How about a boatload of screenshots showing that traffic at dating sites worldwide is declining. This made me sad. Caveat: Some of the decline can be attributed to: seasonal nature of dating, the quality of Alex’s rankings and sunspots.

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Look at this ComScore data on Zoosk vs. Match and Singlesnet. Of course we don’t know what is driving this gargantuan traffic spike, but Zoosk raised $30 million, and if they poured some of that into a marketing campaign (Zoosk ads are everywhere), that could account for some or all of the spike.

I treat all casual dating site traffic spikes with a healthy dose of criticality. It’s real all right, but what is the effect on the site? Are these people converting to paid members (more serious) or just clicking ads(casual) or doing nothing (junk traffic.)

So, Zoosk, nice hockey-stick growth, what’s the deal?

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Traffic stats tell a story, as do what people are searching for. Here’s a Google Trends screenshot of PlentyofFish and OKCupid. See how POF is spiky and all over the place whereas OKC is a more gradual and stable curve? Also notice how many of the spikes in searches between the two happen in lockstep. Google Trends is simply another datapoint to consider.

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Mark Brooks over at Online Personals watch says that online dating sites “could raise their prices without losing customers.” I almost choked on my drink reading that. With the rise in free an freemium-based dating sites, I think that subscription-based sites should, if anything, reduce their pricing.

Lower prices will draw more subscribers, more subscribers = more revenue. Less spam and scammers = more subscribers, which = more revenue. Of course, as a UK contact of my attested to a few weeks ago, getting the price point right takes a lot of testing. Try $3/month, $12/month, $23.67/month and see what happens. People ask me all the time about optimum subscription pricing. I say, let your users tell you what they are willing to pay. There is no magic number across the entire industry.

Look at Match.coms revenue for the year, flat like Kansas, same as last year, same as the year before that. They can’t really raise prices, scratch that… they probably can and get away with it because when people are ready to try online dating, they just want to get the signup process over and done with as quickly as possible.

Dating sites are always talking about raising prices, they test new prices, it usually fails, and they go back to their regular pricing. If anything, most sites should be cheaper unless you are offering a premium service. Enhanced search is not premium, and selling a silly little red box around your search photo is just desperate. Now, enhanced search placement in search results based on a new algorithm, I’m all for that.

Another Brooks quote: “The real measure is the number of people who have logged in, a paid subscription isn’t worth it unless monthly traffic is at least 10,000 unique visitors.” Depends on what you’re measuring there, Mark. I think he means that turning on a subscription paywall doesn’t make sense until 10,000 unique visitors. I’ve heard numbers all over the place on this one.

As for consumers, since traffic systems (at least the free ones) don’t measure logins vs. visitors, the statement doesn’t make sense. Joe sixpack isn’t looking at Comscore when he’s signing up to a dating site buzzed at one in the morning.

Now, effectiveness, stickieness and revenue per subscriber based on unique logins, that would be a decent set of metrics to measure.

A useful metric that Redg used to talk about when he was with Skout was the number of returned emails. Those stats would absolutely turn the online dating industry on it’s head.

The most telling quote of the story is that complaints about dating services rose 62% from 2005 to 2008, according to the Better Business Bureau.

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Reading the interview with Shaddi founder Anupam G. Mittal over at OPW.

If you look at the UK market, in September we saw a dramatic fall.

This is the third time I’ve heard this in a week, and not just in the UK. Wondering what factors are involved with this supposed drop in traffic/conversions across the online dating industry? Social networks dropping dating ads again like Myspace did last year, general consumer malaise, the economy, or is something else responsible?

Related posts:

1. Social Network Dating Ad Ban Is Affecting Online Dating Industry
2. Facebook Global Growth
3. Dating Industry Tweets For September 30, 2010

Markus at PlentyofFish says:

I’m at affiliate summit this week,   its amazing that the only other dating site here  is match.com   There are 3,500 affiliates here and dating sites are paying them 10’s of millions of dollars.     The dating industry is kind of backwards why wouldn’t more dating sites attend an event where people who are responsible for such a massive part of their revenues attend ?   

