A few people were nice enough to provide a copy of their iDate presentations, check the left sidebar and keep them coming. I would like to post copies of the traffic/stats presentations.
I looked that the Jupiter Research report and the GMI poll briefly this week. As usual, some interesting, and not so interesting takeaways.
GMI poll says we look for friendship (21%) more than we look for love (19%) or sex (16%).
Plus or minus a few percentage points due to errors and you have a pretty even balance, but what about the other 40%?
45% of people in the world consider online dating somewhat or extremely important. That should be middle-class internet users in countries with a strong economy. Kind of a throwaway number, what does that tell us? Sounds like America innovated the industry but does not lead.
Nate Elliot says there was a drop from 6% to 5% in paying subscribers.
The industry has flattened out, we knew this 12 months ago. Where are we in terms of hitting that $520 million mark for 2005? I bet not even close.
1/3 of non-converts say dating sites are too expensive. People who think $20 a month is too expensive are not serious daters. My stock answer is that casual daters will do just as well on free free niche sites and social networking sites.
Elliot says only 14% of non-conversions use free sites. That seems quite low to me. Where do the rest go? Back to the bar?
We know several large dating sites gained hundreds of thousands of paying members, which is good news to them but doesn’t say anything about tier 2 and 3 sites.
I think this puts to rest once and for all the the argument that current ranking systems are useful.
Analysts have been relying on ineffective and misleading data, and it shows. Primary research is the only way to go.
I don’t believe for one second that social networking sites pose little threat. That’s a nice quote for sure, one that free dating sites will shout with glee. What about the 60 million Myspacers that aren’t on dating sites? People will argue that they won’t pay for anything, but Myspace has effectively taken them off the market for paid services in the future for good. Where does one go after they outgrow Myspace? Will they graduate to paid services?
Targeted discounting strategies. Nice idea, but too complicated for most dating sites. If targeted advertising on dating sites doesn’t even work, how can they be expected to implement variable discounting?
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