Online Dating Insider » Research

Research Project Seeks Online Daters

David Evans — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:07:02 +0000

Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with college students working on a project about online dating. We talked about a lot of different aspects of online dating, from it’s history, to current trends and what’s coming in the future. They want to talk to more singles, can you spare a few minutes to help them out?

We are senior journalism majors working on our capstone project on technology and romantic relationships. We are interested in speaking with anyone has experience using an online dating site–whether that experience was positive or negative. If you think you want to help us out and want to find out more about our project, please email joseniorsem@gmail.com. Thank you!

Smart brights kids, why don’t you help them out and then go treat yourself to an ice cream.

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What are the best nonverbal predictors of second dates?

David Evans — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:30:19 +0000

Let’s all help out Angela, a college student studying nonverbal communication. Angela asked me to promote her survey, which should take all of five minutes. The purpose of this survey is to determine what nonverbal behaviors occur most frequently during a first date and how those nonverbal behaviors are interpreted. Perhaps the research she is doing will help out dating sites in the future.

Go take the survey, What are the best nonverbal predictors of second dates?

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Dating Blogs Drive Visitors: Why Social Media Is Killing The Press Release

David Evans — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:31:44 +0000

The dating industry has been in the public eye recently due to recent OKCupid blog posts, including The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures and The Case For An Older Woman. I cannot tell you how many press calls I’ve received in the last couple of weeks asking about what this all means for online daters.

At the same time, cable television watchers have been inundated buy the same two Match ads and some new copycat ads from eHarmony. The new Match ads are fantastic the first few times you see them. But after Burn Notice or CSI breaks to the same Match.com guy dropping his meatball on the floor for the fifth time in an hour, one wishes that Match could have spent a few more dollars cranking out a few more commercials.

On Friday, I received a call from Sam Yagan, a co-founder of OKCupid. (The other founders are Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder and Max Krohn.) We had a long conversation, talking about online dating industry trends, recent blog posts, the rise of free dating sites, Sam’s presentation and final panel experience at iDate, the status of the online dating M&A market and much more.

What I want to share with you today is a few stats about the recent blog posts Sam’s team has published which have driven a tremendous amount of traffic to OKCupid. Being interested in customer acquisition costs and the effectiveness of blogs to drive visitors, I asked Sam what sort of resources are assigned to the OKCupid blog.

Hint: if you send me interesting stats about your dating site, I’ll probably write about it here.

I like to talk to people who are open to discussing their businesses, both the wins and the challenges. That’s what turns me on, as opposed to the generally paranoid nature of the online dating industry, which I still don’t fully understand and is holding so many companies back right now.

Publishing the customer acquisition costs, churn rates, lifetime customer value and number of paying members for Match, SinglesNet and eHarmony wouldn’t change a darn thing in the online dating industry.

I wish the phrase “Rising tides raise all ships” were more prevalent in the online dating industry.

Commercials Vs. Public Relations Vs. Social Media

Think about how much Match spends on those commercials. Let’s just say $100 million overall. That’s probably way off but it doesn’t matter, I’m talking about the efforts relative to each other. Now let’s look at the cost of the OKCupid research blog.

Approximately two days a week for an engineer to work the numbers. Christian, the blog author, works on posts around 2.5 days each week. For the equivalent of approximately $50,000/year, or $1,000/week, recent OKCupid blog posts have been read more than 800,000 times a piece. And guess what, the latest post is trending *twice* as popular as the previous one. And they just started a few months ago. I can imagine that they will come up with a game-changing post at some point. Fingers crossed.

It turns out that lots of people reading the posts are married and/or not on OKCupid, resulting in legions of new brand advocates who talk about the blog posts with their friends, on their own blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is why social media matters. It’s the next generation of affiliate marketing, although nowhere near as lucrative, at least for now.

Sam was quoted in the New York Times that the first post got them 10,000 new signups. The real number is higher and I hope he will update us with new numbers at some point.

Let’s talk about press releases vs. social media. OKcupid blog posts are receiving an enormous amount of media attention, tweets, blog posts and mentions, all for $1,000/week. Compare that to sending out a press release. They have sent out exactly four press releases since 2006, the last one being February 2007.

There is a difference between the effectiveness of press releases and social media. The primary one is that press releases in general have been so overly abused over the years that the current versions are watered down in terms of news and extremely spiky in terms of traffic. People argue with me over the long tail (shelf life) of press releases, and I think that’s a bunch of baloney.

Well-crafted social media efforts, on the other hand, have a much greater potential to make a great story go viral in a very short period of time, and the overall story tends to have a longer tail. I don’t have the research handy, but the results of a typic dating site press release don’t hold a candle to the amount of attention OKCupid has been able to accomplish with fantastic blog posts.

