It’s great to be back in familiar 15 degree Boston weather even though people were walking around Miami Beach in fur coats last week. I have a stack of business cards I need to scan, expect email from me if we traded cards. Sorry to everyone I didn’t get to spend time with, cramming a year’s worth of networking into three days is a difficult task. If we didn’t get a chance to speak, you can always contact me.
Attendance for iDate was down slightly, yet a surprising number of new faces in the crowd. Online dating is approaching a billion dollars, which is bound to attract new people.
Much of talk around the conference was on member acquisition and marketing in a recession. I met lots of people making $5k -$50k a month with niche dating sites, no recession for them.
I must have been approached by half a dozen payment solution providers. Nobody has any idea why to pick one over the other, the only thing that came up consistently was dating sites looking for international payment providers. People need to be educated before they can make a decision and it seems like the payment companies understand this.
World Dating Partners didn’t bother showing up this year, leaving White Label Dating as the only white label provider in the US market. WLD had an enormous entourage. I hear the Royal Palms pool was the place to be Friday night.
I learned a tremendous amount about building and running dating applications on Facebook. It’s a lot harder than it seems. You have no idea what apps like Zoosk and Are You Interested go through when dealing with social networks. Good luck launching a new dating app now, that door is pretty close to closed, you’re better off buying traffic from an existing application.
Dr. Helen Fisher’s keynote presentation was fantastic. I can’t wait to read her new book, Why Him? Why Her? We spend so much time talking about marketing and know so little about what makes a good couple.
DNA-matching is getting exposure, but the cost and the results are still far too costly for most singles. Niche product for matchmakers for now, although expect more scientific matching system to emerge over the years. Right now it’s too sci-fi for people.
I bounced in and out of sessions both days. Listening to Markus at PlentyofFish talk about his business, catching Marc Porcelli talk about growing dating sites during a recession, Lavinia Evans talking about Making dating sites more female friendly, photo management systems and much more.
I missed the Canoodle presentation. I’ve worked with several dating site aggregators in the past and I wanted to know if Canoodle has what it takes to succeed.
Casual is the new adult. Talked to Fling and OnlineBootyCall, both are doing well. Lot’s of stories about Adult Friend Finder and the proposed IPO.
I participated in the Friday afternoon revenue generation panel. For some reason I was expecting a smaller room and less attendance, many people tend to leave after lunch on Friday. Such was not the case, the room was packed.
Mark Brooks led off with an overview of ways online dating companies can earn additional revenue. After taking a few moments to calm my nerves, I talked about software platforms, free vs. paid, value-added services and was cut off by the 20-minute rule with another page or so of points to cover. I’ll post the outline of my talk here later this week. Evan Katz did a tremendous job talking about the importance of member retention and got the big claps at the end for a job well done.
The closing beer-fueled panel was interesting. Lots of discussion about how dating sites don’t do a good enough job catering to women interspersed with many insightful and amusing comments. No, I was not drunk.
Apologies to the woman sitting beside me. She asked why nobody was talking about relationships and the human side of dating. I jokingly said, “You must be new here” which was funny to the old-timers. Forgive me?
This show enforced the premise that online dating is all about marketing. It’s landing pages, SEO, advertising and email blasts. Little or no talk about what singles find important, their mindset or how to better market to them. There are 90 million singles in the US and only 3 million or so pay for dating.
No Markus, for the 100th time, paid dating is not dead.
I called dating sites to task for expounding about lifetime value of a customer when they have an implicit contract with members to get them off the site as quickly as possible. From the perspective of singles, churn is good, it means you’re doing it right. Nobody wants to be on an online dating site. It’s not fun, it’s not enjoyable, it’s not how people want to spend their time. Maybe casual users, but not serious daters.
Dating sites have to figure out how to get members off the site faster and new people on the site in their place at a more affordable acquisition cost.
Free dating sites are basically banner networks at this point. Everyone drives traffic to each other. If you don’t have a banner campaign and affiliate program you’re losing out.
Skout put together a real-time conference networking system. I loved the photos people posted to the public monitors, some very funny stuff. The service itself is ok, although the website experience needs some polish. Looking forward to seeing their iPhone app, which is coming out any day now.
All casual, large dating sites should have mobile applications. Few do, which is surprising. Bolting a mobile dating app on an established site seems like a much better value proposition than starting from scratch like Skout is. They say they have 100,000 members though, which is much larger than most dating sites. Jury is still out on mobile dating. It’s a 20-something casual-dating market for now.
I’m glad I put my photo on the blog, it was disorienting to be stopped on the street by people greeting me by name and satisfying to meet longtime readers. Several people asked me if I blog in my underwear.
I never got my photo of SpeedDate and Woome together. I wanted that along side of last year’s photo of eHarmony, Match and PlentyOfFish. Here are just a few photos. The PlentyOfFish and White Label dating team has a lot of photos that they need to send me and thanks to Connie at iovation for the party photos. Send in your favorite pix and I’ll add them to the gallery.
Remember, it’s all about the robots.