At any rate the conference has been a huge success for us,   we met thousands of affiliates many of which buys ads on our platform.   What other marketing conferences are worth attending? The only other conference we are going to attend the next few months will be ad tech.

Of those 3,500 affiliates, it seems there are only a handful who that aren’t scammy, spammy or simply don’t perform well. Sure top 10 dating sites and adult/casual sites make a boatload of money of affiliates, but for the rest of the dating industry, the reality is that so many of those leads are bogus, it’s a tangled web that most dating sites don’t bother unraveling. Send me traffic, if I make money I don’t’ care how it got to my site, seems to be the prevailing mindset.

I can’t believe that dating review sites are still pimping out American Singles, and a few other sites. The dating affiliate market needs to catch up and more dating sites need solid affiliate programs. Feels like the sector is stuck in 2005.

Funny that I got an email from Shoemoney while writing this.

I did a project this summer to build up an affiliate network, the most absolutely miserable project I’ve ever done. Talking to a bunch of sleazbags operators shucking crap traffic while trying to figure out the real deal behind their offers was a complete night. The few people who are expert affiliates keep their mouths shut and those who talk the loudest tend to underperform, at least in my experience.

POF will not be at iDate next week. That’s another big site not attending this year.

Related posts:

1. SuccessfulMatch At Affiliate Summit
2. Seasonal affiliate incentives
3. Affiliate Summit

Jason Calacanis (Weblogs Inc, Maholo) has been writing a weekly email newsletter for Internet entrepreneurs for a while now (Sign up). Jason is an old soul in the Internet World, I remember going to some of his Silicon Alley parties in NYC circa 1996. This week the title of Jason’s latest missive is Why We Should Boycott ComScore.

Quantcast and Compete (with Alexa trailing far behind) is where those of us who don’t spend $10,000/year for stats go for our traffic intelligence. I used to be a big fan of Compete (Boston company) but the prices seem to have gone up and the paywall became more restrictive. I have the Compete.com plugin in Firefox. The Compete stats for every site I visit show up in the bottom of the browser. I look at every site I visit and when I open up Safari or Chrome I look down at the bottom of the screen, only to be disappointed when I don’t see the Compete traffic stats.

Lately, Compete has been screwing up. They, along with every measurement firm, often drastically under-report traffic stats, but the consistency of the old Compete seems to have vanished.

I mostly rely Quantcast, which is free, but still has spotty stats for most dating sites and doesn’t have a browser plugin (come on!).

I’m surprised that Google hasn’t made it’s Analytics data more public like Quantcast. Everyone uses it, why not take the lead and make the data publicly available (opt-in of course)?

In the online dating market, what I care about most are trends. Is a site’s traffic trending up, down or flat? It’s amazing to see the top 10 dating site traffic modulate over a year or more time in accordance to changes in advertising spend and feature roll-outs and other changes.

Trying to nail down exact numbers is futile, and ComScore isn’t doing anyone any favors with their latest extortion move. Like Jason says, if Google buys Quantcast and keeps the information free, maybe we can move closer to better traffic measurement without paying an arm and a leg.

Go Sign up for Jason’s email newsletter and read about ComScore and how they are going to start charging $10,000 to correct your site’s stats.

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Yesterday’s Online Dating Industry Landing Page Optimization Webinar was a great success. Fifty forward-thinking dating executives spent a fun and educational hour learning about optimization strategies, participating in A/B tests (I got so many wrong!) and better understanding how landing page optimization can increase revenue. Congratulations to Rewarding Love, the recipient of the free landing page evaluation. Click the attached photo to see the comments WiderFunnel made about the landing page and thanks to Rewarding Love for letting us post their critique.

I want to make sure these webinars are topical, interesting and provide the greatest value. If you attended, what did you think?

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Markus at Plentyoffish let me know about his post today, Worlds top dating sites for August from comscore.

I’ve stopped using paid dating sites for a few months to gauge firsthand how effective free dating sites are. Basically I’ve been on Facebook dating apps, Plentyoffish and OKCupid. Someone asked me about mobile apps recently. I personaly don’t use mobile apps for the most part. Why squint at the screen when I can go home and view on a 24″ monitor. I’m not in that much of a rush to get a date. I know, thats just me, but mobile clones of the desktop just aren’t interesting anymore.

