Online Dating Insider

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From SeekingAlpha:

Non-core online dating and video sharing ($3.1 million deficit on revenue of $2.3 million in 2Q08) has been reclassified as a discontinued operation.

Remember that $30 million purchase of Tickle and LoveHappens?

I’m sitting here jailbreaking my iPhone while I install some cool new applications that Steve Jobs isn’t ready to officially approve, which means they are better than what’s in the iPhone, or have created an additional revenue stream that Apple has no control over, or something as simple as cut-and-paste, which Apple evidently decided wasn’t important enough to include as a feature.

A highly placed official in a large dating site sent me the following, People Really Do Look Better When You Drink. For everyone trying to cure AIDS or cancer, someone else is earning credits for studying horny bar behavior. I guess we should be grateful for the opportunity to learn about human nature.

The research study is right, I’m looking at some profiles on dating sites and the woman look much better after a few drinks.

A close friend got dumped by his fiance, second time she’s performed that particular move, ouch. He’s on Match and sometimes we compare the women in our hotlist and who contact us. He is a good sport when I go into research mode.

He’s nowhere near as good looking as I am (ha), makes a lot more money and is gung-ho about having kids, so we see decidedly different search results.

When I went to the Match.com search page tonight, I see it’s changed. Looks like they moved the search fields from the sidebar to the bottom of the screen. Knowing Match, there is a perfectly good reason for doing this. Or is there?

Match has all the answers but I’m not sure they know which questions to ask anymore. What’s it like to grow to be arguably number one then hit the wall? More revenue per member, sure thats great for shareholder value but it sucks for the rest of us members.

PlentyOffish and SinglesNet are going to crush Match in terms of traffic over time, but boy is that traffic getting expensive.

Look at the difference between unique visitors and visits per month. There are almost three times as many visits to Singlesnet as to PlentyOfFish, and many of them are paying members. See the growth of unique members on PoF? Nice and steady, avoiding the stutter steps and fluctuations that most sites exhibit over time.

Don’t let Guy Kawasaki and the affiliate marketing people like Shoemoney distract you, Markus at PoF pays a hell of a lot of money to get 30+ million visitors a month. Once you know what the competition pays so it’s pretty easy to figure out the rest of the equation.

Markus didn’t need to be at the Affiliate Summit in Boston this week. The people that make a lot of money affiliate marketing and advertising don’t go to the shows and they don’t talk.

OkCupid has grown buy a hundred thousand visitors and total visits went from 1.7 million to 4.5 million in the last year. People really like taking tests!

Funny thing about the online dating industry, it’s all about online marketing, nothing more, nothing less. Anyone else tells you different they are too passionate about the market or ignorant. Passion for online dating doesn’t make money or success, in fact it hurts you, just like it can in real life. Huge marketing budgets, absolute mastery of metrics and analytics and top-notch marketing leadership are required for success.

Time to go shoot some videos on my iPhone.

Can you guess what dating website this represents? No peeking via Google, leave your answer in the comments.

Today, Ignighter is bringing a group of Obama supporters (official supporters, members of Obama support groups, staffers, etc) together on a group date with Clinton supporters (and former staffers). What a great idea. More on the Ignighter blog.

MarketingWeek says that Match.com is launching a summer TV campaign to target men for the first time. The ads carry the strapline (tagline) “Too Many Women” to illustrate the fact that online dating is now a popular choice for women. The new campaign has been created by US agency Hanft Raboy & Partners and will break in the UK on August 18.

I’ve talked to a lot of people, regular singles and dating industry insiders, about Match’s US tagline, “It’s ok to look.” Almost everyone cringes and says it sounds like they are catering to married people. I would love to have seen the user testing on various Match taglines, interesting that the one they picked is almost universally misunderstood.

Addressing intent with ambiguous wordsmithing doesn’t seem to be hitting the mark at Match. Can you come up with a new tagline? Leave a comment.

I hear that StyleMePretty wedding blog is possibly going to announce some sort of deal with a dating site. Not much to go on but it’s from a trusted source. Wedding websites are a logical extension for some dating sites, lots more money to be made in weddings than dating site subscriptions.

