OmniDate has landed it’s first dating site as a customer. Ireland’s AnotherFriend now offers virtual dating to it’s 200,000 members.
OmniDate is a mashup up Userplane, IMVU and OKCupid.
OmniDate says that sites that don’t use their system are second rate. Perhaps not the best way to introduce yourself to the industry. That’s desperation marketing, whereas OmniDate needs to be as nice as possible to the dating industry, especially given the fringe nature of virtual dating.
Flash-based avatar chat is interesting and certainly some dating sites will adopt it as an additional feature. As Markus says, virtual chat is a 5% feature, meaning 5% of a site’s membership will use it.
Compete and Quantcast say Anotherfriend has around 6,500 unique visitors a month. That means 325 might use the virtual dating application at AnotherFriend.
I’m talking to a company that has a very exciting demo thats somewhat similar to OmniDate. I can’t talk about it yet but it’s great to see companies offering more advanced communications features.
How does Omnidate make money? They are not embedding ads into their environment yet. Is the dating site expected to absorb the cost?
I haven’t talked to OmniDate in a while so I’ll throw out a few questions that might make it easier for dating sites to understand what they offer.
What is the value proposition to dating sites?
Does virtual dating convert more visitors to members, extend the subscription duration or increase pageviews?
How much does it cost and how complicated is the integration?
Dating sites won’t touch a new feature without having answers to these questions.
