Big news, social discovery/dating site Badoo is on track to hit 150 million users today. Corporate communications at Badoo told me that they attribute the 150,000 daily new users in part to mobile and US growth, specifically. Thirty-five million active users per month worldwide is incredible, to say the least.
I spent 30 days straight on Badoo a few months ago and have spoken at length with executives about the company’s past as well as its future plans. I even wrote a position paper on Badoo for a top 10 dating site, which was smart enough to see the writing on the wall in terms of social discovery and the opportunities and challenges it brings to traditional dating sites.
Looking at Badoo, I can’t help but feel the same as when I started tracking Skout, Zoosk and Are You Interested back in the day. All three have grown to be mature businesses that have come to define the mobile social dating and discovery sector. Of course there are others like MyYearbook, which has been a strong presence in to social space for years.
With social discover being such a hot topic and investor money pouring into the space, expect a whole new crop of similarly-focused sites and apps to proliferate over the next few months as everyone chases after the “We’re tired of Facebook, I want to meet and/or date new people” market.
Its been a blast watching this sector grow over the past few years, and while none of these sites are for serious daters, they certainly know how to go after the casual market. Recently, Zoosk saw the writing on the wall, and has been doing some rebranding to try to appear more social in nature. It remains to be seen how thats worked out for them.
I’m surprised that POF didn’t go after the paid exposure market. that would have been a great fit for them. Maybe POF is making big bank on their daily deals site and decided to stick with that strategy, we’ll see.
Mobile usage has grown by 100% since November 2011
More than doubling mobile revenues
U.S. growth is also being powered by mobile
Android app is now one of the top 10 most popular apps (No. 7) for social networking
iPhone app is now a top 25 social networking app, up from No. 60 late last year
Impressive. Badoo had a fun US launch in New York City a while back, and is seeing US growth primarily centered in Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston.
While 150 million users is no small feat, in order to really make an impact in the US, Badoo has to do some serious refactoring of their interface and add some features. There’s simply not much to do on the site and its easy to use it for a few weeks and they bail, although in other countries the site has proven to engage members for quite some time.
A TechCrunch commeter mentioned that the 150 million users number might have been inflated due to Badoo acquiring HotOrNot, good point.
Badoo makes around $1 per user, which is low, but with 150 million people, they are hard at work figuring out ways to further monetize users, just like Facebook. I wonder where Badoo will top out at? 200 million users? If they could get the “Tired of Facebook” people, that number could be much larger.
Yes, Tagged is at something like 300 million users, but honestly I haven’t been on the site in years and don’t pay attention to it.
Who owns the patents for this social discovery stuff? I bet they are just sitting back waiting for the marketplace to reach a certain level and then start trolling for dollars. That’s going to be fun to watch.
Sponsor Post Avoid the pain of content moderation with RTFM Are you a developer or community manager concerned about offensive content on your site or app? Check out Real Time Foto Moderator by CrowdFlower to keep your content clean and your users happy.
Device reputation firm iovation did some research and found that the online dating fraud rate originating from Europe grew 357% between Q1 2011 and Q1 2012.
This is great news for iovation’s business model, while at the same time bad news for the online dating industry. The last thing it needs is more fraud, there’s plenty of it to go around already. I don’t know what the actual number of fraudulent activities was, but thats a pretty big jump.
While some larger, more savvy dating sites roll their own anti-fraud systems, the majority don’t have any anti-fraud protection in place at all. Active in the online community space for several years, iovation has a number of customers in the online dating space. I like their concept because it relies in part on a shared database of fraudulent devices, meaning that if a device has been tagged with a red flag, you’ll know that on your site the second they hit it and be able to head off the offender from the get-go. They have launched a new European data center as well, which means better, faster services for dating sites with a footprint in Europe. Plus then you can expense a trip to Amsterdam for business. More info.
I just got back from a weekend meditation retreat. At one point there were 24 of us sitting on cushions in a room overlooking the mountains of New York State, with an amazing sunset and all of a sudden I felt 100% connected with everyone in the room on a level I’ve never, ever encountered before. Call it being open, call it love, lets just agree to call it a feeling that dating sites should strive to facilitate between members.
Prepare for some major link-droppage, enjoy.
I mentioned that Pinterest could be an interesting idea for a dating site. Of course someone is doing that.
Here’s another one. Foreign Affairs on Pintrest. Pintrest is doomed because its all women and they hate this stuff and its getting so spammy its ridiculous.
Netflix never used its $1 million algorithm due to engineering costs. The increase in accuracy on the winning improvements “did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment. Ouch!
