Online Dating Insider

Dating Industry Under Fire For Dubious Matchmaking Claims

David Evans — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:27:59 +0000

Today’s New York Times has an article about The Dubious Science of Online Dating. While I was reading it, Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish (recently rebranded as POF), sent me ELI J. FINKEL AND BENJAMIN R. KARNEY are wrong at least when it comes to POF. Markus was responding to a research report by Eli Finkel, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Northwestern University, that says dating site matching systems are Doing It Wrong. Read the full report here (PDF). Markus feels that POF is doing things with matching that the dating industry doesn’t even think is possible. I can’t comment on that claim, but every single person on the planet should be glad he’s made it. Perhaps we are witnessing the point in time where the dating industry, with prodding from academics, the media, and singles, starts to realize how important matching systems really are. Not to mention how a great matching system can reduce customer acquisition costs and churn, and perhaps get some of those 70 million US singles not on dating sites to try online dating.

As Sam Yagan of OKCupid told me once (paraphrasing), a good matching algorithm isn’t only about making great matches, its also about hiding the people from you that you don’t want to see on the site.

The online dating industry has generally been focused on marketing for a decade. Now, the industry is being forced to acknowledge that the playing field has shifted to the matching algorithms used to put quality people in front of each other . Game on!

But first, lets take a step back and look at a decade of online matchmaking. For the early part of the decade the algorithms matching people were, how can I say this politely, less than useful. For the majority of sites, matching on anything more complicated than age/sex/location was a shot in the dark. EHarmony was the first site to bring psychology into the mix. EHarmony, which has from day one put its reputation on the line as the number one site for quality matches, was just starting to figure out what they had gotten themselves into with their 240-question signup process. (Sidebar: I wonder what the minimum number of questions will be to make a successful match, or will matches be based more on behavior, or something completely different?)

Along came OkCupid, which was quietly building a system based on ascertaining compatibility based on its social questions features (and I’m sure a lot of other proprietary magic pixie dust). Singles appreciated the nature of the questions, which were fun, and most importantly, social. No big long tests, results hidden away in some database. You answered a question, and could make that answer public. Exposing and leveraging people’s answers to questions about their personal beliefs in a way that no other dating site was doing at the time. Brilliant. OKCupid was the first site that made dating more social, just not in the way the latest crop of sites is doing it (friends matching friends via Facebook social graph).

Around this time, dating site started realizing that trying to match people together from a pool of 5 million people was a considerable challenge. If there are 5,000 singles in a major metropolitan area, how in the world were they going to show you the handful of people that might be a quality match? This wasn’t so much of a problem for smaller areas, because sooner or later you’re going to see everyone around you, and the thinking was “let the customer figure it out.” I don’t blame them, matching people on a dating site is an incredibly complex undertaking.

The online dating industry is still in the Paleolithic era. They are just starting to figure out how to take your profile, your test and question results and your behavior into consideration while building matching systems. Figuring out what kind of car to buy on Cars.com is straightforward, but us humans are messy bags of flesh, full of ego, bias and emotional detritus that makes the job of pairing us up with life partners (and to some extent one-night stands) seemingly impossible. Just ask any jaded online dater.

I’m not going to compare matching systems here, because there is absolutely no way to compare the effectiveness of dating sites. The methodology of measurement is flawed, the sample sizes are flawed and the folllow-up process isn’t stringent enough to warrant a serious discussion about whether or not say a POF or a Match or an eHarmony are “better” dating sites. Better for what? One-night stands? Long-term relationships? Casual dating? Dating sites may have this data internally, but until now they sure haven’t wanted you to know about it.

Markus has a chart in his blog post showing how many people are in successful relationships after meeting on POF. the caveat here is that the people left the site and never came back, which doesn’t take into consideration that the people might have gone to another dating site. See, messy.

Talking about big top-10 dating sites is one thing, but what about the white label dating services, which deploy, host, run and manage tens of thousands of dating sites? Nobody seems to ever question the matching algorithms on these sites. The focus has been on the speed and simplicity of getting a dating site up and running in a matter of days. Turn on the revenue spigot and go, go, go.

Same goes for niche sites. Match bought People Media and their suite of niche sites for $90 million dollars. Spark Networks falls into this category as well, although JDate is considered the grown jewel of the Spark empire. The idea behind these niche site networks was to build a dating platform and then roll out multiple sites by cloning the look and feel and tailor the graphics for each specific niche (mature, asian, Christian, Jewish, black, etc.). But nobody ever talks about how they match people up, everyone was so excited that there was a site for them, because they didn’t want to be lost in a sea of millions of generic singles.

