Now that Google has hired most of the big brains in academia, Yahoo is rushing to catch up.
In the dating space, Yahoo is hiring PhD’s to figure out how to use economics to save attractive women from unwanted solicitations on an Internet dating site. While displaying how many people a guy has already approached is an interesting metric to make available (transparency is good, even if not public data), this is a basic database query. I think i mentioned the idea on this blog last year.
It’s the rest of the projects that Yahoo is unleashing a new breed of economist brainiacs that’s most fascinating. Researchers are going to have a field day with Yahoo data, which is an incredible treasure trove of consumer behavior ripe for analysis.
The contextual advertising project is going to be huge for Yahoo, but only because they are a network of sites that can share data. Most standalone sites cannot afford, or get access to, such broad amounts of data. That’s where the new identity providers using new systems like OpenID, are going to run rampant when it comes to targeted advertising.
Interesting factoid:
In 2001, Yahoo started charging for its online dating service — which surprisingly resulted in an increase in membership. Mr. Raghavan thinks the switch increased the value of Yahoo Personals in the eyes of consumers and encouraged them to use it more. While the move predated Yahoo’s recent research push, it’s an outcome economists might have predicted: The fee deterred users who weren’t serious about dating, making the service more efficient for those who were.
While I agree with using price as a filter, I don’t buy that increasing the price increased membership alone. There are other factors that come into play, including changes in marketing strategy and overall industry growth which may or may not have been taken into account when measuring the increase.
In 10 years I have never been approached by Yahoo to do a survey, so I don’t know how much they rely on them or focus groups. I went hiking this weekend with a friend who does high-end focus groups, it’s was enlightening to hear her take on how useful, and useless, expensive focus groups can be, depending on the moderator, questions asked and the participants. Reminded me of a book called How to Lie With Statistics.
Factoid #2: Yahoo records over 12 terabytes of data daily — the equivalent of about half the information contained in all of the books in the Library of Congress.
Technorati Tags: search+engine, yahoo+personals, online+dating
