Ad Age on talks about singles flocking to Myspace from Match.com. The novelty has worn off and dating sites have not stepped up to the plate with new features to keep up with consumers. BindMindFind and $200 couple’s therapy do not a healthy industry make. Couples counseling is more of a Google Local kind of service, but if you want to pay a dating site more money to stack the deck in your favor, go for it.
Lisa Skriloff states that CL is drawing away daters from traditional sites. Lisa, I don’t see Craigslist taking much away from traditional dating sites, where’s the data to back that assertion up? Unsubstantiated claims drive me crazy.
Then we have Teamdating, where you get to meet their friends and their friends get to meet your friends, or something to that effect. Are people demanding they want to go out on a first date with their friends around? This is new to me.
Good intel: Match.com spent $54.2 million on ads last year, while eHarmony spent $61.6 million, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
More than 1/5 of the entire dating industry revenue went to ads for both companies, and Yahoo wasn’t even mentioned.
Yahoo Personals Premiere had “solid early growth over the past 18 months.” I assume that is shorthand for “early interest has flattened out.”
Jim Safka was telling people that Chemistry.com is “intended to draw in affluent individuals who haven’t online dated before.” I have not heard this “affluent individuals” phrase from Match, Chemistry is Match’s response to eHarmony walking away with their customers, affluent has nothing to do with it. Rich people like to take tests and middle-class rely on intuition?
New advertising campaigns? I haven’t seen them. All my brain registers are Eharmony ads and those Mate1 ads popping up everywhere. I wish for all the money they are spending that Mate1 would make them more memorable. They are advertising for brand impressions, not call-to-action. Big mistake.
Pretty soon people will have their dating site running in their taskbar with presence detection, voice and third-party enhancements like testing and search. We will look back and wonder why we had to actually visit a website to view profiles and search for people. See Meetro as an example.
Technorati Tags: match.com, mate1, teamdating
