Michael Jones- When he mentioned blogs as “extended profiles” I knew we were hearing something big. Talk about loyalty, once you get members to start bloging… Michael and his crew really get the space and his presentation keeps getting better and better. During his presentation someone said that MySpace was like a circus, I couldn’t agree more.
Judith Meskill- sorry to hear about the broken leg. We all wanted to hear you talk about the next generation of online dating.
I skipped the Koran mobile market for a few meetings. I also skipped Alex Panelli of Trilibis, as we had lunch a few weeks ago. Keep an eye on them, great stuff coming down the pipe.
The metrics and statistics panel was great. Bonny Brown from Keynote schooled us all on competitive benchmarking and gave up some data on customer experience rankings. John Larosa from Marketdata took the usual heat for measuring the online and offline markets together and coming up with some numbers that you really had to “read between the lines” to understand, like the “vitality of a site” metric. Mike Sinco at ComScore gave us some fresh numbers and explained how they measure “active registered visitors”. ComScore uses multiple blended metrics to get a bead on site movement, visitors and popularity. His data on Active registrant conversions was fascinating, hopefully I can post some of that here.
Bill Tancer at Hitwise came in with data that was minutes old and showed how they let you drill down through their stats to get to nuggets of information that might not be evident when looking at quarterly stats. They can show you how to move your ad spend around weekly and have some sort of real-time keyword assignment tools coming soon.
Reminder, the Online Publishers Association online dating report is out at the end of February.
Back end systems- More meetings, so I missed this. By now everyone knows about Relationship Exchange. I met Jason Allan and his group from DatingRev and they had my live dating site up in about 2 minutes. That was impressive. Obviously there is a lot more to it but the price and time to market seems pretty good for smaller sites. I was disappointed that I missed Louis Kanganis speaking about SpringStreet. I hear they have lost almost 2/3 of their customers although getting anyone to talk about it at SpringStreet is close to impossible.
Speaking of missing, Yoav Cohen missed his keynote. I hear this happens a lot.
Search engine optimization makes my head spin and who can possibly figure out which firm to go with by listening to one company spokesperson so I skipped that. Besides, the action at the pool was pretty good in terms of deal flow.
Lot’s of people hanging out in the hallway who didn’t have passes to the show. Sneaks! That said, $900 was too much for basically one day, and I hear they were giving out passes at lowers prices on the day of the event. What’s up with that?
I didn’t get to see Dave Coy speak. LookBetterOnline seems to be landing some partners, but I still don’t think that $129 is a good price point for a dating site photo. 50% profit is high when all they do is broker the deal through an automated system.
Chris Bradley from Trufina gave a great presentation about identify management and verification. I’m glad to see they are not so averse to the phrase reputation management, which I’ve been pushing for a while now. Some dating services left the presentation scratching their heads, but I think Chris did I great job explaining what ID verification is, what Trufina does and how it impacts the industry. After the debacle at SITRAS in December, it was high time someone came out and started speaking english about the whole identity game.
Scott Butler at Boehm-Ritter gave a fantastic presentation on customer acquisition and retention. I gave a presentation with a similar name at SITRAS last summer and it’s amazing at how differently we perceive this topic. Scott schooled the entire conference on how to market your products. No wonder he was cherry-picked from True.com after he last presented at iDate. Get his presentation, it’s work a million dollars to your dating site. Really. Placement optimization is 6x more effective than creative optimization. That alone is worth a goldmine in terms of human and financial capital.
I hear there were only a few people in the “advertising for online dating sites” track. I can’t believe someone thought that was an appropriate workshop.
True.com used to have 30% men, 70% women. Currently it’s 20% men, 80% women.
Date.com is now using Userplane for their chat/IM client needs.
Sam at Christian Cafe may raise the ire of a lot of the larger dating sites, but his intelligence is good and he asks the right questions during the presentations. Keep it up, Sam.
A friend of mine pulled me aside at the end of the show. He said, “I’m amazed at how many of these companie seem to strive for mediocrity.” The online dating industry has it’s work cut out.
Watch out for the print and IVR (interactive voice response, or 1-900 number) print personals. Lot’s of movement in this space.
I feel the whole conference could have been consolidated into a single day if the tracks had been put together correctly. Two days is good but the third day for Oasis was unnecessary.
SITRAS is in big trouble. I attended the December event and was nonplussed. As much as Marc Lesnic doesn’t not anything about the online dating market, he knows how to put on a decent conference. Hopefully the tracks will continue to improve. How about an event somewhere other than Miami next year?
