The online dating busy season is over. We’ve recovered from iDate and the media has written all it ever will about the effect of the recession on online dating. I thought now would be a good time to introduce myself, explain what I do and the reason this blog exists.
My name is Dave Evans and I have been blogging about the online dating industry at OnlineDatingPost since November 2002. This is my primary marketing channel for my consulting business in the online dating space.
You can read this blog at onlinedatingpost.com, subscribe to the Online Dating Insider RSS feed or Subscribe to Online Dating Insider by Email. I post to Twitter and Facebook, periodically, but this is home base.
I started blogging when I was launching ProfileDoctor, the company I started that helped people make a better first impression with their dating profiles. Profile Doctor was unique in that we built an entire system that was integrated real live editors and scaled well. Nobody else has come close to that, then or now.
While starting ProfileDoctor, I often talked to the business development people at many dating sites. As a consultant, it’s in my nature to ask questions about the industry, it’s growth, the major players and the barriers to success. That led to some ProfileDoctor business growth, although not nearly as much as I had hoped. Back then dating sites were printing money and didn’t want to be disturbed. It was only a $250 million market at the time but the growth was staggering for some sites.
After a while I was working less on ProfileDoctor and more on consulting with online dating startups and a few social networks. That led to being on an ABC dating show pilot, media attention and more consulting business, which led to speaking at dating conferences, more media attention, and so the cycle repeats itself each February and I find myself a consultant in billion dollar industry run by a small group of people. Who would have thunk it?
I previously worked with a management-consulting firm. Before that I worked on some of the earliest award-winning and innovative websites. In the past 10 years I’ve helped AT&T figure out where to run their fiber optic cable, done due diligence on database software acquisitions, written proposals to bring wifi to cities and helped scores of online dating sites launch grow and flourish. Just as often, I’ve talked companies out of starting new dating sites or sat by watching companies crash and burn, firm in their belief that their way was the only way.
To reiterate, I am a consultant. I am not a journalist. I blog so companies will take notice and hire me. It’s as simple as that. I don’t have to interview anybody, or fact check, or get pre-approval for what I write. Many times I do reach out for quotes, feedback and observations from industry insiders. I hold myself to my own internal set of blogger guidelines, which has worked out pretty well, at least I think so.
If you want to read press releases, go to OnlinePersonalsWatch. That’s where I read about what’s going on in the online dating industry. I shake things up and try to get people thinking about new ways of doing things. If you’re not growing, innovating or trying something new, I’m not really interested in covering your business. If all I talked about were what was spoon fed to me by eager dating site executives and their PR teams, I wouldn’t read my own blog.
I’ve worked with many consumer internet companies, Silicon Valley-based and around the world, and the lack of community and sharing of ideas in the online dating industry was a shock, to say the least. Nobody went to school to run an online dating site, or to be a consultant, or be a blogger. We figure it out as we go along, collectively. Originally I thought this blog would be the place where the online dating industry gathered to discuss issues affecting all of us. For the first few years, it was the same handful of people commenting on this blog.
Lately, with the post iDate conference busyness, Valentine’s Day exposure, new clients and the post listing dating sites with Twitter accounts and the resulting traffic increase, things are getting livelier around here, which is exciting to me and I hope to readers as well.
Companies make mistakes and the industry learns from it. I often write about those mistakes. If a company feels slighted, I’m sorry you feel that way. My intention is never to harm, but to shine light on issues that I feel of interest to the online dating industry, the media and other participants in the space. After writing a few thousand posts, I’ve learned that you can’t keep everyone happy all of the time. Fellow bloggers know exactly what I’m talking about.
I am the first to admit that I’m not a very good writer, or blogger for that matter. I skip days, I upset people from time to time, I often neglect to write about important news and even worse, I have advertisers, which means I am biased and obviously on the take. By the way, please click the ads in the sidebar and tell them Dave Evans sent you. They want to help your business succeed, really.
Sometimes an observation I make comes across as linkbait. Bloggers know how important a strong headline is but I certainly don’t want to misrepresent the intent of a company. Then there are times when what a company says is obviously not aligned with what they are doing. Then things get complicated.
Interacting and actively participating with the blogosphere and social media channels like Twitter is becoming a more important aspect of running a successful business. Those who take challenges (mis-quotes, reporters getting things wrong, outright lies) and turn them into opportunities are the companies that tend to succeed. some other blogs in the space simply ban users and delete comments. That doesn’t happen here, for the most part.
People go to their favorite news sources for online dating industry news and then come here for the commentary, click on a few ads and maybe even contact me about a consulting project. I try to link to as many amazing online dating blogs as possible, because there are a lot of people who are smarter than I am, know more about the industry and have more time on their hands. Check the blogroll in the sidebar for more blogs you might not me aware of.
Finally, I have changed the tag line for the blog to “Online Dating Industry Consulting & Commentary”, in the hopes that first-time visitors, longtime readers, the media, investors and others have a clearer understanding about why they should take time out of their busy day to pay attention to anything I have to say.