Further, we have the “dating site in a box” vendors like SkaDate and Boonex (disclaimer: you’ll see their ads in the sidebar on this blog.) What is their matching system based on? Most dating site entrepreneurs didn’t worry to much about the matching system. It was all about getting up and running quickly on a site where they controlled how the site functioned, and more importantly, keeping all of the revenue. Remember, white label dating providers take anywhere from 25-70% of a sites’ revenue in return for managing the site.

Lets not forget Chemistry.com, Match’s answer to eHarmony. Dr. Helen Fisher and her group at Chemistry have worked for years on a matching system that purports to be more efficient and effective than other dating site. But do we really know if Chemistry matches people better than the competition? Chemistry, like all big dating sites, has spent tens of millions on marketing, because as I said, dating site superiority has been a marketing exercise for the better part of the decade.

I have a folder full of research pertaining to compatibility matching. I talk to Very Smart People all the time about psychology tests and deep math, none of which I claim to understand at more than a superficial level. What I do know is that dating site rankings based on traffic alone are useless, and its been a popularity contest until now. If you don’t have quality singles in my area code, it doesn’t matter how large you are. Maybe someday dating sites will use heat-maps to show the density of their users based on a specific location, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the last year or so, dating sites have started to announce the number of successful relationships started on sites, ranging from 3-months in duration to marriage. This is a Good Thing and a step in the right direction.

I wonder how long dating site marriages last compared to meeting someone through friends, a bar, church, etc.? This is a good start, but it still smells to my like a variation of How to Lie With Maps, who’s author wanted to “make readers aware that maps, like speeches and paintings, are authored collections of information and also are also subject to distortions arising from ignorance, greed, ideological blindness, or malice.”

Getting the online dating industry to move the battle towards effective matching is good news for all parties involved and I am excited to see how this all plays out. There are also many new dating startups trying out new matching systems which I hope will play an important role in forcing the dating industry to step up its game.

To see what POF has learned (love their transparency!), you should definitely go read Markus’ post, its a good one and sure to fire up a lot of people, dating industry insiders and singles alike.

Interview with MyYearbook, The Top Social Discovery Site

David Evans — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:15:20 +0000

What a great week. New clients, the CNBC show Love At First Byte was a big hit last night and today we have a great interview with Catherine and Geoff Cook of MyYearbook.

In today’s episode with MyYearbook we talk about social discovery, the need for social networking to fill the space between the MySpace and Facebook, big mobile numbers and much more.

I ran into Geoff last summer at eAmore in NYC, where he impressed the audience with a great presentation about how big MyYearbook is and what a great fit it is in the social networking ecosystem. The next eAmore event is coming up, February 28th. If you’re in NYC, this is a must-attend event for the dating industry.

Online Dating Industry News 2-9-12

David Evans — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:22:52 +0000

Tonight on CNBC at 9PM EST. Love at First Byte. NBC News and Today Show Correspondent Amy Robach reveals how online daters are using cutting-edge technology in search of love and how digital entrepreneurs are getting rich helping them do it.

You’ll meet scientists, mathematicians and psychologists who claim they can draw revealing conclusions about you from what you do – and don’t do – on their websites. Can online dating really deliver what it promises? CNBC takes you inside a business trying to unlock the secrets of the human heart with science.

Maybe you’ll even get a glimpse of yours truly.

Grading the online dating industry: Eli Finkel, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Northwestern University, says that dating site matching systems are Doing It Wrong. Eli just called me and we’re going to have an in-depth talk next week, the highlights of which I’ll share here.

“To date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works,” Finkel observes. “If dating sites want to claim that their matching algorithm is scientifically valid, they need to adhere to the standards of science, which is something they have uniformly failed to do. In fact, our report concludes that it is unlikely that their algorithms can work, even in principle, given the limitations of the sorts of matching procedures that these sites use.”

“The authors suggest that the existing matching algorithms neglect the most important insights from the flourishing discipline of relationship science. The algorithms seek to predict long-term romantic compatibility from characteristics of the two partners before they meet. Yet the strongest predictors of relationship well-being, such as a couple’s interaction style and ability to navigate stressful circumstances, cannot be assessed with such data.”

