The crappy screenshot above shows that dating site HowAboutWe does a good job at letting members know that the more you log in, the more dates you post, the more messages you send, the more they will put you in front of other people.
Many dating sites reward members who send messages (and more importantly respond to, one would hope). However, few are up front about the benefits of being active. Why is this?
Badoo and Are You Interested are more straightforward. The more you pay them, the more often you show up in front of other members. Easy-breezy. Someone should dive into both sites and figure out why Badoo is supposedly approaching $100 million in revenue and AYI is at about a quarter of that.
While both approaches have their merits, I’m more of a fan of activity-based exposure, along with trust and reputation metrics. Organic activity trumps paid exposure when it comes to serious dating, but with the casual dating market getting so large and unruly, expect many more sites to launch based on the Are You Interested/Badoo model. There’s simply too much short-term money to be made churning through millions of horny guys around the world willing to part with $25-$50 a month for potential hook-ups. Although most guys have no intention of meeting with the women on these sites. Its Myspace voyeurism with a paid layer on top. Unless for most everyone, but pretty damn smart given the size of the market.
Question of the week: Dear Lazyweb, someone wrote in to say they had too many ugly people on their dating site, asking if I knew a way skew the site towards better-looking people. Besides buying profiles from BeautifulPeople and a few other possibilities like rejecting certain photos for being to blurry or some other white lie that I’m not entirely comfortable with, how can this site up the hotness factor of their members?
