I’m glad I got my dating rant off my chest, back to business. Apple is announcing new laptops in 15 minutes. I am bouncing around the office in anticipation.
Match is inserting ads into it’s free SMS alerts. The ads are terrible. “Earn a degree”, “Info on the best schools”, why is this un-targeted junk reaching me? It’s bad enough they are charging for mobile access. Next post will be about the new Myspace self serve targeted ad platform. Maybe that will get dating sites starting to think about mining everything they know about members instead of the blunders we see on Match and PlentyOfFish. Un-targeted ads on dating sites are a red flag for greed and frankly exhibit a lack of taste that bothers me to no end. I guess most singles don’t care about the ads, as long as they are meeting people. But who actually clicks on this junk?
My friend Kara wrote in to say that Engage is now charging for general features such as seeing who has expressed interest in you, contacting people and finding out who thinks you’re a match. I don’t understand why some profiles require me to pay $5.95 just to view, while others I can view for free. Interesting that monthly visits continue to increase, from 1.5 million to almost 4 million over the past year. We’ll see how the new paywall influences visits and engagement over the next few months.
