I meditated this morning and them promptly smashed my head into a doorframe, which dislodged some thoughts about the future of online dating and discovery services I’ve had filed away somewhere behind the reptilian part of my brain that focuses on breathing, the Red Sox and not getting run over on my bike.

In the future, dating sites will pay singles for the priviledge of displaying their profile. The idea of paying to belong to a specific site will seem quaint. Sites bidding for profiles will be the norm.

The value proposition for singles will evolve from amount and quality  of members to  better matches distributed and accessible across many entry points. This is where the current crop of white label dating sites has a leg up on the competition.

You will own your profile data. You can change it, display it, add features and communication tools as you see fit.

A high quality validated profile for a successful single who has proven they are serious about finding someone is worth a lot more than 10 free incomplete stale profiles. Dating sites will capitalize on this and aggregate profiles that match their business model.

Similar to what’s happening in certain parts of the white-label dating world,  which is growing by leaps and bounds in certain markets, but still has a long way to go when it comes to quality destinations, customer service and current profiles.

Niche dating will evolve in functionality and popularity, but large services still own the market. It’s more difficult to put yourself in a niche than it is to be part of a large date-warehouse. Geographic dating sites will fall out of favor, again it’s easier to segment a large database of people than market to an area code.

At present most dating sites search criteria revolves around age sex location and not much else. In the future, more and more valuable metadata will be attached to profiles resulting in vastly improved search. People will not necessarily know more about themselves, but the systems powering dating services will use this information to more effectively act on a users behalf.

Many singles will choose to conduct first dates via videoconferencing, with real-time voice-stress analysis to complement the usual “gut check.”

Serious daters will have a psychological exam as part of their background check. The test will not resemble todays tests, instead they may be taken on other sites and shared as part of their profile.

Dating will obviously happen on your pc, laptop, palmtop, phone and other devices. In fact, bars and other meeting places will have hookup systems, which use GPS, RFID and Bluetooth to connect compatible singles.

Crowdsourcing, part Engage.com and TrueDater, will be more prevalent. Any information learned about people from those they have dated previously will be a valuable asset.

People will stop using brick and mortar dating agencies, which by then will have been supplanted by introduction services with incredibly rich communication, matching and psychological testing capabilities.

Many more people will use online introduction services, while dating and social networking continue to overlap to the degree that the majority of  serious and casual daters will be in the same places online.

Many other changes and innovations will occur that no one has thought of yet, thats part of what makes looking into the crystal ball exciting.

What are your thoughts on the future of dating? Leave a comment and let us know.

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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

Job of the Week: Durex, maker of fine prophylactics, is looking for condom testers. Guys, please don’t crash their servers. Via Everyone’s Guide to Online Dating.

Simulating Dating: Nintendo’s Days of Memories dating simulator “is a collection of love simualtor games pitting players against ladies with slighty enlarged features in a bid to score through gestures, virtual dates and gift giving.” Via Cubed3.

Russians Spend $34 Million Dating Online. The Mamba company, which cooperates with major portals Mail.Ru, Rambler and Km.Ru, is estimated to control over 85 percent of the online dating market. Nine million of online profiles, four million of which are active.

Match video ads get personal. Your local time is displayed in the video ad. These night vision ads are creepy and the women look kind of sleazy. Guess that’s what the kids like these days, a la Paris Hilton ‘s sex video. I would love to see the click-through rate of these ads and the profiles of the people who sign up for Match.

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Hot or not goes free: They buy into the idea that free dating sites will subsume paid sites. To some extent I agree. Sites like Match hit a ceiling and have to grow by acquisition and international expansion. Free sites are taking away some of the thunder of paid sites- social networking sites, not free dating sites in most cases.

Lavalife is trying something new, moving from credits to $29.99 subscriptions.  Let’s see how they do with that. Anyone want to guess how much market share they are going to loose?

I am tired of hearing that Match is going down because they charge for a decent  service. Free sites will say that until they are blue in the face and it may happen at some point, but that is not for a long time. Nothing but background noise and the only people listening are the ones who read this blog. Most consumers don’t care, they try new sites out all the time. I’m still waiting for a decent percentage of singles saying they are meeting better quality people on dating sites.

90 million singles, only a third of which are online dating at any one time. An untapped market of 60 million people and the answer is free dating sites? I don’t think so. I think it may be the opposite. Higher touch services, higher pricing, safer sites, authentic profiles and a better user experience.

Sam at OkCupid has made millions taking pay services and unleashing free versions. I respect that. The Internet is perfectly suited to making certain businesses more transparent or free, and there are plenty of examples of free being as good as, if not better, than paid.

Problem is, a lot of these rules don’t apply to online dating.

I bet we could bring 10 million more singles online with a few straightforward changes to typical industry practices.  

Most dating site operators don’t understand the difference between authentication and background checks. There is a lot of money to be made when people can authenticate their profile for a few bucks. When they figure that out, more singles will come online.

Dating sites ruined for themselves. They got to greedy, and left the door open for everyone to come in and make a mess of the place. The notion of a dating site having quality singles has gone out the window, the majority of sites are full of stale junk profiles and scammers.

Speaking of junk, when dating sites start showing ads that aren’t from the bottom of the barrel, maybe they won’t have to game search engines and artificially inflate pageviews to justify their existence.

Let’s lower the quality of our profiles, throw in lots of crappy advertising, save money by not hiring any customer service and hope we can flip this sucker before the bottom drops out. Nice business model but not very respectful to their members.

It’s no wonder people malign online dating. The industry doesn’t talk with each other, they won’t open up profiles, security is a pesky problem,  and with all eyes on the bottom line, innovation is all but ignored. I’m not talking about DNA testing for compatibility, I’m talking about basic changes to the way the business operates.

Just like free sites continue to pester us with the demise of paid dating, I will continue to tell the dating industry to wake up, think different and take a few risks. Same goes for the VC and angel investors who avoid the sector like the plague, for good reason most of the time. We need a few more well-funded dating sites. $10-25 million right off the bat. That’s what it takes these days to make serious inroads into the market. Show me a top-10 dating site that hasn’t spent this kind of money to get where it is today (besides Plenty of Fish, but that’s an ad network these days, not a dating site, and it’s an anomaly not likely to be repeated for quite some time.)

There is plenty of room for a new paid dating site to take on refugees from the top 10 sites. It doesn’t have to be a mashup of the latest technology, or bare-breasted advertising, it has to feature an impeccable database full of real people and a way to connect these people online before they meet in a safe, useful manner. Technology and boobs may get them in the door, but quality service is what keeps them coming back. Why is this so difficult to understand?

My girlfriend comes back from a month in Australia tonight. I promise I will be in a better mood tomorrow.

Related posts:

1. Date.com Releases Free Online Dating Toolbar
2. Is Advertising Killing Free Online Dating?
3. The First Success Story Of Free Online Dating