Friendfinder Networks pays off some debt, remains deep in the red. I’ve been doing some research on AdultFriendFinder (for a client, really!) and its clear that after dropping $75 and receiving a severely bruised ego, I totally understand why men pay to be abused by women on AFF. Just like with dating, its a numbers game. You have to deal with the seriously deluded people and every once in a while there is a real person with a real photo that you can actually talk to that will actually respond to you and doesn’t have a list of demands 4 screens long.
The FFN cam business is probably raking in a lot of cash. Girls asking for tips on webcams is a *huge* business segment. At least thats what they tell me.
Big buzz around theComplete.me (private Facebook dating, oxymoron?), which for some reason is apologizing for something I didn’t really pay attention to (doing geographic roll-out instead of nationwide), making it a bigger issue than it needed to be. If everyone on the team is a dating industry pro and worked for Match, Yahoo etc, why are mistakes like this being made? #newbiemistake.
In other news theComplete.me raises $1.2 million seed round. Investors include PlentyOfFish, what??? Dating sites investing in other dating sites, its cats and dogs and raining frogs. I would love to see that term sheet.
The main reason theComplete.me is able to raise any money is because of the team. Investors probably have a vague idea what the final product will be or if it will be successful, but they like the team, a lot, so it doesn’t really matter what they pitched them with.
This is a very different approach from most dating startups, which throw down their business plan and say “fund us so we can build this” and have to discernable experience or team members. TheComplete.me folks have a general idea of what direction they are going, something like”It’s private/real identity/facebook/some other stuff and we’ll see what happens.”
The first U.S. Edition of the Online Dating Summit in Las Vegas is January 22-25 2013. Their inaugural event in Barcelona featured 450 professionals from over 30 countries. In Las Vegas they expect close to 1.000 delegates. Registration opens June 1.
Interesting how iDate moved from Miami to be in Vegas at the same time as the Online Dating Summit. I guess domain squatting wasn’t enough for them. If you go to Vegas, which event will you be attending?
Plentyoffish, I mean POF, POF passes 100M weekly messages, 2 Billion Pageviews/Week. That is just insane. Whats more, they have no idea what’s driving this traffic bump. Read More…
Match has a new campaign in the UK called Real Stories.
Billing and marketing vendor and friends of the dating industry vindicia have expanded their CashBox solution. I’ll let them explain it better than I ever could.
Traditionally, dating sites have been subscription oriented, with monthly, quarterly, six-month and annual plans being the most common offerings. Usage billing gives them the opportunity to potentially attract audiences that might not be yet ready to cough up $30 a month, but still get value from the service. You could have an “entry” pricing model that’s based on the number of profiles you’re able to see (say 100 per month) for $19.95, and every profile over that is $1.99. The latter pricing model is exactly what the latest release of CashBox would support because we would bill the appropriate amount based on the profiles “viewed” for that particular customer. That way people who want to test the waters could. Dating sites using CashBox would have the flexibility to incorporate multiple pricing models into their arsenal.
Badoo says they have 8 million and counting in the States. Thats huge since they have zero marketing footprint here. Former Google and Facebook exec Ben Ling is joining Badoo as COO, effective May 1. He’ll be based in their London HQ.
Ben was Senior Director, Product Management of Search Products and Local Business Products and Director of Platform at Facebook back in the day. He’s got skills, but can they translate to the further internalization of Badoo?
I was on Badoo every day for over a month. The way its going to grow in the US is by adding a few select features. They have the HotOrNot thing going (literally, they power the site now) and the “Who’s close to you right now” thing, but they need some new features that Americans and Canadians like to keep people engaged, otherwise the site gets boring too quickly.
Wait, I’m looking at this all wrong (again!). With a member acquisition cost of pennies per person, Badoo can make a ton of money with the site just doing what they keep doing. Serious daters won’t use it, but there are plenty of people like those on MyYearbook that will hit the site just to see who’s around and engage in some casual flirting. Will Badoo stay the same and just coast and cash in or evolve to be something bigger and more important? Let’s see what Ben and the team can come up with.
New site alert. Ladies interested in partaking in some questionable idolatrous behavior can check out Miss Travel, the site where they can find rich men to fly them around the world. Is sex with an old rich fat man really worth a trip to Paris? A lot of people seem to think so.
Your online dating profile photos make you look like a blurry Sasquatch. Here’s how to fix them, A Free Photo Lighting Lesson.
