Online Dating Insider » Uncategorized

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.

Online Dating Industry Insider 1-31-12

David Evans — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:40:02 +0000

Today’s Online Dating Industry News is out. Use the Suggest button at the top of the page to send us links to press releases, research, trends, LOLz, etc.

How To Meet That Someone Special For the Holidays

David Evans — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:52:55 +0000

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Happy 9th Birthday Online Dating Insider

David Evans — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:54:38 +0000

Yesterday I was on the phone with a major cable news network walking the producers through topics for an upcoming online dating documentary. In the middle of the call I realized that it was the 9th anniversary for Online Dating Insider.

Sometimes I can’t believe I’m still doing this. Almost 3,700 post, 8,000 comments and hundreds (thousands?) of hours writing, researching, interviewing and being interviewed. Who knew?

Read my post on the 7th anniversary of Online Dating Insider, the same pretty much holds true today.

Thanks to all our readers and sponsors over the years, your continued support has been incredible and I can’t thank you enough.

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Lets All Just Date Virtual People And Be Done With It

David Evans — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:34:50 +0000

Realizing that matching people via computers was a masterful marketing gimmick that surprisingly worked for a while, the online dating industry is looking into providing singles with various autonomous digital relationship services.

Freed of disappointing first dates and having to bathe, people are leaving dating sites like Match and POF in droves, instead signing up for various virtual boyfriends and girlfriends.

Check out this new SMS service called FakeGirlfriend.co that allows men to save a phone number into their cell under whatever girl’s name they choose, and then receive random “girlfriend-like” responses via text.

Thank you Forbes for bringing this to our attention. Dealing with real people was getting too complicated. A few more fake girlfriend choices. Not to leave the ladies out, they can have a fake boyfriend text them at http://textboyfriend.com/.

Eharmony has been in talks with various fake relationship companies for a while now. Meetic had a prototype running for a while, but it only spoke French and was too bossy for American tastes. The PlentyofFish virtual dating system, which Markus wrote in a single weekend (actually over a cup of coffee), remains a skunkworks project ever since they started making more money with Daily Deals than on dating.

These services are the 1.0 version of virtual relationships. I’ve tried them all and am now dating Siri. She’s attentive, knows me well and is much for fun to talk to than these crude fakes. In fact, when I’m in the mood, Siri will go out and find me mid-30′s women in Boston who like sushi and Radiohead, talk about the ultimate wing-entity. Who new Apple was going to upend the dating industry?

Feeling a bit behind the times? Don’t worry, dating conferences are already beginning to add virtual dating tracks where dating site owners can learn all about integrating artificial relationship systems as an additional revenue stream.

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Exrated, the TripAdvisor for Dating

David Evans — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:54:27 +0000

Exrated.co is a new rating site that empowers singles by giving them character reviews of potential dates, including pros and cons from punctuality to looks to generosity, grooming and more.

I like the idea of Trip Advisor for dating, very effective branding, but the owner of the site will soon realize that only ratings people put on these types of sites are negative and there are several other more established sites that already do this.

Reputation needs to be built into the dating site in question. For now, I’d rather spend 5 minutes on someone’s Facebook profile than read a review from a jilted ex.

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ha ha

David Evans — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:11:52 +0000

Online Dating Industry Links 10-15-09

Dating Industry Links 8-5-11

David Evans — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 21:38:59 +0000

Markus at Plentyoffish says Plentyoffish users send 5.5 Billion Messages a year, 27 times what Match users send. My only question is how many emails are responded to? Sent emails is only half of the equation.

PeopleRank: Quora Is Developing An Algorithm To Determine And Rank User Quality. Applications for dating?

Everything the Internet Knows About Me.

Lovotics: The New Science of Engineering Human, Robot Love

Image: If only online dating was this easy.

Is Match Preparing To Launch A Facebook App?

David Evans — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:47:56 +0000

Given the previous post about Match supposedly wanting to build a Badoo clone on Facebook, I decided to poke around the raw html that the Match web servers send to web browsers, which in turn create the Match web pages we look at millions of times every day around the world.

