hours. That way you know that those creepers can’t get back into your profile after a first glance.

The subscription button could also allow longer-term access to profile data, sort of like what OkCupid has been doing for years.

Is Facebook going to undermine the entire online dating industry? Of course it is, just a matter of time. Until them, singles should use their Facebook profiles to share details about their tastes, personality and preferences with potential dates. You know, the things that traditional dating sites aren’t very good at doing.

After all, you’ve never seen a Facebook post start with “I can’t believe I’m doing this…”

Read Introducing the Subscribe Button and start using Facebook to meet your match today.

Oh and congrats to Friend Finder Networks for acquiring PerfectMatch. Hopefully they don’t follow in the footsteps of Spark Networks and kill it off like Spark did Engage. Love the idea of the Penthouse business doing deals with the Lifetime network.

What’s the next PerfectMatch product-placement going to be, Must Love Buxom Babes?

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Dating Industry News November 12, 2012

David Evans — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 13:45:12 +0000

The High Court rejected claims made by US online dating company Plentyoffish Media that it was entitled to assert rights over UK-registered trademarks because it had high UK visitor numbers to its website.

The domain UDate.org is for sale. Email Lee @ lbraxton03@gmail.com for details.

eHarmony Australia has recently released their new iPad app, eHarmony HD, available for free from the iTunes App Store. Also, eHarmony subsidiary Jazzed launches photo-sharing app and is featured in a dating television show. Does anyone think that Jazzed is making an impact? I’m seeing around 100k/month visitors.

NFC will help people find romance.

A recent survey by the University of Leicester suggests that as many as 200,000 people in the UK have fallen victim to online dating scams.

My Love Life is new dating and intimacy app to keep track of and log all aspects of your dates, flirts, sex life and personal activities. Available in itunes for $2.99.

I’ve seen a number of references to the IBISWorld U.S. Dating Industry Report. If you’ve read read it, was it worth the price?

Technology Cancels Out Dating’s Three Day Rule.

Bad Online Dates announces the launch of a new Rescue Bad Dates with Astrology Toolkit.

Jiayuan IPO Research (historical).

New mobile dating and discovery app: WhosHere. Send free texts, images, even VOIP calls, without giving out so much as an email address or phone number.

Online match-maker, eHarmony.com.au, is set to launch a new multi-million dollar integrated marketing campaign to redirect and refresh the brand.

OkCupid has released TameJs, developer tools that make managing certain aspects of dating site code easier to write and manage. What other dating sites are sharing code?

Dan Winchester from FreeDating.co.uk has done some research to find out the likely outcome of a first date, based on information available in a typical online dating profile.

No related posts.

Match Wants Facebook Profiles, And How

David Evans — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 22:53:06 +0000

Back from a week in the woods. Have to find a new place to live in the next few weeks and my car died, not how I expected my summer to go, but that’s life.

Plentyoffish blog says that a recent IAC investor call featuring Match CEO Greg Blatt mentions the Okcupid team signed a deal to stay on for a year and is focused building a Badoo clone that will get profiles via Facebook to compete in the space. Badoo. Sure its big but what a terrible service. Spam and junk all over the place.

In the past, Match has toyed half-heartedly with acquiring profiles via Facebook, but until now, paying for ad space like everyone else has been the only way to get any significant traffic.

After a few years of a learning curve (Deal with Are You Interested, Little Black Book), perhaps Match can step up to the plate.

The investor call is supposed to be available for 180 days. A month after the event and the call has been pulled down already. Anyone have an audio archive of it? I’d love to hear it.

Match.com Pegasus Limited, Mojo Acquisition Corp, Elicia Acquisition Corp, interesting. Thats a whole lot of tax advantage right there. Interesting reading in regards to the Match deal with Meetic. The deal alone will cost 3 million Euros.

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