The entire dating industry is based on acquiring any and all cheap traffic online and off. I on the other hand, am more attuned to branding, messaging and “beyond the banner” trends like social media. Can I just say that I hate the term social media? It’s really just another form of marketing, albeit newer and more exciting than buying banner ads, which is why so many people flock to it.

By publicly releasing such potentially-incendiary research, OKCupid has become dangerous. As the second largest free dating site (please correct me on this if I’m wrong), they are leveraging their ability to speak freely about their site in a way that other sites cannot, or will not reciprocate. The long-term effects of these efforts are not clear, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s all good to me.

Now there is an expectation that OKCupid will continue to deliver the goods. Unlike a press release, which unfortunately sounds like SHOUTING, OKCupid is telling a story, and we can’t wait to hear the next chapter. Nobody eagerly anticipates the next press release from a dating site.

I’ve been asking the dating industry to be more transparent and share their research for many years, and OKCupid is the first company to really take advantage of the wealth of information they have at their fingertips and turned it into a marketing machine.

Granted, the OKCupid team is way ahead of most dating sites in terms of the ability to do this sort of research, and they are much more forward-thinking than most, which gives them an unfair advantage from the start. I eagerly await other dating sites to start publishing their research as well. It’s too bad Match and eHarmony can’t/won’t do this, but there are other sites which are primed to publish.

Traditional dating site press releases are an ineffectual use of marketing resources much of the time. There are too many other channels available which carry more weight and potential upside. For example, having your site re-tweeted by a few big dating blogs could garner more attention than sending out a press release to thousands of people who probably aren’t going to write about you. It’s all about the story you are trying to tell and the action you want your readers to take. Signing up for a dating site is but one action worth considering, there are many others, like leading readers to your blog, which act as a lead-up to a confirmed subscriber.

If you want to talk about creating a social media marketing campaign for your dating site, contact me.

Disclaimer: I sometimes use the OKCupid office to park my stuff when I’m in New York.

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Unrealistic Expectations of Male Daters

David Evans — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:13:03 +0000

In The Case For An Older Woman, the OkCupid tackles a tricky topic, unrealistic expectations of male daters. In this case, mainly that men want to date much younger women. I’m going to point to a few choice quotes and leave it at that.

…Men between 22 and 30—nearly two-thirds of the male dating pool—focus almost exclusively on women younger than themselves. I’ll be investigating this phenomenon today, with gusto and charts. Ultimately, I’ll argue that they would be well-served to expand their search upwards, to women in their thirties and forties.

The median 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging teenage girls as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.

Except in their early to mid-twenties, when they apparently want nothing to do with younger guys (i.e. guys who are still in school?), women show an admirable openness to both reasonably younger and reasonably older men.

Either something very sad happens to a woman at 40, or something incredibly awesome happens at 39.

If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young, and also remove the people you won’t realistically want to date (the worst-looking women), you find that everyone else’s attractiveness doesn’t change much with age.

…Women have more pursuers than men until age 26, but thereafter a man can expect many more potential dates than a woman of the same age. At the graph’s outer edge, at age 48, men are nearly twice as sought-after as women.

Check out The Shape of the Dating Pool, it’s an interactive widget, as are a few others. The Tides Of Longing, the Zone of Greatness, older-women-are-more-sexual pattern, this is great stuff! OKCupid is absolutely killing it with this research. Bows and applause all around for the team.

I could quote this article all day long, why we both save ourselves some time, go read The Case For An Older Woman.

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One inch equals $30,000 in online dating world

David Evans — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:00:42 +0000

From the “stating the obvious” department:

CHARLOTTE OBSERVER — “A forthcoming study by a Duke University researcher and several colleagues confirms what not-so-thin women and short, broke men have long suspected: They don’t get nearly as much romantic attention as skinny women and tall, financially secure guys. Online dating research impresario Dan Ariely worked with University of Chicago researchers on the project.

Via Carpe Diem.

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At OKCupid, Openness is The Key to Success

David Evans — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:21:15 +0000

Great article about OKCupid in the New York Times, Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data.

In its fight against much bigger competitors like Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony, it has tried a number of marketing techniques, often with little success. But the blog, which OkCupid started in October, has helped get the company’s name out on other blogs and social networks. A post last month that set out to debunk conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups, according to the company.

The research obviously took a lot of time and resources, but If this doesn’t once and for all show the dating industry that there is a huge upside to being more open and informative while helping members make the most out of the online dating experience, I don’t know what will. 750,000 visitors based on a blog post!

