This is one way to see how TheCompleteMe is growing.
Send in the clones: TheDatable Launches To Help You Discover The Singles In Your Social Graph. Another Likebright/TheCompleteMe social dating app.
I’ve been using them all for a while now, current version of Yoke, if they clean up the hotornot feature, is coming alone nicely. It shows what we have in common, distance, and other useful information about a person in a much more user-friendly way than all the other apps. I especially like that you can click from a stream of people’s photos at the top of the page, not having to click in the order they are presented is great. There is plenty I don’t like about the app, but its getting there.
The social dating space is going to go through a feature war. These sites are all to similar, nobody can tell which one is better than any of the others.
Social dating today is a Pinterest gallery display model, some are the natural evolution of the HotOrNot user experience. Why look at one person at a time, show me a pageful of people at once, don’t be stingy for pageviews for advertising purposes, inviting friends to use the app (single or wingman, I still have never met anyone who really wants to be an online wingman, but I’ll keep my ears open), review various chunks of information about a person (photos, mutual friends, likes, it all depends on which site you are on), click and add people that you like to your folder of liked people (nothing new here). Some sites will mutually introduce you to someone if they like you back. Its like speed dating online with all of this mutual liking. Actually, its Match’s Mutual Match, thats been a feature for almost a decade. Hmm, matching people on mutual Facebook Likes is like Mutual Match circa 2004.
Can you imagine if Match starts going social? I bet that’s what the OkCupid skunkworks in San Francisco is working on. Heck, they have ex-Zoosker’s working there as well. If I told my 200 or so single friends on Facebook that I wanted them to import their friends in Match for social matching purposes, they would do it in an instant. Not nearly as much friction with the old address book import as when I ask and they say “Complete-what?”, “What is Likebright” and “WTF is a Yoke?”
What about being on Match.com and having an “Import your single Facebook friends and match them with people you know (or don’t know) on Match and (perhaps even on Facebook).” Match really can’t pull this off though, which is too bad. Its simply too complicated for their users. Heck, I haven’t even figured out how this would work, but then again I just thought of it about three minutes ago.
A more social Match could grow their business more than games and events combined. I recognize that older people need to play games and people in cities like to congregate in groups with other singles. Wait, people under 50 are going to play games on Match?
All of these social sites are currently focused on refining the user interface, doing testing to see what features people want/will put up with and tweaking the virality of the app.
Social dating will not be interesting to anyone until these sites figure out how to recommend friends-of-friends in a way thats helpful and scalable.
This requires leveraging the social graph in ways that are light-years ahead of what these companies are doing right now. Its ok, we’ll wait while you figure it out, but not for long. Either they figure out something amazing and effective for us to do in the next 12 months and we start to see one or more of these sites pulling in over a million active users a month, or the sector will cool off and everyone will lament that Facebook-powered dating “could have been a contender.”
Look at how the sites are evolving into their own brand, their own look and feel. Likebright features photos are of good-looking people, the interface is very clean and overall its a lightweight experience.
(I’m advising Likebright, so there’s that. In fact, I’ve been talking to many of the new social dating startups, trying to figure out what makes each one potentially a contender, and at the same time impart some wisdom to help the avoid all of the pitfalls they will come across. If you don’t pick up the phone or send an email through the contact form, how the heck am I going to know what awesomeness you’re up to?)
Anyone who’s been rejected on a dating site outright or by not hearing back from someone is going to want to try social dating. One would hope that our friend’s friends won’t give us the cold shoulder as readily as the shark tank of traditional dating sites. Or will they and social dating will be as troubling as regular old dating in terms of never hearing back from people?
An analogy: If Likebright is a Mac, TheComplete.me is Windows. Very busy interface, blank photos and for me, not nearly as appealing people (I am a Libra after all). Is that because of the advertising TheComplete.me are doing, or that my friends with not-so-hot friends are connecting with me there as opposed to on Likebright, which feels like all the hot people I’d like to meet hanging out in a room together? These types of vibes, some are very personal intangible measurements, are what sets yet another social dating site apart from the cream of the crop. Its not a pixel color or necessarily how a feature feels when its clicked, its much deeper than that.
