http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCLzXXYR5e0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtI8FzuOTjc&noredirect=1
Two great great dating site videos. “There’s something you should know about Jen, she voted for Dennis Kucinich”, Ha! Great marketing piece to pander, I mean cater, to liberals and conservatives. Political affiliation-based dating sites are definitely a niche, but given the divisiveness in the US, this is a great idea with a huge market. Quick, go register texassecessiondating.com.
Love the clean look of HowAboutWe’s HotorNot feature (or should we now say Badoo?). And look, taking some screen real estate to tell me a bit about the person. So basic and helpful, yet most sites don’t do this.
Facebook comes one step closer to launching a dating service. Facebook And Partners Launch Social Jobs App With 1.7M Listings.
At launch, the application includes 1.7 million listings from BranchOut, DirectEmployers, Work4Labs, Jobvite, and Monster.com, which can be sorted based on industry, location, and skills.
Change that to “At launch, the application includes 1.7 million personal ads from Match, eHarmony, POF, Christian Mingle, and JDate, which can be sorted based on preferences, location, and age.” Hmm…
Cupid Diversifies From Dating Into Property: Always interesting to see dating sites diversify. POF launched a groupon clone, OkCupid has tried a few things and now we have Cupid Plc attempting to take on AirBnB. Dating sites are just one type of discovery engine after all. Why not go into housing, jobs, insurance, healthcare, anywhere that a personal profile can be mined to provide recommendations. Via OPW.
POF Creates Conversion Exclusions:
POF is now offering the ability to EXCLUDE people who have already converted on YOUR CAMPAIGN! In other words, you will not continue to spend $ on people who have already signed up to whatever you’re advertising. In a sense, POF is optimizing for you!
Facebook Launches Couples Pages so users can chart their relationship. I’ve had similar functionality for months where where I can see all of the back and forth I’ve had with a specific person. Not sure why I’d want to see the back and forth between myself and a girlfriend. Possibly good for post-breakup blaming and shaming.
Facebook Ads Manager add-on helps marketers craft more effective campaigns.
The new self-service Ads Manager tool measures and optimize campaign performance. In an expansion to its “Optimized CPM” (OCPM) bidding program, Facebook has crafted a two-part addition for marketers who want to drive specific digital actions, say web signups or online purchases. The first piece, which involves adding code snippets to webpages, gives marketers a more comprehensive look at whether their units are driving the actions they want.
The second piece of the new tool is all about unit optimization. Marketers can opt to select the Optimized CPM option in Ads Manager to grant Facebook the capability to automatically show ads to the demographic group of people it deems will be the most likely to convert. This feature is meant to lower the marketer’s cost per acquisition (CPA) and provide a quicker route to potential customers, Facebook said.
Thanks to Venturebeat for the reporting. I wonder how these new tools with affect online dating industry spend?
New site Dinner Date brings online daters together in a group setting because more than 80% of romances begin over dinner, according to the DinnerDate team, which includes creators Robert Earl, Planet Hollywood founder, and Grant Hosford, formerly of eHarmony. Via Mashable.
Group dating is yet again enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Seems like I write that every few years. the idea of having group dinners with a bunch of interesting people appeals, but group dinner dates without a seriously tuned up algorithm to make sure my table is awesome, not so much. One step up from speed dating in terms of the potential for giant #fail and an uncomfortable evening.
Eharmony Appoints Thod Nguyen as Chief Technology Officer. “The complexity of the underlying technology powering eHarmony rivals what companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft’s Bing are utilizing to deliver results that are most significant to users.” Not sure about comparing yourselves with Google and Facebook, but we get the idea. Big Company, Big Data, Big Problems to solve.
Secret Chaperone, a new personal safety mobile application.
I’m on a bit of a matching algorithm kick lately. Lots of great stuff to read and some companies are beginning to innovate in ways I haven’t seen before. Having been involved in building or advising more than 50 dating sites this year, its clear that entrepreneurs feels that niche sites are the only way to go. Well, that and boil-the-ocean-style social dating sites.
Michael Wu is the Principal Scientist of Analytics at Lithium where he is currently applying data-driven methodologies to investigate and understand the complex dynamics of the social Web. His guest post on TechCrunch addresses The Problem With Measuring Digital Influence.
Some guy made a profile of a woman on OkCupid and the entire Internet is talking about it. I don’t understand why this guy got so much press, people do this every day. Perhaps it’s because the profile he created is so awful and the things his said masquerading as a woman were so lame, totally off the charts.
Women get more messages than men, to an astounding degree. Nothing new here.
There are a lot of matchmaking services that I would classify as bad actors.
Oh Friendfinder, your crushing debt and yet you make so much money on adult and camgirls.
Noticed the Stop.Think. Connect thing at the bottom of the Match messaging system.
STOP. THINK. CONNECT.™ is the first-ever coordinated message to help all digital citizens stay safer and more secure online. The message was created by an unprecedented coalition of private companies, nonprofits and government organizations.
I tried clicking, but there is no link to anything at STC. hmm. Here’s the Match Safety page.
DataSift aggregates and processes 700 million data interactions a day with over 20,000 data streams. Currently, DataSift processes 2 to 3 terabytes of data a day. Who’s going to be the first dating site to partner with them? Via TechCrunch.