These days I am inundated with dating site social media spam clogging up Twitter with cloaked affiliate links and T&A photo enticements. This sort of lowest-common-denominator marketing will continue because it’s cheap traffic, but I like to think that sites taking more focused on branding and efficiently are the ones who will grow the most and succeed in the long run.

Someone should do a comparison between social media traffic results and generic dating site marketing like Adwords. It would be fascinating to see comparisons between cost and effectiveness.

The OKCupid article went viral primarily because it’s something people had never read about before. It was re-tweeted many times, and media attention begets more media attention. It wasn’t 101-level dating advice like “brush your teeth before a date” like so many dating site magazines publish (with a few exceptions, which I will be talking about in coming weeks.) The tone of the blog post was not that of an academic paper, which would never have gotten the same level of exposure.

Greg Waldorf, chief executive of eHarmony, which says it has more than 20 million registered users, was dismissive of the marketing power of OkCupid’s blog reports.

Of course he was. Waldorf’s quote is garden variety CEO-speak. I understand media quotes that position a brand against competitors, but that level of snarkiness in unnecessary. eHarmony clearly doesn’t understand the importance of great profile photos, which is inexplicable.

And what’s with the 20 million registered users comment? There are lawsuits brewing over statements like that. Shame on eHarmony and Match for using these irrelevant numbers in the media. They are both going to get spanked over these statements, just you wait and see. Monthly logins is a number I’d like to see used instead.

Eharmony doesn’t have to be concerned about OKCupid, but to be dismissive of the research is an indicator of just how out of touch eHarmony has become. The trend is toward openness and empowering singles, and that’s the polar opposite of how eHarmony works.

EHarmony doesn’t share anything. They are like the North Korea of the online dating industry. A big black box and a giant marketing machine. They have their top-5 position in the marketplace and will be there for many, many years to come. It’s imperative to understand how brilliantly eHarmony built the company, from the $100 million dollar early fundraising, to the commercials, and the fact that eHarmony is perfect for busy and lazy people who don’t feel like spending five hours a week on Match and need a lot of handholding.

Eharmony’s empire is built on a matching system that nobody really understands outside of the company. It’s probably the best black-box compatibility system available and there is nothing any competitors can do about it. Except Chemistry, which is spending tens of millions of dollars to take the edgy/urban/alternative people away from eHarmony, with varying degrees of success.

I wish someone could compare eHarmony to Chemistry.com and Perfectmatch. In the meantime, the Catalyst Group in New York has done an exhaustive comparison of Match and eHarmony, A Usability Study of Online Dating is the best review of two dating sites I’ve ever seen. Every dating industry executive should read the entire report.

Read a Usability Study of Online Dating

While I’m at it, I would also like to see IAC break out Match and Chemistry financials and to report each PeopleMedia property on it’s own. Hey, we can dream.

PlentyOfFish thinks I’ve got a crush on OKCupid, and it’s true. I will not hide the fact that I believe that OKCupid is hands-down the best introduction site for urban, sex-positive, educated, liberated and worldly singles. No other site even comes close.

In fact, I unsubscribed from PlentyOfFish today. Longtime readers know that I subscribe and unsubscribe from dating sites all the time, and this time it’s POF. I’ve been on numerous great OKCupid dates recently and for me, personally, POF just isn’t delivering. And it’s not like PlentyOfFish is going to change anytime soon, at least from the member perspective. So I’m out, at least for a while. I’m going to replace POF with Match.

Maybe I’ll re-join eHarmony, but I’ve been on that ride before, not expecting a different experience, but it’s good to go through the signup process every once in a while to see what’s changed.

Note: not belonging to a dating site doesn’t mean I ignore it. I have logins all over the place, and my favorite market research has always been pulling out the laptop with friends and having them log into their favorite sites and search and emailing people together.

One final bit about PlentyofFish before I sign off. I’m sure that people in the dating industry have discussed these topics ad nausea, but I ran into POF execs at iDate and wanted to clarify my thoughts.

For a handful of people up in Canada running an international site nearing 100 million monthly logins, their stratospheric grow is unprecedented and worthy of a business school case study someday.

As a business, POF is trying to break through to the next level. The company is doing everything it can to monetize the stupefying number of logins it receives each month. Word on the street is that in Canada POF is landing higher-class advertisers, which I don’t see when I log in here in Boston. Anything they can do to lessen the number of slutty ads will be a bonus for all users and raise revenue accordingly.

Problem is, the company is too small, not to mention the fact that reliance on advertising is never going to get them to that magical $30-$50 million in revenue. What was once a bragging right has become a hindrance. To begin with, they need to broaden the team. Five people can’t possibly build out the strategy and execution plan that gets a free dating site from $15 million to $30 million. Not being critical of management, just realistic of the efforts involved and how revenue growth tends to swell the ranks.

