One of my favorite dating sites, OKCupid, has started offering premium services to certain members. Because I am incredibly wealthy and good looking, I received a free monthlong upgrade to the OKCupid A-List. Actually, I was invited because, among other reasons, the OKCupid Staff Robot likes me. A silicon-driven artificial intelligence deemed me worthy of being a VIP on a dating site. Pinch me.
Being A-listed lets you:
- Browse without ads
- Search for matches with new, advanced features
- Attach private photos to messages
- Give awards to other users
- And about 12 other things.
The A-List is a great for OKCupid to test out new features and get feedback from a small group of members. After a few uses, the features are growing on me, although I haven’t given out any awards yet.
Awards are kind of funny, why would a woman I don’t even know take three minutes to write something nice about me and give me an award? Are awards given to you by people who think you deserve one but don’t want to date you?
To tell the truth I didn’t notice the lack of ads. I have ad blockers in Firefox and barely pay attention to them and it was a surprise to learn that ads were indeed non-existent.
The new search features are nothing special, just the usual additional search criteria, although I appreciate how the selectors are at the top of the page. there are some neat criteria though. The “Order results by” selector starts with “Grey Goo” and ends with “Totally Random.”
No doubt people are going to abuse the unfiltered photo sharing feature, but thats an easy way to catch the weirdos and kick them off the system. Plus, I like attaching a candid photo and attaching it to emails, bed head and all, it feels more immediate and real.
Several months ago, PlentyOfFish launched it’s Serious Member paid feature. Read PlentyOfFish Starts Charging Premium Membership Fees and How to Ask For An Upgrade for the details. There was lots of backlash/discussion about the offering in the POF forums.
Same goes for the A-List forum thread at OKCupid. A user makes a great point:
it’s not features that A-List members want to pay for in the first place. The currency of online dating sites is not the ability to do things like attach photos and so forth. The currency of online dating sites is visibility.
Spot on from the users perspective and has launched a spirited debate. I need to spend more time with the A-List features but for now I’m liking almost all of them. We’ll see if it actually affects member success rates and efficiency.