This week the Affiliate Summit rolled into Boston. I spent time with Honesty Online (Mark Ezra and Larry Cynkin), SinglesNet (Jeff Clark), Date.com (Meir and Chris) and MillionaireMatch (Steve Casper). Dinner at Persephone was good, my favorite waiter works their and they have Nintendo Wii’s to play while you’re shopping at the in-restaurant boutique.

Marc Porcelli and I met up, Marc was Chief Marketing Officer at SinglesNet and is now back at Azoogle. Jeff Clark, current SinglesNet VP Marketing, was around too (with Mark and Larry in above photo). Jeff tells it like it is and had me laughing often. I learned a lot about SinglesNet which was great because it feels like they have had a wall of silence up until recently.

AshleyMadison had a booth. Notice the copy of Maxim Magazine on the table.

“Life is short, Have an affair,” nice.

A highlight of the event was getting invited back into the blogger/press room and meeting up with a group of incredibly smart, talented and connected folks from the social media world. I am not at liberty to disclose our locations or what occurred throughout the evening, let’s just say we had a lot more fun than I’ve ever had at iDate and my Twitterstream is smokin’ hot this morning.

Seeking Alpha talks about the true value of Spark Networks:

At first glance, the stock has all the makings of a potential value play. It’s got captive audiences in a growing industry, a P/E under 10, and its net income has grown consistently..

Looks great! Unfortunately, this is exactly why investors cannot make purchase decisions “at first glance”. We’ve discussed examples here of what kinds of things get buried in the notes to the financial statements. In this case, however, the investor need not go further than the income statement.

While most companies lose 35-40% of their income to tax, Spark Networks actually gets to double its income in 2007, and pay very little tax in 2006! Clearly, this is not sustainable. A careful reading of the notes reveals this tax gain is a result of making up for past operating losses, and that a large chunk of these tax assets have now been used up.

I predict Spark will sell in 2008, but for how much? Leave your guesstimate in the comments.

So I’m getting my daily dose of BoingBoing, watching the Porter Report video of beatbox impressario Beardyman, and the interstitial advertisement for Cisco kicks in, asking how would online dating be different if profiles included video. Check out the comments.

Many dating sites have tried to add video profiles. I have a whole category dedicated to speed dating and video. Video profiles are a great idea for certain types of people, but it’s not for everyone. For starters, not everyone has a webcam, although I’m sure Cisco would like to change that.

Then there is the problem that most people freeze up and sound wooden, because speaking into a camera is more difficult that it seems. If you are sexy, you get responses, if you’re not, you don’t. Harsh reality.

Policing photos and text is difficult for dating sites, how are they going to review thousands of videos?

Video profiles are a long way off for mainstream dating. Several dating sites that have video, but they have a ways to go before more mainstream people start looking into the webcam and saying, “I can’t believe I’m doing this, I’m just as comfortable in jeans as I am in a little black dress.”

WooMe and SpeedDate are solid interim solutions for the younger generation, receiving approximately 200,000 visitors monthly.

I wonder what Cisco has up it’s sleeve? Video-based identification services?

Datran Media has released the results of a brand impact survey it completed in conjunction with marketing effectiveness research company Dynamic Logic. While the survey was in support of a b-to-c campaign for online dating firm eHarmony—that company saw unaided brand awareness increase 11.5 percentage points and brand favorability increase 7.3 percentage points as a result of its e-mail campaign—many of the lessons they learned are the same for all e-mail marketers.

eHarmony does great email marketing, as does Yahoo, even if I have a problem with some of the content.

Personalization is also a key consideration, he said. “When you’re thinking about brand awareness, it’s important to segment your list.”

All dating sites fail when it comes to customizing messaging for members. Besides your name and the last time you logged in (if that), email are generally generic in nature, lacking a tie-in with user participation metrics. Are they sending a lot of emails? Not responding to them? Adding people to hotlists? This kind of data can be used as a call to action to get people participating on a site. Why these datapoints are not integrated with email marketing campaigns is beyond me.

I’m working with several sites which will be mining their databases to create super-customized member emails, I’m excited to see the results.