While I’m certainly an avid OKCupid fan, PlentyofFish has a much larger opportunity to grow, especially internationally. Markus and the team need to focus on evolving the definition of the company from “we’re popular” to “we’re successful,” and that is no small feat.

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Tracking Worldwide LoveMaking With I Just Made Love

David Evans — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:16:58 +0000

Last week my neighbor was playing Vivaldi with the volume at 11 on a Sunday morning. This of course means that he was getting busy. If the music didn’t give him away, I could have figured out what was going on by visiting I Just Made Love, an interactive map that displays the location of people having sex all over the world. With optional descriptions of what they did, photos, search, it’s a tantalizing distraction, at least for a few minutes. And yes, there’s an app for that. This is now my favorite app besides the iBrator and the Sex Offender Database in terms of the best apps to show people. More at the Daily Beast.

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One-Third of Facebook Users Are Single

David Evans — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:20:30 +0000

A while back, Facebook came up with the United States Gross National Happiness. measurement.

When people in their status updates use more positive words–or fewer negative words–then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.

The graph contains several metrics. The first, GNH, represents our measure of Gross National Happiness. The other two, Positivity and Negativity, represent the two components of GNH: The extent to which words used on that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores, though they are interesting to view on their own.

People post happier status updates around Holidays, which have their own negative rating as well (people who don’t like the holidays, Mother’s Day, etc.)

On Valentine’s Day, Facebook posted Relationships and Happiness, posing the question, Does having that someone special really make us happy?

People who are in a relationship seem less happy compared to married folks, but there is less variation in both positivity and negativity amongst married people.

People who do not disclose their relationship status are about 50% more negative than everyone else…. About 30% of women and 40% of men on Facebook are listed as single.

Let’s say that Facebook has approximately 100 million singles. That’s the same number of singles in the US. Can we use these rough estimates to predict how many singles will use Facebook to find a date? I don’t have singles-per-country data at hand, but I wonder if the 30% number holds true around the world.

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Sextistics: Your Sex Stats

David Evans — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 23:05:58 +0000

TLC is doing a special Valentine’s night show called Sextistics: Your Love Life. A few stats to get you warmed up.

The average man’s ideal woman is 60lbs lighter than him.
A woman will get chatted up in bar 6 minutes faster if she is wearing make up.
Last year 21% of dates were organized via e-mail and 5% of relationships were ended by text.
98% of Americans have experienced unrequited love.
Ladies don’t drink more than 1.5 glasses of wine more than your date – a turn off for most men.
For every $5000 extra a woman earns over her partner, their risk of divorce goes up by 5%.
Over 2% of all heart attacks have been directly attributed to having a broken heart.
Divorce has been proven to reduce a man’s life expectancy by 3.7 years.

Dr. Helen Fisher, creator of the Chemistry.com matching system, is featured, along with several other experts.

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This Facebook Data Set Will Blow Your Mind

David Evans — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:08:47 +0000

Yesterday I mentioned How to split up the US, which it turns out is just a taste of the analysis that researchers will be doing on the massive Facebook dataset made up of 210 million profiles set to be unleashed tomorrow but Pete Warden. That’s right, yours and mine, with our names intact (and some personally identifiable information removed.)

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public.

I have been asking the online dating industry to do exactly this for at least five years. It makes me sad to think about all of those lonely hearts who will never find their match because their data is being squandered by companies more interested in profit than actually helping singles discover each other. Just think of all that juicy data hidden behind closed doors.
I bet some Netflix teams could improve online dating efficiency by 10 percent pretty easily. Wait that’s IntroAnalytics.

If dating profiles were open-source, we would have lots of matching and discovery services companies built on top of a giant dating dataset. Imagine if the most effective/efficient companies are the one’s that would win. Not the ones with the biggest marketing budget. I know, crazy talk!
As for niche sites, sure, they are hot right now, but that’s not going to last forever. Make your money while you can because its only going to get harder to win paying customers, especially with changes coming to the e-commerce landscape in coming months.
Look what Pete says in How to harvest Facebook profiles from emails without logging in:

Recently I was surprised to discover that you don’t need to be signed in to an account to search by email addresses and match them to profiles. To my mind this is a nasty hole both because it gives companies legal cover to resell the linked data, and in practice makes it tough for Facebook to crack down on firms siphoning off user data.

He describes exactly what you have to do to get those profiles. Wow. I wonder how many people have exposed this flaw?

Read Readwriteweb’s The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul for the full details of tomorrows launch. I hope the dating industry will at least pay attention to what people are doing with the data. We’re going to see many assumptions crushed, assertions tested and learn a whole lot about ourselves and society in a very short time.

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