In a recent Venture Beat article, Zoosk made some pretty inflammatory comments. Alex Mehr, Zoosk co-founder, regarding Match: “We can’t kill them and they can’t kill us … but we really believe that we are going to win.”
All this talk about killing and winning, are we talking about making the world a better place through bringing people together or did I miss the memo?
Match or any other dating site doesn’t want to kill Zoosk, which is seen as a surprising novelty in the dating industry that we all view with wonder. $90 million last year by a site that few have heard of. Just amazing.
Zoosk earned $100 million dollars last year and is big in parts of Europe. Match made $100 million a decade ago and increased their revenue 30% last year.
Zoosk is casual dating defined and will grab a large portion of the casual dating market. Problem is, Zoosk has a lack of name recognition, and until you can outspend them getting your brand out there, Match is going to be king.
Zoosk went viral like nobody’s business during the beginning of the Facebook application gold rush. That growth was amazing, and led them to big numbers, high levels of virality and a large round of financing. Its all about advertising now.
Commercials will help on this front but you can’t outspend Match, and until that happens you’ll never win. And don’t forget, media exposure is not the be-all-end-all metric when it comes to winning, or killing or whatever cutthroat verb Zoosk uses in relation to its competition.
I would love to see how viral Zoosk is on Facebook today as compared to a few years ago. Or is it all Facebook ads, affiliate marketing and cable tv commercials? Can we get some intel please?
On OKcupid: Mehr said he doesn’t consider OkCupid a competitor since it’s free (the free and paid online dating worlds are separate, he said), and he added that he’s skeptical that OkCupid will be doing much innovation in the future.
Picks jaw up off floor. Thats some weak trash talk there, obviously for the media and future investors, who are hanging on to every word written about Zoosk as they decide upon a new round of funding.
How is free dating different than paid besides the obvious? OKCupid may make less in revenue but their numbers are as good as if not better than Zoosk. Trot out all the charts and graphs and engagement metrics you want. I’m talking brand sentiment, read-between-the-lines reaction here. Plus my friends are talking about OKCupid. That could change, but getting them to talk about it is going to take a long time and cost an enormous amount of money,
I don’t have $20,000 to buy Comscore dating industry report, or I would comment on things like engagement metrics, time on site, etc. Someone send me a rip of the report, that would be good for 10+ really interesting blog posts.
Now that Zoosk started this one-sided pissing match, someone much smarter than me needs to explain to me how the Zoosk matching system compares to OKCupid. OKCupid matches are based on many different datapoints. Zoosk doesn’t capture nearly as much information about people as OKCupid, so how effective can it be? Not that more data in necessarily better, but still.
ZSMS calculates matches for Zooskers according to their search criteria. So if you are not interested in a particular Zoosker sent to you via ZSMS, click the “No” button and move on. Over time, ZSMS will learn more about your preferences and will work to find your best match.
From the Zoosk Community.
OKCupid has a Staff Robot vs. Zoosk’s ZSMS, a behavioral algorithm maybe-kinda-sorta matching system, perhaps similar to OKCupid and POF and lots of other sites. What does eHarmony think about all of this?They hired God to sit in a cubicle in Santa Monica to do the matching for them, right? Oh come on, that was funny.
Trying to differentiate between psychological testing, compatibility dimensions and behavioral matching makes my head spin. The claims, or lack thereof, feel like 90% black-box science and 10% marketing hype and 100% unsubstantiated. IntroAnalytics has some whitepapers about how they are impacting site engagement and revenue. Anyone else?
Zoosk talking smack about Match, just like OKCupid did. Is that how this industry works? Will Match and Zoosk hook up or is Zoosk too expensive now? I’m still amazed that Match acquired SinglesNet, which, still has on its homepage a prominent notice that it receives more traffic than Match, dated 2008 no less. I can’t believe they left that up there. Then again, nothing should surprise me about the online dating industry by this point.
I’m off to check on JPicks.
