In November 2005, Court Rye wrote a Match.com case study. I stumbled across it doing a random Google search for industry information. His portfolio states he worked with Match.com employees to identify alternative business strategies, marketing techniques, and technology related opportunities and proposed RSS integration and chat room facilitation with sponsored events as a means of increasing customer interaction and retention.
Weighing in at 21 pages, there is a lot of information about business models, early corporate history, affiliate networks, and details about their IT infrastructure that is sure to make Markus crow about ineffective use of IT resources.
There are some good ideas here, and some not so much. Nothing we haven’t discussed here ad nauseam. For example I’ve mentioned dating sites utilizing RSS feeds a few times and the notion of a smaller, fresher database has been around forever.
Good food for thought if you run a dating site.
