Goodbye Jazzed, hello eHarmony.
I hope everyone is having a lovely National Singles Week. HuffPo has all the relevant Someecards for you.
Iovation launched the Virtual Crime-Fighting Network, where customers and fraud professionals can connect in private. Scamalytics should do this if they want to get the dating industry on board. Business development pitches are much more effective when done in conjunction with creating a community around your products and services. More info.
Companies that think the primary value of Facebook is the Social Graph are missing missing the big picture and opportunity that Facebook presents. For example: The AlchemyAPI sentiment engine has seen a number of under-the-hood enhancements, including improvements to English accuracy and the ability to identify text that is “mixed” sentiment (expressing both positive and negative emotions). AlchemyAPI supports user-targeted sentiment analysis. This feature allows identification of the sentiment surrounding any arbitrary keyword or phrase in a text. Targeted sentiment is useful for gaining a more descriptive view of sentiment than document-level analysis provides.
Sentiment analysisis a a key aspect of parsing the meanings of what people say in dating profiles/Twitter, FB, etc. Over time I predict that it will be a key aspect of all predictive dating site algorithms. Right now the hype is on behavioral matching- Match Synapse, OKC and eHarmony and probably a bunch of POF code somewhere. Nobody else is really motivated enough or has the internal resources to put towards behavioral matching. POF could be using time travel and quantum-based matching systems working with a million decimal places but I’d have no idea because you can’t even tell the ads from the profiles on the pages. Difficult to take their their matching expertise seriously given how the site is laid out.
I don’t know a lot about Alchemy API per se, but the concept of parsing Facebook wall posts, Twitter streams, Spotify playlists and other social exhaust and using that data to improve discovery and matching is exactly what the dating industry needs to be doing more of.
In June, hackers compromised about 1.5 million eHarmony passwords in a security breach. PC World says the problem is that passwords have become self-defeating, often impotent tools in the grand scheme of digital security. We need too many of them, and the strong ones are too hard to remember.
Password management service LastPass, said on Tuesday that it had partnered with PwnedList, a database of leaked usernames and passwords, to alert customers if a Web site was breached and if their information was included in the data dump. Via NYT.
On a grading scale of A through F, experts say, LinkedIn, eHarmony and Lastfm.com would get, at best, a “D” for password security. Maybe someone at eHArmony could tell us what they have done to prevent future security breeches?
Cowboys Group LLC says that gay cowboy dating is the fastest growing online dating segment. A bit late to capitalize on the Brokeback Mountain hype, aren’t we boys?
Metrosexuals begat Datasexuals.
OPW just posted an update of the Hitwise dating site rankings. POF is a top dating site in US with more than 18% of US online dating market share, followed by Match.com (9.7% of market share) and Zoosk (5.8%).
These types of rankings are.. well you know the drill. Zoosk and all of the sites with Facebook apps aren’t included and a lot of other factors skew the rankings. I pity anyone planning ad buys on them. Adam4Adam is larger than OkCupid and SinglesNet is #7? Try again. I’d love to see last month’s Comscore numbers as a comparison. Still its nice to have a list even if its like reading a year-old newspaper in another language.
I am relentless in saying how badly traffic measurement sucks even after all these years. Nobody will ever be happy with them until they can use your webcam to track the laser-etched ID number embedded in your eyeball. Until then we’re stuck with wild guesstimations.
Zoosk mobile users are predominantly Android users. the press release somewhat wrongly states that Zoosk “is the top grossing social networking app in Apple’s iTunes store.” The app is free, what they probably meant to say is that Zoosk is tops at in-app purchases. But how do they know its top-grossing compared to the in-app purchases of their competitors? #headscratcher.
Look at all of the things you can buy in the app and the price-points, wow. Compared to Badoo, Zoosk is charging eHarmony-level prices.
Spending some time on POF today got me thinking. There is a whole sector of the dating industry that risks turning into AOL or even worse, Yahoo.
If you talk about the history, trajectory, monetization strategies, executive turnover, customer acquisition costs, user engagement metrics, etc., I think that pretty soon dating sites like POF, Zoosk, AYI, Badoo and others in the 5+ million monthly visitor sites risk becoming just as large, lumbering and fragile as once-great giants like Yahoo and AOL.
There is nothing wrong with this from a business standpoint if you own a big dating site and are raking in the cash. More power to you, but its not addressing the needs of the singles population enough to warrant a giant round of applause anymore. Steady revenue, cushy 401-k plans, stock options, so-so growth, a nice cash machine to steer and hand over the reigns every few years to a new executive. Thats what’s happening at old-growth dating sites.
A couple of million visits a month is not a big deal anymore. Traffic is just buying eyeballs one way or another. You spend a lot and you get bigger if you are smart. But are you more effective?
Clearly traffic trumps end results, at least until a startup launches with a transparent effectiveness rating that makes everyone else look like they have something to hide. Just wait a few months ;-)
There is a new trend afoot which is starting to get some notice. Dating sites, including Zoosk and HowAboutWe, are doing partial-pivots towards couples. Catering to couples is a great way to waste resources and take your eye off the ball if you are not careful. There may be revenue there, but hardly enough for investors to get more excited than a golf clap for their efforts. That said, the Couples stuff on Zoosk is vastly different from the expensive curated couples dates that HowAboutWe are selling.
Please prove me wrong, these are simply my initial thoughts after running some numbers and talking to people. Perhaps couples-focused stuff will turn out to be huge, I’m just not seeing it clearly enough to be bullish on it (yet).
Here are some images I came across this week. I especially like what your OKCupid dating profile looks like immediately after you’ve left a long-term relationship. Love how other sites are taking note of what OKCupid did a few weeks ago with ad blockers. Jesus Christ is Lord, check out my boobs. I’m kind of burnt out on the Hot Christian Chicks advertising. I like the Geek2Geek dating site idea, great niche that nobody has P0w3d yet. Also check out the Boost feature on Zoosk. Launched in 2009, I wonder if they need to send a royalty check to Badoo for all that extra revenue. Didn’t Badoo have the Power-Up feature before then?
