Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Mate1 co-founder Liz Wasserman. Much thanks to Liz for letting me share our conversation with Online Dating Insider readers.
What’s the story behind Mate1?
I started with my Father in 2003. I previously worked in film and print. Thought online dating was the best use of the web. We were 8 people in 2004. One programmer and 1 customer service person. Then came rapid growth in 2004.
We thought it was a mistake to sanitize profiles. There was room in the dating market to be more open. By the way, Mate1 is free for women.
What or who drove decision to focus on the “Intimate Encounters” market as opposed to a more general approach?
There is a lack of brand loyalty in the dating space. It’s the most intense experience in terms of amount of communication. Know the person first, the small-town feel as opposed to the megalopolis.
Your home page boasts 14.5 million profiles. Currently Mate1 is ranked #9 in March Hitwise report, Nielsen #6, Comscore #8, #4 in boomers according to Nielsen. Compete says 9 million visitors a month. Quantcast says 2.3 million uniques a month, around 300k a day.
Online dating lost the 18-24 market to Facebook. Our focus is on wealthier and serious daters 25 and up, increasingly seeing more empty nesters and those on their second marriage. Many just want to find someone to hang out with.
Last year Mate1.com spent $ 20,410,000 on online advertising. 1/2 as much as True and 4 million more than Match. What did you get for your $20 million ad spend?
Majority of ad spend was online. We experimented with television, which didn’t work out well. Affiliate marketing is increasingly important but we don’t have one at the moment.
We are working with ad networks to target high-value members. We have multi-tiered payouts for qualified leads. Certain demographics cost more. When we started our CPA was about $1, now it’s about $4 for high-value leads.
PlentyOfFish is one person and gets twice the member activity despite being 1/5 the size of Mate1. How do you plan on continuing to compete with Markus, True.com and to some extent OkCupid?
We aren’t especially concerned with the competition. There’s room for everal players in the field. Dating is not like shopping- unless you really don’t care who you hook up with, you’re going to want to maximize your options by joining several sites at once. Our main concern is providing our members with service that makes them want to stick around and stay active once they’ve signed up. I do think that the free sites are going to run into
difficulties on the technical side of things, and in terms of quality control. We devote enormous resources behind the scenes to protecting our customers from fraud, abuse and offensive photos. We don’t do a perfect job, but what we do makes a huge difference to our members. I think that as databases on individual sites grow, filtering is going to become an increasingly valuable feature for members.
I first noticed you Myspace ads earlier this year. When did you start?
We’ve been advertising on MySpace for well over a year now, through networks
and directly.Mate1 was one of the first dating sites pushing the widespread use of cleavage advertising on social and ad networks. Can you talk about the Mate1 ads and how others are copying you? True and Match come to mind.
The goal in advertising is to target sincere people. Not the kinds of people who are just killing time at the office browsing through profiles, but the kinds of people who want to create quality profiles and meet other people with quality profiles. Our ad campaigns are designed to attract those people. Yes, we use sexy models in our ads, but I (a fairly conservative, heterosexual woman) personally approve every one of our ads, and I only
approve those I consider to be appealing and positive. I don’t do headless women. I don’t do demeaning catch phrases. I am, however, strongly pro-cleavage- I think it’s nature’s greatest symbol of femininity and sexuality. I believe that Mate1.com pioneered a certain style of advertising that has been copied by some of our competitors, and as long as they don’t lift our designs wholesale (which they have done from time to time), I’m flattered by the imitation.
Social networks happen to be a fertile source of traffic for us, largely because (contrary to popular belief) social networks are not competitors to dating sites. They are, in fact, the antithesis of dating sites: they limit your encounters to people you already know, and they allow for no anonymity or discreetness. But they are full of gregarious and web-savvy people who are comfortable with the internet as a mechanism for socializing.
What is the difference between corresponding and email and saying “Hi”?
Corresponding and saying “hi” are two variations on the classic “wink” or “icebreaker”. We just felt that a pre-written message might seem more dignified, less cutesy to a mature audience than a “wink.”
The #2 Google result for Mate1 is the ripoffreport.com What’s the story behind your Ambassador program?
The Online Ambassadors are our version of a bar host or a Walmart greeter – a few friendly faces on the site (well-labeled so as not to be confused with regular members) who welcome members and encourage them to get off the sidelines and engage. They also serve as a kind of adjunct to our customer service department, fielding questions, complaints, and suggestions from the members they communicate with, and helping them learn how to use the site.
As for negative reports, one complainer out of hundreds of happy ambassadors, many of whom have returned for several stints and some of whom ave even met significant others on the site, seems like a pretty good ercentage to me.
What is in store for Mate1 for the rest of 2007?
Mate1 is going to spend the next year focusing on where the real value is for members. Background checks will be first, provided by Honesty Online, followed by a couple of fun features, including astrological matching. We’ve got a much improved design to be released by the end of ’07. We also intend to introduce communication tools that will be of genuine interest to our demographic, which skews toward more mature users (over 25), and on radically enhanced search and data filtering features that help users home in on the kinds of members they wish to meet. We’re also going multilingual and multi-national this year, with translated versions of our site.
Thanks Liz!