Much has been written about certain mobile apps that were a bit too close for comfort when it comes to knowing exactly where a person is on a map. To counter-balance this, why not learn how Carnegie Mellon researchers are Using Foursquare Data to Redefine a Neighborhood.
Video-based dating is heating up (again). Runfaces this time. And Skyecandy.
After hanging out on a cushion all weekend, I came across Spiritual Singles. Nice niche and less dogmatic than Christian dating sites. Maybe Buddha is their spokesperson?
A social network for two people? If Facebook would only get groups sorted out and not so complex, these sites would be mostly unnecessary. but hey, why not make social nets specifically for certain numbers of people? Social Networks, Small and Smaller (NY Times).
MeetMoi launched Wingman, allows friends to get introduced to other groups nearby. I love how the press release says “MeetMoi is the leader in social discovery technology.” Sorry, there are no leaders at this point, everyone is simply trying to figure out how to make meeting people more social, because that is the buzz and the hype of 2012. Kudos for MeetMoi for trying out a wingman feature, haven’t seen a digital version of that yet.
When I met Maria Coder a few years ago, she was writing about online dating for the Examiner blog network. Today, Maria runs Investidate, a service which offers workshops focused on making sure your date is who they say they and how to navigate the complicated world of modern dating.
I’m not talking about the guys posing as women, fake profiles or financial scammers. I’m talking about the millions of people who fudge their height, weight, income and interests. No wonder we look at photos first and read profiles afterwards. A face can tell you much more than a poorly-written profile ever will.
Dating sites, what you’ve been doing for the last decade with profiles hasn’t worked nearly as well as it could.
What’s it going to take to get you to create more in-depth profiles that accurately reflect our tastes, preferences and personalities?
Several years ago I met Christian and (at the time) Redg at Skout, think it was iDate. After talking to them a while I wanted to help them out with fundraising, so I went to the usual suspects and sat in on some investor meetings on Skout’s behalf. Nobody was interested, most investors (that I know anyway), were either already invested in mobile apps, or sitting back and cooling their heels to see how things in the location-based discovery/dating market panned out. Skout also had too many business models at the time, and the tons of young kids and spam turned some investors off completely.
What a difference a few years makes. Skout has refocused the app on a new demographic: young people who wanted to meet strangers and singles who wanted to flirt.
Skout was popular enough early on to take advantage of much cheaper customer acquisition costs, and is currently singing up one million new members each month.
In a story on TechCrunch, its mentioned that Skout has a healthy revenue stream from in-app purchases. Users can pay for points to send virtual gifts, see who is viewing their profile and send wink bombs.
Skout co-founder Christian Wiklund says they have cleaned up the service, removing 40,000 devices a month to keep existing members happy and spam-free.
To keep the engine going, Skout is raising $22 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Thats Marc Andreessen, the guy who invented the web browser, and who also invested in Foursquare and many other huge Internet startups.
With the funding, Skout plans to find a new office that will hold 120 people and focus on scaling the service.
I love it when capable entrepreneurs keep chipping away at an idea over time, making mistakes, learning from them, pivoting when required, and having the tenacity to round up a huge pile of cash from A-list investors. Huge win for Skout, and the entire dating industry should benefit as investors continue to warm up to casual, social, mobile, location-based dating apps.
Note that HowAboutWe raised $15 million last year. What did Skout say to investors to get such a big investment? Probably the fact that Skout is much larger than HAW and its often easier to ask people for money with in-app purchasing than it is subscriptions, just ask Badoo.
Looks like paying for credit-based features on dating sites is back with a vengeance after networks like Spring Street abandoned the practice years ago.
Badoo has tons of money in the bank and now Skout steps up to the plate. The battle for the casual dating is on, although I think Badoo will take the 30 and up crowd and Skout will split up the youngsters with a handful of other apps. Who else is doing casual dating at this scale?
While we wait for society and dating sites to figure out how to do video profiles and videochat, the dating industry has had one option when it comes to getting past static profiles.
OmniDate, which many readers will remember from iDates past, was the only pure-play avatar-based dating system. When I first tried Omnidate I sketched out exactly what they had to do to get to the point where they could comfortably say they had a minimum viable product for the dating industry. The problem was throwing up a background jpeg and some cutesy avatar gestures wasn’t enough to catch the eye of the dating industry. It turns out that you get just about as much emotive bandwidth out of IMVU or Yahoo Messenger. Try as they might, the founders ended up selling the company.
With 50 million registered users, 10+ million unique visitors per month and a $50+ million annualized revenue run rate, IMVU has long been a leader in the avatar chat space. But there is always room for improvement, because its all about increasing emotive bandwidth. I just wish these apps were built in HTML5 and not Flash.
