Many moons ago I had a long conversation with Anna Zornosa, head of Yahoo! Personals. Anna, for those of you who don’t know, was CMO at Knight Ridder Digital until November 2005 where she was in charge of crafting digital strategies. Prior to KRD she was the CEO of Topica and Sr. VP at Women.com. At the time, I thought that Anna definitely had the pedigree, the only question was can she outlast her successors? Months later and several conversations with Yahoo insiders leads me to believe that things have settled down at Y! Personals, even after the recent re-org.

Speaking of the re-org, Y! Personals moved to Jeff Weiner’s Network group from Local Markets and Commerce Division (LMC).

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Susan Mernit, the Product development lead for a Yahoo! Personals. Susan was at Knight-Ridder and started a month after Anna. Susan and I spent an enjoyable hour talking about what’s been going on behind the scenes at Y! Personals for the past two years and what’s in store for the future.

When Susan arrived, the Y! Personals platform had not been touched since 2004. The communication tools were lacking and the overall service felt “kind of empty”, more like classifieds than personals.

Search data storage and system architecture exhibited a lack of flexibility and scalability that had to be addressed before the service could grow.

Susan’s goal was to grow and improve the business and product as well as finding new audiences.

First up, a new platform. Planning for the development of the new Y! Personals platform began in late 2005.The goal was an infrastructure which would support a more expressive, richer interactive user experience. Plus, the system needed to be flexible and module enough to enable building for the future.

This next section is for those of you more interested in the technical details behind the new platform.

Y! Personals is built on top of a completely new system architecture featuring state of the art performance enhancements.

The search database was rebuilt. Search is now XML driven, featuring much more flexible data maps. Was using MySql, now on Oracle. Susan’s team spent six months testing seven different database platforms. The improved search system made enabling new search features much faster and easier than the legacy system. The new database systems features *much* faster database calls between databases anda consolidated XML formatting of data.

I was not aware that Y! Personals has had an API all of 2006, but it’s only accessible to affiliates.

The Front End

Susan says the majority of the front end is new, utilizing JSON. One result that users appreciate and advertisers won’t is that revamped Web 2.0 features reduced the number of clicks it takes to do common actions, resulting in fewer pageviews for ads.

New Features

Side-by-side profile comparisons were launched December 2006.

Photos updates: July 2007, featuring 10 photos instead of five. This has greatly increased the number of photos posted. Eight different flavors of photo file formats can be uploaded, up from only one.

The addition of searchable captions has been appreciated by yours truely. Providing a context and description of photos is an efficient way to increase the amount of information that can be gleaned from a profile.

Upcoming Features

New communications tools and interaction capabilities are coming Q4 2007. Expect additional search capabilities and new features through 2008.

I asked Susan about Yahoo! Hack Day, where developers spent a day working on things they would like to see rolled out. (Funny video done for Hack Day, featuring naked puppets, almost NSFW.) Her response was intriguing, saying she supports and endorses the culture of Hack Day and that Yahoo! is committed to hacking and innovation. I can’t help but wonder what features will roll out based on Hack Day.

Given that Yahoo! has such an incredible amount of content, people and services, Susan at the team spend a lot of time thinking a lot about synergies.

Yahoo owns Delicious, Flickr, Yahoo 360, Mash (inf0) and countless other social applications.

The best quote of the interview was Susan saying “How can people have control of their info, how viewed and discovered?” We discussed a few other emerging features that while seemingly no-brainers, Susan swore me to secrecy, so you’ll just have to wait.

Forbes has this to say in article The Algorithm Of Love :

Look for people to match themselves against song lists from Yahoo! Music, perhaps, or photographs from the Yahoo!-owned Flickr photo site. Flickr’s tagging technology, where people mark attractive photos and pool the information, may also be applied to dating.

My take on this at Yahoo Working Towards Richer Profiles. But at what cost to legacy applications like 360? Yahoo did a bold move when they closed Photos and migrated everyone to Flickr. I’m wondering what the effect of new social apps like Mash will be on Yahoo360, most likely cannibalization.

Most embarassing moment of the conversation:

Me: How tightly do you plan on integrating Yahoo Messenger?
Susan: It’s been integrated for over a year.

Susan is also tasked with finding new members for Y! Personals. One would think that with several hundred million members, this would be less of a problem, but when you see the saturation of eHarmony and Match in radio and print, it makes you wonder why Yahoo hasn’t entered the mainstream media market with the same aggressiveness.

Partnership deals

Y! Personals has many different partners, one of the most recent being Beliefnet’s Soulmatch , which I wrote about last year. Yahoo also distributes Beliefnet content through their CMS (content management system).

Note: Here I have taken the liberty of pastebombing various notes from my last conversation with Anna Zornosa.

Whats happening in EU, the deal with Match? What comes around goes around.
Yahoo had a deal with Match in 2000, now they have a partnership in the UK with Match again. Co-branded dating channels in the UK and Germany with global dating giant Match.com.

