Marc Procelli has a must-read post about the current state of online dating advertising. Marc has come up with some ideas about where he thinks the online dating market is going in 2009 by looking at various verticals.
Given that the online distribution has changed at a robust rate in the last six months or so due to the deepening global recession, so have the distribution costs. It is one thing to purchase distribution on a CPM basis; it’s a whole other to purchase it on a CPA basis through performance networks. There is without a doubt more inventory available at affordable rates today than in recent years. These rates have opened up many more opportunities for publishers to promote at highly scalable and profitable rates on both a CPA and CPM basis. Due to falling CPM rates, publishers are finding creative, profitable and highly scalable ways to purchase on a CPM arbitraging the traffic back into an effective CPA.
… Online dating in the performance marketing space for the past several months has been anything but consistent. This lack of consistency on the advertisers side has resulted in the dating vertical becoming far less attractive then it once was – or that it has been in years.
Marc goes on to say that the upswing in traffic to dating sites is not related to the economic downturn. The real reason why these sites have realized huge upswings is because the sites that were active in the performance network space have pulled back. I couldn’t agree more.
Companies like True, Mate1 and SinglesNet appear to be spending less on their ad buys. I ran into chris Dingle, the new COO at Mate1, at iDate, but I didn’t get a chance to ask him about the serious drop in traffic over the past year.
Marc again:
I view all top online dating sites as being in a current throttled or even neutral state. No one is really promoting aggressively, and the traditionally larger dating sites are so focused on partnership portal marketing that they are not utilizing their largest asset, which are performance networks.
… In addition to all of this, there has been a huge lack of innovation when it comes to acquisition and retention in the space. Most dating sites are acquiring users in the same like fashion, yet spending little or no effort on retention. This is completely wasteful marketing and management. There is a plethora of unrealized potential, likely resulting from so many of the top dating sites being in a state of content, internally viewed as cash cows.
This is exactly what Evan Katz said during our panel at iDate. I have an issue with retention in the dating space. Dating sites should promise to get members off the site as quickly as possible. Figuring out how to get them to stick around is a terrible idea. The industry needs to get past the “it’s cheaper to continue a subscription than acquire a new member” mentality. That works for other types of sites, but goes against the whole concept of online dating, at least from a consumer’s perspective.
The implied contract should be that dating sites will get you a date and off the sites as quickly as possible. Until they understand this and figure out how to get those other 60 millions singles online, it’s business as usual for 2009.