Developer Rocket Ninja has created a Facebook app called Be3D. The app will “Transform yourself into your ultimate 3D persona and express your personality, humor, and style while developing relationships, old and new.”
The present build ofBe3D allows users to engage in pre-scripted actions, such as dancing or high five-ing with members of their 3D networks and gift virtual goods to one another. Pelled explains that users will be able to find and add new friends to their network via search parameters like gender, age and location — as one might with an online dating service. Pelled explains Be3D will monetize through a combination of video ads, hard currency, virtual goods — like clothing and the aforementioned facial customization — and product placement. Pelled also says there are plans for an affiliate referral program in the works, but the system isn’t in place yet.
Be3D is in beta, and missing serious social or dating features. Rocket Ninja raised $7.5 million in funding last November, and promises to deliver custom avatars, games and chat.
The bigger picture here is that more companies are bringing deeper immersive experiences to Facebook. Mostly in the casual chat category, expect new dating-focused chat apps to emerge this year. All I want to do is record a 2-minute video and attach it to my dating profile. Is that so much to ask?
Like the other 10 million of you, I’ve spent some time pinning away on Pinterest. I now understand why the service is 90% women, because most dudes are not going to pin anything unless its girls, guns, stuff with engines or showing off their man caves. Women, on the other hand, have found the new new thing.
My take on Pinterest is that its smacks of a fad. While they have absolutely stunning recent growth, at its core its a digital corkboard. Great traffic driver for brands, sure, but really, the media is doing its job pimping Pinterest, so lets all relax and see how the stats are in six months. I thought StumbleUpon was a fad as well, and look at how well they have done as a site discovery service.
Of course I and a few friends started trying to pin photos of singles on Pinterest. Here’s the Match search, its not a board though. My Match profile shows up, so do some profiles from Spark Networks.
Could Pinterest drive traffic to dating sites? Even without any dating-specific features, the ability to browse singles as a gallery is compelling to a lot of people. Adult sites could crush it on Pinterest as well. Fling.com is probably freaking out about how easy it will be to drive traffic with their amazing geo-targeted lead-generators.
Pinterest is social discovery done right. The problem is that singles don’t belong on Pinterest. Its going to dilute what makes Pinterest so useful and fun. And it will invariably devolve into a lot of dating sites spamming people with photos of young women with side cleavage galore.
Pinterest has a spam problem heading their way, from about 100 different vectors. I wish them the best of luck staying out ahead of the spammer arms race. As for profiles on Pinterest, what do you think?
Mobile applications that track and make your current location public have proliferated in recent years. Almost all of these efforts have been tied into public Foursquare, and now Facebook, checkins. My favorite has always been Assisted Serendipity, which I’ve written about many times. There are so may other social versions of these apps, I can’t even keep track of them. Today’s dust-up in the blogosphere is over Girls Around Me.
What makes Girls Around Me special? The fact that it connects Foursquare checkins with Facebook pages and a map, instead of a text list of locations where people are. A basic step in the natural evolution of Assisted Serendipity and 50 other social apps, Girls Around Me is the one that got the data providers to pay attention.
Stalking apps, ahem, I mean mobile social discovery apps, have two primary differentiators. They either use public data from sources like Foursquare or private in-app data, which for this discussion we will generally considere as opt-in tracking. As usual, the devil is in the privacy details of Facebook and Fourquare. Set your privacy setting up right, and most? of this information is public. Do it wrong and well you can insert your own Nightmare Situation here.
You know Grindr, the popular gay hookup app? Girls Around Me makes Grindr look positively antiquated, and all it took was a few API calls to Foursquare and Facebook (Although kudo’s for Grindr to take into consideration that not that the boys on Grindr want to be that public about their trysts).
Many other similar apps have been roaming in the wilderness for years, and all it took was a few blog posts to get mobile/social networks focused on the nefarious ways their data may be used. The truth of the matter is that people are brazen idiots when it comes to checking into locations on Facebook and Foursquare. I’m one myself. I like to brag that I’m at a great concert, or out to dinner at the hot new restaurant in town with an attractive woman.
Did you know there are websites that track Foursquare check-ins so people know to rob your house? Crazy!
I shudder to think about the number of women who are going to get in trouble due to the proliferation of opt-in and automated checkins in the coming years. I think its going to be a much bigger deal than people getting attacked on first dates.
More info at Interactioned and Cult Of Mac, which says Foursquare has released a statement announcing that they have officially killed Girls Around Me’s access to their public API. Facebook is looking into it as well. Well that was fast.