Based on a few months on Plentyoffish, here are a few personal observations, some of which go against what I’ve been saying for years, but things change as the online dating industry evolves.

I wouldn’t date 98% of the women on Plentyoffish, but the 2% I would date is getting to be a huge number and I can’t avoid this anymore. There seems to be a lot more attractive women on the site compared to a few years ago. Some people are going to hate me for saying that but it’s true.

Match says you are paying for customer service. Sure Markus has lots of complaints in the forums but if you don’t get in trouble and act accordingly, who needs customer service? How much customer service is related to billing at a site like Match or eHarmony? Can a free site with no paid help deliver results like a free site? I used to think not, and the fact is that people pay for assistance. Would you buy a free car if there wasn’t a dealership to take it to?

Plentyoffish is like crack, the whole site is built to keep you clicking on faces through a variety of means. The embarrassing “people who haven’t gotten email in 24 hours” display and the constant barrage of photos on every page keeps me clicking like crazy.

The more you click the more likely you are to come across someone you want to meet. This is what kills eHarmony. I’m hearing of people getting 7 matches a month, which is ridiculous.

I end up clicking on a lot of Plentyoffish profiles because so many women (men too) have terrible photos or one blurry photo and that has me moving on without a glance. If a photo isn’t up to par, it should be removed. I don’t know how that would be measured but it sure would help. I would also outlaw people who hold camera in front of themselves in bathroom mirror photos, personal pet peeve. Women, go ahead and continue to show too much cleavage on Plentyoffish. That’s why many men consider it a pickup site. If I could filter on women in suggestive poses I would, because they are 99.999% of the time not my type.

So what if the freemium model at Plentyoffish isn’t compelling? Does it really matter? I’m the first to admit that I sometimes need to get off my high horse when it comes to the perceived quality of dating sites. Most people just want a date and could care less what a site looks like or functions. They just want to be discovered.

A few constructive criticisms that no doubt Markus can refute. I am completely aware that on many sites, things that don’t make sense to me, or seem broken, are actually designed that way on purpose. This is why having access to dating site statistics is so incredibly important and why it’s unfortunate that generic dating sites never do anything with the wealth of information at their fingertips.

Fix the photo system, the display doesn’t work very well, I’m always mousing over the photos and having to readjust to view the profile. Go browse a few people and you’ll see what I mean.

The profile layout needs to be redone. Put everything above the fold, don’t make me scroll down on each and every profile. Match is brilliant, you see everything you need to see immediately. On Plentyoffish I have to focus, scan, scroll and interpret the text, which is a pain and takes too much time. Markus can afford a designer now, change the serious member logo, it’s awful. This is why I am not a designer and I outsource all client User Experience and UI stuff to Thought-Rocket. If it was up to me everything would have lots of whitespace around it and look like it was designed in Europe.

I despise the big-boobed ads for human pheromones next to every single woman’s photos. That’s tacky and crass. The crap-tastic ads for the competition are getting stale as well. Then again, I’ve been looking at the site for five years inside my little bubble. People will put up with a lot of junk if something is free.

I’m amazed at the amount of traffic Plentyoffish is getting, north of 100 million visits a month I believe. And the visits per month kicks everyone else off the chart. These numbers are so much higher than Compete reports it’s ridiculous, although Quantcast seems to peg them at 200 million monthly visitors.

The exact numbers don’t matter, what matters is that Plentyoffish is destroying the free dating competition and paid dating will now always be a smaller market than free. This doesn’t mean that free is better, just, free, which is enough of a value proposition for millions of singles to join free dating sites. There will always be those who will gladly pay for the privilege of meeting online for many other reasons. Do you want to go to a KOA Campground or a boutique hotel? The choice is yours to make.

Food for thought: anyone can go buy a boatload of traffic like Singlesnet and True and get into the top ten dating site list. How can we as an industry gauge how good a dating site is when not taking traffic into account as the sole metric by which success is measured?

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Tip of the hat to Markus for this. Wonder what this precipitous drop in traffic can be attributed to? Inability to maintain ad spend, ineffective marketing decisions or sun spots?

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