These sites have only a few thousand people on them. Lets talk when they each have 100,000 monthly visitors. Maybe TheComplete.me has a killer matching algorithm in the works and is letting its lackluster user interface limp along for a while. Maybe Likebright is all flash and no substance? Maybe social dating will be more like the Kardashians than Stephen Hawking in terms of functionality. Perhaps yoke or Circles or any of the others will hit an inflection point and pop to the top of the charts with some new feature?
Who knows and singles really don’t care who wins. App and dating site allegiance? Please. There will be no brand awareness when it comes to social dating, at least not for a looong time. Function well, suggest good matches, show people a good time, churn out the successes and make some money. Rinse and repeat.
Social browsing of profiles is going to be a difficult business model. Few will pay for these services as a subscription model. Freemium and maybe credits, perhaps. Zoosk owns that market already, for better or worse. A site could attempt to monetize with freemium features and ads like Are You Interested, but nobody is going to get close to Badoo, which has been doing this social dating stuff for five years and it making $150 million a year. that number will go down next year, as they have saturated the marketplace. Funny to say that hardly anyone has heard of Badoo, yet they are at the top of their game.
Badoo already won the game, they came out early and beat everyone while being very quiet about it. by beating the competition, I’m talking about revenue. As a service, Badoo is pretty generic and boring to use, there’s not enough interaction to keep things interesting for more than a few weeks. You can argue that all you want, I used the site every day for a month, and I haven’t been back much since.
I admire the drive of these companies, who face declining interest in Facebook, nobody wanting to pay for anything and dating site advertising rates through the roof. Cheap leads = cheap unattractive people (ability to pay, followed by physical attraction, there I said it). Its a perfect time to go build a cloud-based ad network, hard not to make money on those, and yet the faithful persevere in their belief that disrupting dating remains possible.
PlentyOfFish was the last company to truly disrupt the dating industry, and that was seven years ago. Maybe we’re due for a seismic event. But if social dating is this event, we’ve got a ways to go before it achieves anything like Pinterest-level interesting from singles. BTW, stop making Pinterest-style dating sites, we have enough already, thank you.
Speaking of POF, check out these ads.
I love how POF says you have to be a member to use their UltraMatch system because it uses astronomical amounts of computing power. That is brilliant, I wonder how many people fall for the pitch?
As usual, POF continues as a cesspool of nasty dating site ads. This banner ad for white men borders on being racist. Hey, its the dating industry, anything goes. right?
Verifying Ages Online Is a Daunting Task, Even for Experts. You know what company is good at this kind of stuff? Acxiom. Read about how much data they have, buy and sell about you every day in You for Sale: Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome.
Dating sites should barter/trade info with companies like Acxiom. Your profile matching system sucks, why not match on grocery store analytics or super-enhances demographic profiling. The credit and data bureaus have algo’s 1,000 times more powerful than Match. Why don’t dating sites take advantage of the opportunity.
Oh, thats right, niche sites. All these niches instead of a Google-style dating site which could be a $1.5B company and actually afford to do big deals with vendors like Acxiom. Niche sites can’t afford to do much of anything, stuck in their own niche, as it were. Maybe People Media has the resources, but few others for sure.
Cupid PLC is on a tear, currently investigating several acquisition opportunities. Leave a comment about which dating site(s) you think Cupid will acquire next. Cupid is expected to earn around $20 million for the year, an almost 50% increase on last year’s earnings. Via Herald Scotland.
Cupid PLC is the new Spark Networks, but with a lot more revenue from adult sites and a super-hungry executive team. If they can shed some of the more unsavory aspects of their stable of sites they would be a nice acquisition target of their own.
Now who’s going to buy White Label Dating?
I have an interesting revenue opportunity for dating sites. Make sure to sign up for the newsletter, I’m getting back to publishing that weekly.
