In my previous post I continued to admonish the dating industry for the continued poor state of targeted advertising. Besides social networks, no other websites gather such a broad swath of personal information. Social networks have leapt far ahead of dating sites when it comes to advertising and dating sites continue to leave money on the table when it comes to targeted offers.
People ignore online advertising because for years, ads have not been relevant enough to the viewer’s situation. Make ads more relevant and more people will click them. It’s that simple.
People have become so accustomed to Google ads, which parse the content of a page, grok the concept and pop up ads based on a few keywords (massive oversimplification here). But AFAIK these ads are only relevant to the content of the web page being viewed. When is the last time you saw a dating site ads related to your tastes and preferences? Maybe I don’t spend enough time on niche sites.
In the market dating consumers are faced with a daily deluge of True, Match and SinglesNet ads on social networks. These ads are so bad, bordering on offensive, that people have maligned the ads on hundreds of blogs and newspapers. Clearly a case of quantity over quality visitors, which is too bad, because it comes back to bite dating sites over time, as we have seen with True.com. Ok, True deserved it.
So here we have social networks, pulling in $200+ million based on display ads. How much do you think Match makes on their underwear and education display ads?
I’m tired of complaining about dating site ads, lets talk about the companies that really get it, Facebook and MySpace. Perhaps this will act as some inspiration to the dating industry, or not. MySpace has launched a new ad platform, and it looks amazing.
MySpace Launches “My Ads†Self Serve Ad Platform:
Facebook allows targeting as well, although it’s based on interest areas put in by users directly. So if someone says they like books, you can target ads to them based on that. What MySpace does is much different – they build out a profile of each user based on what they do on MySpace over time, with 1,200 different ways to categorize each user. So if you only want to target women who live in California between the ages of 25-30 who like motorcycles, i can. There are 2,842 of them on MySpace.
That level of targeting is incredible. MySpace can increase revenue, offer better targeting than Facebook, and just maybe break the billion dollar mark. There are lots of detractors saying MyAds isn’t going to work, but at this point, anything that increases ad relevance is a good thing, whether MySpace makes a billion doing it or not. This type of targeting will filter down, like race car technology showing up in consumer cars after a few years. Maybe it will even make it onto dating sites.