Happy Friday, #followfriday, TGIF and all of that. I threw a bunch of fun and interesting links up on the Online Dating Industry Insider Scoop.it page. Finishing my move to Vermont this weekend, back next week. Here’s to hoping that the cable modem in the woods is fast, feeling a bit cut off from the world lately.
Anyone who’s been on a dating site has seen them. She’s a beautiful girl with poor grammar skills. She wants to talk via her Yahoo email account and within a few emails she’s often asking for money to come visit you. Thats a clear indication of a dating site scammer, and just about everyone who’s ever joined a dating site has experienced a similar situation.
The dating industry is finally starting to come around to protecting the safety of their members in a meaningful way, but only after much legal pressure and several waves of recent bad press. Just Google “Match lawsuits” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
However, a newer, and more insidious problem has emerged in recent years, and its one that, while not an immediate threat to one’s personal safety or bank account, is no less nefarious in my opinion.
More and more dating site startups that are buying dating profiles in bulk to bolster their user databases. On one hand they purport to take your safety and well-being seriously, while in the back room they’re wheeling and dealing with profile vendors, and other dating sites, to acquire profiles to fill in troublespots, where there’s not enough density for the site to be competitive. It could be a geographic area, or it could be a lack of lesbians or bikers.
The reason that profiles-for-sale have become a topic of discussion is because its expensive to acquire new members for dating site startups, and there is a huge jump in dating startups this year centered around mobile and social dating. I’m often asked about whether or not a site should acquire dating profiles to avoid the empty database problem. Each and every time my recommendation is no. Put on your big-boy pants and do what everyone else does, sign up new members, one at a time.
My reasoning is simple. If you can’t grow a site from zero to several thousand members in a few months through Google, Facebook or ads on POF, you probably shouldn’t be in the business. Dating sites are 100% driven by ad spend and affiliate marketing and as I tell new startups, you’re not in the dating business, you’re in the Internet marketing business now. The fact of the matter is that it takes thousands of dollars to acquire enough customers in a specific geographic area to “take off”, and there’s no way around it.
To dig into the cloaked world of dating profile sales, BetaBeat purchased dating site profiles from one of the companies that offers them.
Betabeat emailed 208 men and women whose profiles are being sold on SaleDatingProfiles. Most didn’t reply; 35 emails bounced. Only five people responded, none of whom knew their profiles were for sale. Harry Lin, a 61-year-old in Switzerland, noticed that a profile he started at Jumpdates.com had somehow made its way to Mega Dating and the now-defunct Sensual-Attraction.com. “They have my email, user name, birthday and *former* Jumpdates password!” he wrote in an email.
As BetaBeat found out, its the small questionable niche sites which tend to utilize purchased profiles. The majority of singles don’t use these sites, which is why the topic hasn’t been that big of a deal. A side bar discussion about how white label dating sites share profiles among its customers is mentioned as well.
Personally I don’t understand why more sites don’t band together and offer Mega-subscriptions, where you can sign up once for many sites, potentially across multiple brands. There has got to be a way to do this that makes sense for both dating sites and singles.
Mark Brooks, a popular figurehead in the online dating industry says he once fired a client for buying profiles. That is a great sound bite, but if we’re talking about firing clients for poor behavior, why stop at those that buy profiles? What about the illegal billing practices, the lack of ID verification, the sites full of scammers, the utter lack of any decent verified matching systems and the automated enticement emails from fake members sent to people who’s billing cycle is about to end?
Online dating, like any Internet-based industry, exists because of years of positive efforts attributable to a small number of fantastic companies run by people I admire personally and professionally. Unfortunately these shining examples in the sector are heavily outnumbered by the sheer amount of tenacity of bad actors which continue to make enormous amounts of money by fleecing singles by means of any number of unsavory business practices.
Every so often someone accuses me of focusing on the negative aspects of the dating industry too much. Of that I am guilty as charged. My goal has always been to elevate the business of online dating and help it grow as a whole. Sometimes that means calling out bad behavior in the hopes that new companies will focus on the big picture and opportunity instead of the intoxicating and heady get-rich-quick by any means necessary mindset thats so pervasive in the online dating market. Online dating is never going to be a utopian and perfect industry, but we should at least talk about what is possible and fair and right, for both dating site operators and single alike.
Mobile applications that track and make your current location public have proliferated in recent years. Almost all of these efforts have been tied into public Foursquare, and now Facebook, checkins. My favorite has always been 