Other partnerships: Rent.com, Glam.co, Reunion.com.
Yahoo gender balance: m/f even.
Subscriptions: There are some 5.5 million unique monthly visitors on Yahoo! Personals worldwide. 4.5 M US, 1M UK
There will be much more emphasis on partnership deals this year. The strategic principle is to look at each country on specific basis.
Strong partner tools in place.
Factors taken into consideration: what does Yahoo have in place, what does the country have to offer?
France was outsourced.
Relaunched Japan’s Personals last year.

Update: Yahoo Personals has settled with one Robert Anthony over a date-baiting case from last fall.

Thanks to Susan for taking the time to talk to me. It’s not every day that I get to peek behind the curtain of a major dating site.

Subscribe to Susan’s blog to keep up with what’s happening at Yahoo! Personals.

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ON Dating is a new Internet dating advice program produced by NBC Universal Digital Studios for ON Networks. The show functions as a virtual dating coach, dedicated to helping viewers navigate the sometimes treacherous terrain of online romance.

Each “ON Dating” episode serves as a 3-8 minute primer on how to
date in the 21st century, offering viewers advice on topics ranging from how to write the perfect profile to proper online etiquette to
selecting the site that’s best for you.

This is a fantastic idea. I talked with some television executives several years ago about the exact same thing, running on cable and the web.

This week’s episode features an exclusive interview with Dr. Ian Kerner, a relationship expert with Match.com.

ON Dating is one of several new programs being introduced by ON Networks, Inc. (ON). Other shows available at www.onnetworks.com are: Austin Connoisseur, Budget Health Nut, Cocktails on the Fly, Dinner with the Band, Golf Tips, Stump the Chef and Zen Living.

Dating sites may want to offer these videos to members. Most of the segments are Dating 101, but there is always a need for this basic information for the millions of singles that try online dating each year.

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Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Mate1 co-founder Liz Wasserman. Much thanks to Liz for letting me share our conversation with Online Dating Insider readers.
What’s the story behind Mate1?

I started with my Father in 2003. I previously worked in film and print. Thought online dating was the best use of the web. We were 8 people in 2004. One programmer and 1 customer service person. Then came rapid growth in 2004.

We thought it was a mistake to sanitize profiles. There was room in the dating market to be more open. By the way, Mate1 is free for women.

What or who drove decision to focus on the “Intimate Encounters” market as opposed to a more general approach?

There is a lack of brand loyalty in the dating space. It’s the most intense experience in terms of amount of communication. Know the person first, the small-town feel as opposed to the megalopolis.

Your home page boasts 14.5 million profiles. Currently Mate1 is ranked #9 in March Hitwise report, Nielsen #6, Comscore #8, #4 in boomers according to Nielsen. Compete says 9 million visitors a month. Quantcast says 2.3 million uniques a month, around 300k a day.

Online dating lost the 18-24 market to Facebook. Our focus is on wealthier and serious daters 25 and up, increasingly seeing more empty nesters and those on their second marriage. Many just want to find someone to hang out with.

Last year Mate1.com spent $ 20,410,000 on online advertising. 1/2 as much as True and 4 million more than Match. What did you get for your $20 million ad spend?

Majority of ad spend was online. We experimented with television, which didn’t work out well. Affiliate marketing is increasingly important but we don’t have one at the moment.

We are working with ad networks to target high-value members. We have multi-tiered payouts for qualified leads. Certain demographics cost more. When we started our CPA was about $1, now it’s about $4 for high-value leads.

PlentyOfFish is one person and gets twice the member activity despite being 1/5 the size of Mate1. How do you plan on continuing to compete with Markus, True.com and to some extent OkCupid?

We aren’t especially concerned with the competition. There’s room for everal players in the field. Dating is not like shopping- unless you really don’t care who you hook up with, you’re going to want to maximize your options by joining several sites at once. Our main concern is providing our members with service that makes them want to stick around and stay active once they’ve signed up. I do think that the free sites are going to run into
difficulties on the technical side of things, and in terms of quality control. We devote enormous resources behind the scenes to protecting our customers from fraud, abuse and offensive photos. We don’t do a perfect job, but what we do makes a huge difference to our members. I think that as databases on individual sites grow, filtering is going to become an increasingly valuable feature for members.

I first noticed you Myspace ads earlier this year. When did you start?

We’ve been advertising on MySpace for well over a year now, through networks
and directly.Mate1 was one of the first dating sites pushing the widespread use of cleavage advertising on social and ad networks. Can you talk about the Mate1 ads and how others are copying you? True and Match come to mind.

