Every year I like to write something about the Internet Dating Conference sessions I feel will be worth paying attention to, along with some personal commentary having been to iDate, spoken there and generally knowing a lot of the people attending and how it operates.
Wednesday, Pre-Event
Introduction to Online Dating and Matchmakers. If you’re in town early and starting a dating site or consider yourself a matchmaker, you should be here. Of course, as a reader of this blog, you know everything you need to compete with Match, right? If not…
A Complete Guide of New Google Products Specifically for Dating Sites: In terms of dating site advertising, Facebook is pummeling Google and The Goog needed to do something. This would be it.
To finish the day, a bunch of dating sites sit around like they’re at the prom and try to find someone to buy them. As someone who was rarely picked first at dances, its kind of sad to watch this, but thats the engine of commerce at work. Problem is, the valuations are always way out of alignment with reality.
Then its off to the bar.
Thursday, Day 1:
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Consumer Buying Decisions: Logic Versus Emotion. Looking at dating site ads on Facebook featuring women with large breasts is a phenomenally easy way to get men to your dating site. Unfortunately for you, you now have a dating site full of horny men. As usual, the speakers descriptions leave a lot to be desired. I don’t care if the guy has a PhD. What the heck is he going to talk about and why is it relevant?
2010 Year in Review: The Online Personals Industry: Usually a good session. I’ll paraphrase: Flatline growth for the majority of the industry, Facebook dating taking off (slowly), still no love for safety features on dating sites. Even less love for legislators trying to tell dating sites what’s best for them. Couple of tier-two site acquisitions, Google not delivering as many clicks for dating sites, Facebook is the new Google for paid search and soon organic. Billing issues, how did Patty Stanger’s dating site with Spark Networks actually work out, free dating is on the rise and paid dating is dead(yeah, right). Whats going to happen in 2011? Happy to tell you. Time for coffee.
The Dating Business in South American Market: This is an underserved market that deserves attention. Lots of established dating sites are creating South American sites. So are entrepreneurs but you really need a significant amount of capital to compete with them on a keyword basis.
THE 4th ANNUAL IDEA SESSION: Revenue Generation Models for the Internet dating Industry: I do a lot of consulting work focusing on this topic. There are so many ways to monetize visitors and members that the dating industry seems to be hesitant to attempt. I’m a big fan of try, test and either keep improving or move on to the next idea. Hopefully this session will reflect this perspective.
Datingheadshots (client) is just one way to reactivate stale members, earn additional revenue and get more people to post profile photos. Travel, magazines, virtual goods (great ones), personalization, leaderboards and reputation, I could go on about this for an hour, easy.
After the networking break there are demos, the usual SEO talk and Julie Spira will be talking about social media marketing. I wonder how much traffic comes to dating sites from social media efforts. Gauging from the presence of the top sites on Twitter and YourTube and Facebook, not nearly as much as expected.
Trends in Moderation for Dating and Social Networking Sites: This should be good. Crowdflower and several other companies are providing automated or semi-automated content moderation. This affects the dating experience more than just about anything. Crowdsourcing via members is easy, but doesn’t do a good enough job. So many ways to throw together some code to build something that does a decent level of automated moderation. OKCupid is good at this. Of course there is not description of the session (come on iDate get it together with session descriptions, this is embarassing).
Detailed Demographic Analysis of Facebook Users that Date Online: Should be another good session. Everyone in the dating industry says Facebook dating will never work. Tell that to Zoosk and Are You Interested. Your dating site has how many members and there are 600 million people on Facebook. Open your minds, listen and learn from Nick Berry.
At the same time iovation (fraud protection) and IntroAnalytics (matching systems) will be speaking. I wish IntroAnaytics had their own session. Nick and Gavin are brilliant and doing amazing things, just ask the dating sites that use their system to match members. Matching systems should be a whole track, at least a panel.
Day 2 preview tomorrow.