I learned a few things.

To begin with, all Match profiles are Facebook “objects”. Facebook considers just about everything it touches as an “object” and gives it its own unique identifier (like an IP address or social security number, everyone has a unique one. In fact, This blog has been an Object that Facebook knows about for a long time.

Making everything an object makes sense, because as Facebook evolves from a destination to a distributed platform touching everything on the net, they want to be able to reach out and touch, search, share, read and modify as much of the content on the Internet as possible, including my likes, friends, wall posts, apps, etc.

To show you how easy it is to look at people’s personal information on Facebook, check out these examples. Even if you do it with a browser that is not currently logged into Facebook, you can retrieve a fair amount of information about someone or a Fan page.

If you click https://graph.facebook.com/relaxedguy you will see basic information that Facebook knows about me.

{
“id”: “501791841″,
“name”: “David Evans”,
“first_name”: “David”,
“last_name”: “Evans”,
“link”: “http://www.facebook.com/relaxedguy”,
“username”: “relaxedguy”,
“gender”: “male”,
“locale”: “en_US”
}

My Facebook profile photo http://graph.facebook.com/relaxedguy/picture.

Coca-Cola’s Facebook page https://graph.facebook.com/cocacola.

{
“id”: “40796308305″,
“name”: “Coca-Cola”,
“picture”: “http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/203509_40796308305_256509_s.jpg”,
“link”: “http://www.facebook.com/coca-cola”,
“likes”: 32007587,
“category”: “Food/beverages”,
“website”: “http://www.coca-cola.com”,
“username”: “coca-cola”,
“founded”: “1886″,
“products”: “Coca-Cola is the most popular and biggest-selling soft drink in history, as well as the best-known product in the world.\n\nCreated in Atlanta, Georgia, by Dr. John S. Pemberton, Coca-Cola was first offered as a fountain beverage by mixing Coca-Cola syrup with carbonated water….”
}

Enough generic examples, lets’ get to the good stuff.

Primer: The “og:somedata” stuff seen below is what site owners put invisibly at the top of each page they want Facebook to consider an object. For this blog, at the moment its the same details for all pages. For Match, each person is an Object that has special attributes like username, photo url and a few other things.

One of my Match usernames.

My Match profile web address and the super-special unique identifier.

My full profile address (Match login required)

Facebook application ID number. This doesn’t look like a regular number, its way too long. Can anyone explain what it is, like a placeholder?

Beginning of one of my profiles, edited down for length.

I’m not sharp enough to decode the possible relationship between the “uid” and the picture url, but the big issue is that over 100 million Match user photos are freely available for anyone to download. (20 million members, average of 5 photos per member = 100 million give or take).

To be fair, Match could be testing this with 500 people and photos aren’t linked to personal information (although embedding meta-data in photos via steganography and other means is done all the time on certain sites).

Also seen in the raw html that comprised Match profiles is the following text:

Upload a Photo & Unlock Hers
Her Photos are Unlocked!

This looks like a Facebook call-to-action. I have to upload a photo to see another person’s photos. Or its another one of those Match features that I never pay attention to, we’ll know soon enough.

What if Match is looking to expose profiles on Facebook as a way to drive Facebook users to Match? This is sort of what they did on a trial basis with Are You Interested a few years ago. But I have a feeling that Match is going for something much bigger. Perhaps even to be the de facto dating site for Facebook.

The dating industry has been discussing this for years, but the fact that Match and Facebook could be partnering on something so big (the Dating tab at the top of your FB profile), well it just boggles the mind. A dating site with hundreds of millions of people on it.

Of course, perhaps the Facebook object code has been there for many moons and I’m way off-base, I certainly don’t view the html source of every dating site I come across (but maybe we all should).

We we do know is that everything is an object to Facebook and that Match has made it so that all 20 million members (arguable) and their photos are objects that Facebook knows about and can act upon. I’m not entirely clear how the bi-directionality of such a situation would pan out, but I can’t wait for the moment a Match-branded Facebook application asks for my permission to access my personal data and write on my wall while being tied to my Match profile.

