Susan Mernit, who used to run product at Yahoo Personals, had this to say about deal where Match now powers Yahoo Personals.

During the time I was running product at Yahoo! Personals, we had at least 3 different SVPs the unit reported to. Not only did the group get switched around repeatedly, it was clear no one at the top had strong interest in managing this kind of transactional revenue, despite good ROI, strong team, etc.

…And it is a great idea if Yahoo’s best plan is to be an aggregator and make $3-4 MM a year in affiliate referrals via partner payouts for customer acquisition rather than manage greater revenue against greater cost.

But is a great idea?

Not really, But Yahoo! stopped having great ideas a long time ago.

More at Susan’s blog.

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Newsflash: Match.com, an operating business of IAC, today announced an agreement by which Match will become the exclusive online dating site on Yahoo!. Yahoo! Personals users will have the opportunity to move to a new co-branded Match.com experience, “Match.com on Yahoo!” where they will combine with the greater Match.com community. The Match.com on Yahoo! service is available starting today.

Sure enough, the Yahoo! Personals home page is branded as “match.com on Yahoo!” Yahoo.match.com, who would have thunk it?

Several months ago I spent time with someone who put together a deal to acquire Yahoo Personals which fell through. Interesting back-story to say the least. Yahoo owned a (once upon a time) top-10 dating site where they got most of their business from marketing to their own 500 million members and to have to sell it to a competitor. Awkward, oh how the mighty have fallen.

Match, which just got a *lot* bigger, has done deals like this in the past. In November of 2008, eHarmony and Yahoo Announce partnership in Australia. I wonder how Match is going to deal with this?

Yahoo! Personals users will receive special offers designed to help them enjoy all that Match.com has to offer. The two companies are working together to help users easily migrate to Match.com on Yahoo!. Over the next two months, existing Yahoo! Personals members will be given the opportunity to seamlessly migrate their Yahoo! Personals accounts over to the new experience. Match.com on Yahoo! offers compelling features including mobile access, daily personalized matches and robust search tools and will fully replace the existing Yahoo! Personals experience at the end of the transition period.

If you migrate over from Yahoo to Match, let us know how it goes.

Yahoo tried to roll out social services like 360, new profiles and scores of other social services, the majority which have been shut down or buried. It sounds like someone at Yahoo finally decided enough is enough. Fish or cut bait, as they say.

Back in 2008 I said:

Yahoo spent an enormous amount of time and energy upgrading their dating site platform. I spoke with Yahoo a year ago, about the upgrade, back when Susan Mernit was still around. Doesn’t seem like anything has changed in ages. Why go through the process of a massive infrastructure upgrade and do so little with it? At least they can start to achieve feature parity with the competition.

At this point it’s safe to say that Match is the Honda Accord of dating. Nobody else come close in terms of worldwide brand recognition, marketing spend and mainstream advertising (the new commercials are very good.) I’ve known in my gut that Match was going to take the brass ring, just like I knew that YouTube was going to be the big winner in the online video business. Both exhibited traits of winning companies and continued to build upon a strong foundation and make solid strategic deals for the most part (Singlesnet, cough, cough.)

Who the heck is Match going to acquire next? Place your bets in the comments.

Congrats to Match, and if you worked at Yahoo! Personals, contact me for help getting another job in the industry. Better yet, come freelance with me while you figure out your next move.

I hope that someone at Yahoo will comment on this. In the meantime, what do you think the sale price was?

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Yahoo is by far the largest dating site. PlentyOfFish, Match and SinglesNet combined don’t even come close to the number of singles on Yahoo. Let’s look at a few reasons why why Yahoo isn’t owning the market.

To compound how far Yahoo has fallen, remember that it has launched and shuttered several attempts at social networks. Now Yahoo is building out a new “social” platform and recently Yahoo rolled out new profiles, replacing ancient attempts at letting people describe themselves with a few links and some text. Tech Crunch says to go get our Shiny New Yahoo Profiles and was there when Yahoo Previewed Its New Application Platform.

Yahoo begins the rollout of its new user profile today, which marks the first tangible product release for the social part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS. The profile is one of the anchors (mail is the other) to Yahoo’s strategy of turning the site into one big social network.

Turns out they deleted everyone’s profile information, which upset people to no end. Not that there was much to delete, but still, unexpected. Update: turns out you can request your old profile data at Customer Care. This is a good example of what’s wrong with Yahoo. Who in the world approved the process of removing all data from profiles? I understand that with hundreds of millions of profiles, making changes is never easy, but it seems like Yahoo made a lot of mistakes that I wouldn’t have expected.

Yahoo is a champion at squandering opportunities and their stock price shows it. Morale is down, more layoffs are probably coming and the executive directory might as well be written on a whiteboard it changes so often. And that’s just Yahoo Personals.

Here’s my new profile, empty, oops!

The Managing your alias and profile post explaining the changes has 1,100 comments. Here’s the explanation of what happens when you start sharing data with third-party applications. And you though Facebook app data sharing was difficult to explain? I wonder how many comments the post explaining data sharing is going to have.

What Can Yahoo Do to Improve Dating?

Yahoo spent an enormous amount of time and energy upgrading their dating site platform. I spoke with Yahoo a year ago, about the upgrade, back when Susan Mernit was still around. Doesn’t seem like anything has changed in ages. Why go through the process of a massive infrastructure upgrade and do so little with it? At least they can start to achieve feature parity with the competition.

Yahoo has the largest number of profiles of any website. At the core, they should add a checkbox to your profile that let’s people self-identify as being single. Bingo, add tens of millions of singles to their database. If they make dating more social, which they should, they could tie lifestream data, Flickr photos, MyBlogLog communities and lots of data from other Yahoo properties. That’s where things start to get interesting.

I certainly hope someone at Yahoo Personals has the foresight, power and organizational skills to make this happen. It’s a great brand, the site looks great and works well, for the most part, but the lack of keeping up has me worried about it’s viability in the long term. Yahoo Personals started with a hell of a lot more going for it than any other dating site, but will it ever really flourish?

Otherwise we get to think about what it will be like if Microsoft runs Yahoo Personals (and how weird that would be because MS has a huge deal with Match.)

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