According to Finkel, “developers of matching algorithms have tended to focus on the information that is easy for them to assess, like similarity in personality and attitudes, rather than the information that relationship science has found to be crucial for predicting long-term relationship well-being. As a result, these algorithms are unlikely to be effective.”

“Thus far, the industry certainly does not get an A for effort,” noted Finkel. “For years, the online dating industry has ignored actual relationship science in favor of unsubstantiated claims and buzzwords, like ‘matching algorithms,’ that merely sound scientific.”

Thanks to @dizzycatdesign for the tip.

The latest Online Dating Industry Insider is out on Scoop.it. Feel free to suggest stories and links.

Mobile Update

While niche apps like Grindr and other discovery apps may get all the press, Plentyoffish surpassed 300 million monthly visits to their free iPhone and Android apps in January 2012. Markus Frind, Founder of POF told me this week at 40 percent of sign-ups in the U.S. are now via mobile device. Can any other dating app come even remotely close to this?

Update: Markus just sent me this link. Is dating on the web dead, is it really moving to mobile like he says?

I have 15 dating apps on my phone, from POF to Badoo, Match and a bunch of little ones that look so sad sitting on my home screen, barely used. Even OKCupid’s mobile app, which I like, has never let me make a meaningful connection with a woman in my area. Believe me I’ve tried. Never once has a woman said, “Thanks for saying hi, yes I’m in your area, lets go get a cup of coffee.”

Maybe I’ll reinstall the POF mobile app and give that a try. Its getting near impossible to keep track of all the mobile apps and I know I’m missing some great ones.

As for Zoosk and Badoo and AYI and whatnot, the churn rate on these apps is so high, anyone worth meeting is only there for a few weeks and then poof they disappear. That is emotionally draining, at least to me.

I’ve spent a month on Badoo and MyYearbook. Logging in via mobile and web every single day. I’ll have more on that in a future post.

Mobile, its hard to attract users, even harder to monetize them and the location-based services rarely turn up anyone worth talking to. Someone please show me a new site that has awesome members who are engaged, intelligent and want to meet for a coffee.

AstrologyDating.com Officially Launches with the Introduction of Pay-Per-Match Online Dating.

Tastebuds, the dating site that matches singles using music, now has over 35,000 music fans. Love their blog, Coldplay fans least likely to have sex on first date, ha.

More Christians Seeking Love Connection Online (video).

Niche site of the week: uTest Launches “QAdate.com” – World’s First Dating Site For Software Testers. Talk about the perfect way to design a dating site, lol!

Top 25 dating blogs.

Match has an infographic out about singles and politics. Infographics are all the rage now. The problem is that most are boring, don’t tell an interesting story, or as with Match’s, basically say one thing and the graphic says something else completely. Infographics are all about getting more links to your site. Throw up some questionable data, make it look pretty and hope for the best.

Speaking of Match, check out Meetics’s numbers. Dating industry growth hype, let yee be smited (or at least put into perspective) by the mighty 10-Q. I wonder who put that Singlesnet deal together at Match? That was a rare misstep that they are going to be paying for for a while.

Still, Match continues to crush it in terms of overall revenue and subscribers. Pretty soon they will be making $200 million a quarter!

Sure there are 50 new tiny sites making waves with press releases, but Match = Amazon and even if they have a bad quarter they are just going to buy up competition and keep growing.

Match will own Plentyofish within a few years, right?

Dating Website Fraud Rose 150% in 2011

David Evans — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:30:57 +0000

Online fraud fighting company iovation has detected a 150% increase in fraud attempts directed at dating websites and their customers in 2011. Using its patented ReputationManager 360 solution to identify computers, mobile phones and tablets used to commit fraud, iovation found that 3.8 percent of the total transactions it processed for online dating sites in 2011 were fraudulent —more than a 150 percent increase over the 1.4 percent in 2010 and 1.5 percent in 2009. To date, iovation has stopped almost 60 million fraud attempts on dating websites.

Disclaimer, I’m an iovation partner and have have been known to drink beer with their sales and engineering team.

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.

Love at First Byte: The Secret Science of Online Dating

David Evans — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:59:00 +0000

For the past few months I’ve been working with CNBC on a new dating special that airs next week. Here’s a clip, which features OKCupid’s Sam Yagan, Match and a few other dating sites.