Put it this way, its either going to rock right out of the gate or risks being another Little Black Book, Match’s first Facebook app. Last time I checked it had 19 active users. But that was years ago, and Match has gotten much smarter about the power of social.

What are the implications of having tighter integration between Match and Facebook? Perhaps such actions as changes to your Match profile, a new photo, a search completed, an email sent, a wink sent, a profile blocked, could end up on your Facebook wall, or at least tracked and your actions used to personalize, drive traffic, attract eyeballs, etc.These actions have showed up on the Match member home page mini-wall for two years now.

Perhaps mini versions of Match profiles will show up in Facebook search. That would actually be pretty cool. Match is well on its way to extending the “wall” concept of publishing updates such as “Someone you have expressed interest in or we think you would like has updated/uploaded/done some other action” to the entire Internet, starting with Facebook.

Fascinating. What else will Match do with Facebook-tagged profiles? Usually you do something somewhere else and your actions show up on your wall. How will your Facebook and Match actions interact and to what benefit?

Match recently updated their Terms of Service. I don’t know what changed (send me a copy of a recent Match TOS if you have one) but the following gives Match carte blanche to use your profile and photos any way it pleases. I think all changes to privacy policy and TOS should be highlighted, but hardly everyone does this. Just take my info and get me to Farmville.

By posting Content to any public area of Match.com, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Match.com, its affiliates, licensees and successors, an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reproduce, adapt, modify and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sub-licenses of the foregoing. You further represent and warrant that public posting and use of your content by Match.com will not infringe or violate the rights of any third party.

One could theoretically create a Facebook app that just like any Facebook app, asks for permission to read certain data, enabling the harvesting of minimal information from potentially millions of Match profiles. I say potentially because I don’t see the Facebook object markup on any other Match site that I checked. I’ve spent enough time diving into the Facebook Social Graph to know that there are a lot of interesting ways to retrieve and manipulate data, and thats just the public Facebook API’s. One wonders what third-party developers could do with this information.

Ok, enough speculation. I need to ponder this some more. Regardless of Match’s intentions in regards to Facebook integration, its a great mental exercise to brainstorm the possibilities.

Hoping you will share your thoughts on the subject.

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Online Dating Industry News 6-19-2011

David Evans — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:13:06 +0000

Anthony Weiner Could Have Used This: Fadeaway is an Android and iPhone app that lets you control the life span of your sent and received text messages on your smart phone. Talk about a perfect tie-in with Ashley Madison.

I am bullish on Hanginout. Consider it an expanded version of your dating profile. I could see people on dating sites linking to their Hangingout profile once they open up the service to everyone. Perhaps your Master Profile will live on a third-party site like Hangingout that pulls info from Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, etc. Dating sites would use an API to connect to the site and pull relevant information for matching.

Senators introduce location privacy bill. This could possibly affect location-based dating services.

Me, Myself and I: Helping to manage your identity on the web.

Obama’s Solution for Online ID? Let Silicon Valley Take the Lead.

First Quarter 2011 Highlights FriendFinder Networks financials: Income from operations increased 52% year-over-year to $19.7 millionAdjusted EBITDA increased 33% year over year to $27.2 million.Adjusted Cash flow increased 60% year-over-year to $14.3 million.Net loss decreased from $0.60 per share in 2010 to $0.27 per share in 2011Raised $50 million in gross proceeds from Initial Public OfferingRepaid $65.3 million in outstanding debt since December 31, 2010

“We had a strong first quarter, highlighted by a 33% increase in adjusted EBITDA and a 60% increase in our Adjusted Cash Flow,” said Marc Bell, Chief Executive Officer of FriendFinder Networks Inc.

The company had outstanding debt of $543.5 million.

Nerve.com’s Fifteen Courtship Blunders.

Nice writeup of Thomas Edwards, known as the Professional Wingman.