TechCrunch is talking about online dating again, someone over there must be single. This was the title of a New York Times Magazine article two years ago, aren’t we at 3.0 by now?
Story starts out with the usual “Myspace is really a dating site”, traffic stats and PlentyOfFish references.
It’s a decent aggregation of a particular cross-section of dating sites from someone with a particular perspective. These are sites in the news at the moment, not necessarily sites that are pushing the boundaries of online dating.
Overall, it’s still business as usual. We’ll see more contraction between the majors and there will always be niche sites popping up. A lot of sites will continue on due to the low monthly costs to stay in operation and a few will sell their databases and move on.
The bottom line is that every one of these sites lives and dies by their traffic numbers. If you can’t buy the traffic, you’re doomed. I don’t care what matching, tagging or rating feature you add to your site.
I keep hearing of amazing new sites coming out. Spend a few minutes on each of these sites and you’ll see they are more about incremental change than the evolution of online dating. Except for VerbDate, they are all introduction services, not dating sites.
Most people go to HotorNot for the vicarious thrill of rating people and seeing how they stack up. As for the whole rating each other thing, it’s fun for a while and I’m happy for you if some guy rated you a 10 and you ended up getting married. I doubt many people will join a particular dating service just to be able to rate members.
I would argue that the majority of these sites are not targeting serious daters. That’s fine, but a site like Wikia Personals, which is like Geocities 8 years ago, doesn’t really belong on this list just because it’s a wiki page.
Interesting that most sites are created by techies, geeks and biz dev people with little experience in the fields of sociology and psychology. These are pure-play internet companies looking to build traffic and sell out to the highest bidder, few can charge subscriptions and the ad-supported model doesn’t have the legs to continue on as a mom-and-pop company.
Quick run down of a few of the sites:
Engage (at one time a client) has $5 million in the bank and is poised to move to the next level.
Google Personals: This is never going to take off. Ever. Let’s move on.
GreatBoyFriends: ambivalent about this site. It’s there and it’s making some money for now.
MatchActivity: Latest in a long line of activity-based sites. Most people want dinner and sex, for the rest, here is where you find your climbing/games/movie/protest event partner. Tracking other people’s activity on the site and bringing about more transparency is useful.
MatchTag: See MatchActivity.
MingleNow: Ad agency runs social networking site. They are RSSifying everything, run by a club promoter. Will feature a list of “nearly every social place.”
PlentyOfFish: What else is there to say about this site that hasn’t already been said by Markus?
PodDater: I predict that people will start uploading dating videos on Myspace and YouTube, at which point PodDater needs licensed content from major studios to stay relevant.
I ran out of time to write blurbs about the rest of the sites. The comments section has retorts from left out sites and responses from people at Yahoo and other large dating sites, definitely worth a visit.
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