From the show’s website: NBC News and Today Show Correspondent Amy Robach reveals how online daters are using cutting-edge technology in search of love and how digital entrepreneurs are getting rich helping them do it.

You’ll meet scientists, mathematicians and psychologists who claim they can draw revealing conclusions about you from what you do — and don’t do — on their websites. Can online dating really deliver what it promises? CNBC takes you inside a business trying to unlock the secrets of the human heart with science.

Love at First Byte: The Secret Science of Online Dating
Premieres Thursday, February 9th 9p | 10p | 12a | 1a ET

Love Apps – The Business of Mobile Dating

David Evans — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:45:51 +0000

With Valentine’s Day around the corner we decided to look into Love Apps and investigate the Business of Mobile Dating.

We will cover these topics and many more:

How to start a dating community from scratch?
Which features monetize most?
How long is the life time of a user?
Which days are most active?
What business model works best, subscription, ad supported, fremium?

Panel:

Romain David – Co-Founder – Meexo, http://www.linkedin.com/in/romaindavid

Neil Goldberg – CEO – Handmade Mobile Entertainment (Flirtomatic, Chaarmd and Take Me Out Flirting), http://www.linkedin.com/in/ondemandmediagroup

Sophie-Charlotte Moatti – Co-founder & CEO – Rendez Vous Labs,
http://www.linkedin.com/in/scmoatti

Steve Paddon – Vice President of Products and Services – Trilibis Mobile (Match.com), http://www.linkedin.com/pub/steve-paddon/0/5aa/524

MobileMonday Silicon Valley – Love Apps – The Business of Mobile Dating
Monday, February 6, 2012 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (PT)
Palo Alto, CA

Registration.

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.

Single Edition Media Connects Brands With Singles

David Evans — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:17:39 +0000

A few years ago I was in New York City visiting friends, clients and family. After a long day of meetings with clients, visiting OkCupid and a few other dating site offices, I was thirsty and in need of good company.

Thankfully, I ended up meeting Sherri Langburt for a glass wine wine at a fantastic bistro on the upper west side of Manhattan. Sheri is the founder of Single Edition.

Single Edition is the premier lifestyle destination for singles: women and men of all ages who have never been married as well as those who are divorced, solo parents or suddenly single.

At the time, Sherri she was doing content and some marketing for People Media, and branched out from there, providing content to a number of dating sites.

Last year, Sherri created Single Edition Media. Today she sent out an email update that I wanted to share with you.

This February marks the one year anniversary for Single Edition Media….Over the last 12 months, we worked overtime building a social marketing agency, secured over 100 single female bloggers along the way, and we keep growing. We helped companies such as Jeep, The Fresh Diet, Ice.com, Vitamin Shoppe, AOL, Bai Beverages, Naked Winery, Biofilm, Amazon.com, Tabatchnick Fine Foods, BistroMD, Silk’n and others, differentiate themselves by delivering engaging content for their brands on blogs, websites, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Why should dating sites and dating bloggers care? A record number of people in the U.S. now live by themselves — and they spend $1.9 trillion a year. Businesses are beginning to take notice.

I waited for years for a singles-only advertising network to show up. It never happened on a large scale. Then Sherri came around and started putting together big singles events in NYC, content for dating sites, fun events like trunk shows and parties.

Not content with glitzy parties and selling high-quality blog posts to top-10 dating sites, she went on to create her own network of top dating bloggers and figured out a way to bring brands and bloggers together for the purpose of marketing to singles.

This required Sherri to provide the strategy and support required to make major brands comfortable with handing over their money and brand so she could put them in front of millions of singles. No easy task if you’re ever worked with large consumer brands. Nobody was doing this in the singles space in any meaningful way until Sherri came around.

So, if you’re a dating blogger, a dating coach or work with singles, check out the Single Edition Media Network. Brands wanting to connect with singles should go here. Make sure to tell her I sent you, maybe she’ll add me to her network :-)

Check out this great article in Forbes about the Solo Economy that mentions Single Edition. Us singles, we’re a multi-trillion-dollar market baby!

Online Dating Industry News 1-28-12

David Evans — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:11:45 +0000

Todays dating industry news update is over at Scoop.it. I’ve tried a number of aggregation and curation services and Scoop.it looks like a good choice. The last one I did at Paper.li didn’t have a preview, so it would publish and I wouldn’t know what it looked like in advanced. This one looks great, let me know what you think.