The goal in advertising is to target sincere people. Not the kinds of people who are just killing time at the office browsing through profiles, but the kinds of people who want to create quality profiles and meet other people with quality profiles. Our ad campaigns are designed to attract those people. Yes, we use sexy models in our ads, but I (a fairly conservative, heterosexual woman) personally approve every one of our ads, and I only
approve those I consider to be appealing and positive. I don’t do headless women. I don’t do demeaning catch phrases. I am, however, strongly pro-cleavage- I think it’s nature’s greatest symbol of femininity and sexuality. I believe that Mate1.com pioneered a certain style of advertising that has been copied by some of our competitors, and as long as they don’t lift our designs wholesale (which they have done from time to time), I’m flattered by the imitation.

Social networks happen to be a fertile source of traffic for us, largely because (contrary to popular belief) social networks are not competitors to dating sites. They are, in fact, the antithesis of dating sites: they limit your encounters to people you already know, and they allow for no anonymity or discreetness. But they are full of gregarious and web-savvy people who are comfortable with the internet as a mechanism for socializing.

What is the difference between corresponding and email and saying “Hi”?

Corresponding and saying “hi” are two variations on the classic “wink” or “icebreaker”. We just felt that a pre-written message might seem more dignified, less cutesy to a mature audience than a “wink.”

The #2 Google result for Mate1 is the ripoffreport.com What’s the story behind your Ambassador program?

The Online Ambassadors are our version of a bar host or a Walmart greeter – a few friendly faces on the site (well-labeled so as not to be confused with regular members) who welcome members and encourage them to get off the sidelines and engage. They also serve as a kind of adjunct to our customer service department, fielding questions, complaints, and suggestions from the members they communicate with, and helping them learn how to use the site.

As for negative reports, one complainer out of hundreds of happy ambassadors, many of whom have returned for several stints and some of whom ave even met significant others on the site, seems like a pretty good ercentage to me.

What is in store for Mate1 for the rest of 2007?

Mate1 is going to spend the next year focusing on where the real value is for members. Background checks will be first, provided by Honesty Online, followed by a couple of fun features, including astrological matching. We’ve got a much improved design to be released by the end of ’07. We also intend to introduce communication tools that will be of genuine interest to our demographic, which skews toward more mature users (over 25), and on radically enhanced search and data filtering features that help users home in on the kinds of members they wish to meet. We’re also going multilingual and multi-national this year, with translated versions of our site.

Thanks Liz!

Related posts:

1. Mate1 Launches datedaily Blog – New Dating Site and Facebook Application Coming Soon
2. Interview with PlentyofFish Founder
3. Unable to Turn Off Mate1 Ambassador Email

What is Chemistry.com?
Chemistry.com welcomes those who are seeking a serious relationship based on their own personal goals – perhaps it’s marriage, perhaps not. And it connects those people in an environment that combines privacy with a superior matching system that transcends “compatibility�? and seeks out chemistry.

What’s happened to get it where it is today over the past year or so?
Chemistry.com launched in February 2006 and over the past year, we built the business organically allowing us to learn so much from our customers along the way. Currently, more than 2 million people have registered on the site and we have had more than 350,000 first dates in the past 6 months.

We’ve had great success matching people based on individual chemistry, and that’s because our system was developed by Dr. Helen Fisher, the acclaimed biological anthropologist. Dr. Fisher used her research into brain science to create the Chemistry.com profile, which captures deep personality characteristics that yield chemistry-inspired matches.

Who is on Chemistry.com?
While people of all ages are flocking to Chemistry.com, if you pressed me, I’d say that most people here are older than thirty and younger than 55.

What does “Come as you are” mean?
We believe that consumers care deeply about what a brand stands for, and what its values are. That’s especially true when it’s a place that brings people together. This campaign introduces a philosophical difference between Chemistry.com and eHarmony — its largest competitor — into the dialogue. Chemistry.com doesn’t have a check list of criteria, we invite everyone to come as they are.

What goes into creating an ad campaign?
Looking inward and outward. Inward, to understand what needs consumers have that aren’t being satisfied. Outward, to look at trends and social forces that shape the way consumers perceive brands.

Why did you choose Hanft Raboy?
We chose Hanft Raboy & Partners because they are a fiercely independent advertising agency that is agnostic to media. They represent Match.com; you’ve recently seen their work with the “It’s Okay to Look�? campaign.

What media are addressed?
This is an integrated campaign that includes national TV, print and a strong online presence including the “Great Mate Debate.�?

Where will it run, for how long?
TV will run on NBC for 5 weeks, you can see ads run during shows like The Office, SNL, Heroes, Access Hollywood, etc. Print ads will run for 4 weeks in People.

Here are the links the TV spots on YouTube:
Dear John, Small Things, Still Gay, Five for Free, How Happy.

Chemistry Print Ads (392k PDF).

What about the feedback loop and paying attention to customers
We receive hundreds of customer calls a week. I am in close communication with the teams who are talking to customers everyday. Not only do I sit in on the calls to really listen and understand both the complaints and success stories, but I also read through every customer comment each week.

Thanks Mandy!

More conversation with new Match CEO Thomas Enraght-Moony and Mate1 coming soon.

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