MARKETINGWEEK – Feb 14 – eHarmony is taking part in a location-based trial that will let lovers stream romantic messages to one another via London’s black cabs this Valentine’s Day. Those taking part in the trial can target loved ones by specifying their message is displayed in the vicinity of a specific address such as their significant other’s office or where they plan to spend the day together.
Month: February 2013
OkCupid’s Combosaurus Worries Privacy Advocates
HUFFINGTON POST – Feb 15 – Combosaurus, the website that launched in beta last month, tests all the data entered into OkCupid by users to see what clusters together. "OkCupid collects extremely sensitive … medical conditions, drug usage, and sexual preferences," Rainey Reitman, activism director at the the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Users who share this information are doing so to find relationships, likely not realizing the data will be mined for marketing purposes." "Of course it has advertising potential," said Yagan, who noted the team is still figuring out precisely what they're going to do with the product. "This is a treasure trove. Knowing what things are correlated with what. For instance, when someone buys an iPhone, what are the other 10 things they're likely to want to buy?"
Lessons For Dating Startups
LA WEEKLY – Feb 14 – The Dating and Social Networks Startup Showcase and Digital Dating Etiquette Panel held this week in Santa Monica attracted industry professionals to pitch their startup companies, as well as a panel of experts to discuss social media startup tips and online dating etiquette. Eden Dranger and Jason Hsin pitched their app, At the Pool, a people directory where you find connections with people in your area. Hank Leber pitched his app, Gonna Be, which lets you tell users, publicly or privately, what you're "gonna be" doing anywhere from that next moment to infinity. Nick Bicanic pitched his app Flikdate, which lets users go on 90-second live chats, or "dates" using their camera phones.
Startup Tips
- Don't be afraid to monetize early
- Don't be so busy with branding that you forget about a revenue model. Have an exit strategy.
- Have a strong emotional hook. Don't overlook potential for partnerships.
- Embrace social media, limit to a few verticals and focus on real interaction.
- Use social media to tell a story and use it to send people to a place where you onvert an audience into revenue.
by Jacy Wojcik
The full article was originally published at LA Weekly, but is no longer available.
Tinder Gives Online Dating A Makeover
ABC NEWS – Feb 15 – ComScore says 22.9M visitors ventured to online sites in January 2012 compared to 29.3M in 2011. Apps like Locals and Singles Around Me are making instant love connections with people nearby who want to meet up immediately. The number of dating apps is booming, according to Nielsen. In November 2012, there were 13.7M – double the rate from the previous year. The fastest growing app is Tinder, which instantly introduces you to your friends’ friends. It grew 750% just last month.
by Paula Faris
The full article was originally published at ABC News, but is no longer available.
Under The Covers Of Online Dating
WSJ – Feb 14 – The transformation of a once-taboo market into a multibillion-dollar industry is the subject of a new book by Dan Slater – "Love in the Time of Algorithms".
Q: How inefficiency is good for online-dating businesses?
A: The site needs to work on some level, or else people will not use it. But it can't be too efficient because then people aren't going to be using the technology for long enough for the site to make any money. So it needs a little bit of inefficiency.
Q: What are the ways to create inefficiencies?
A: Showing you the profiles of people who may no longer be active or show you profiles of folks who are not paying members and can't respond.
Q: What is the difference in profit for a paid site versus free?
A: Even though OKCupid was bought out by IAC's Match.com for $90M, OkCupid was only making ~ $4M a year in revenue, which tells you a lot. It's very hard to make money when you're just selling advertising.
Q: Why the $90 million?
A: A lot of users use free dating as a first step. Then they get an appetite for a more seriously committed community that only a paid site can offer.
Q: What do you think about the term "social discovery"?
A: It is definitely an attempt to get away from "online dating" as a name. A lot of these sites are looking at the large world of social media and they're saying. "Oh gosh, how can we get to Facebook's scale?
Q: Are the challenges that these sites face really that different from Facebook?
A: Facebook is trying all kinds of things. One of them is the Graph Search. They did not use the word dating, but without even saying anything, Facebook is now basically in the dating business.
With Apps Dating Got Easier
IRISH TIMES – Feb 14 – Companies such as AnotherFriend, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish and Spark each boast millions of messages, chats and other measures of mobile dating success. “The dating industry is moving massively towards mobile technology, with a huge percentage of users going mobile and using apps,” according to internet dating analyst Mark Brooks. Brooks says location-based mobile technology has had to broaden its scope though, to provide the vicinity as opposed to the exact location of users. “Women didn’t want to give away their exact location and GPS technologies were able to do that, showing where a person was within three metres. Now the more successful mobile dating apps provide vicinity-based services using GPS.” Brooks believes the next step in mobile dating is for the app to ask users how the date went. AnotherFriend.com, a dating site which acquired Maybefriends.com last year, has ~90K active users in any three-month period. ~20% of the site’s users log on from their smartphones, with traffic to the dating site’s app peaking at commuting times. Brian O’Neill, founder of Irish dating site Spark, says: “Some 25%of our 15K users now access the site via their smartphone.” POF has also seen massive growth in terms of apps, with 50% of the site’s Irish users now using the iPhone and android apps on a regular basis – a 250% increase in usage of the site’s mobile apps since 2011.
by Pamela Newenham
See full article at Irish Times
See all posts on AnotherFriend See all posts on POF.com
See all posts on MaybeFriends See all posts on OkCupid
TrintMe Guarantees No Rejections
WASHINGTON TIMES – Feb 14 – TrintMe is offering an app allowing users to privately set their true intentions, or “trints,” for their Facebook friends. Users can look through their Facebook page, mark if they would like to have coffee, go to dinner or even “hook up” with one of their friends. The would-be significant other will not see the user’s “trint” unless he or she is also a user and expresses a desire for the same interaction. My Love Checker is another less-flashy Facebook app that works much like TrintMe. Users select friends whom they would want to go out with or spend the night with and then wait to see if others have put them in the same list. If so, they will both receive a notification. TrintMe is not limited to the user’s Facebook friends, but will also show you “friends of friends” to make connections with as well. And all “trints” are deleted after a 30-day period. While it is currently free, TrintMe is discussing how to generate revenue, including ads on where to meet your connection or paying tokens.
by Sidney Van Wyk
See full article at Washington Times
SinglesAroundMe Sees 300% Download Increase
TECHVIBES – Feb 13 – SinglesAroundMe was reporting a 300% surge in daily downloads across Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone app stores ahead of Valentine's Day. The company says that, unlike other location-based mobile dating apps, SAM utilizes geographical mapping to plot the location of nearby singles who could even be next door. Launched in 2010, SinglesAroundMe has ~1M users in 100 countries.
MeetCute: Another Crazy Blind Date Service
THE NEXT WEB – Feb 14 – MeetCute encourages serendipitous meetings between people who don’t know each other, and are likely to be attracted to one another. After signing up, users are asked to indicate the faces they find attractive from a list of people. Then, when they fancy putting the service to the test, they send a text message to a dedicated phone number, specifying a location and time that they’d like a chance at an ‘encounter’. The service then uses this data and an algorithm to find someone nearby who is likely to be a good match, prompting them that a potential encounter is available nearby.
Outsourcing The Algorithm Of Love To Online Dating
FORTUNE MAGAZINE – Feb 14 – There are thousands of sites out there, many with an incredible degree of specificity in their target audience. The personals sites for The Onion and Salon are both powered by a service called FastCupid. That company is a property of FriendFinder Network. FriendFinder Networks, formerly called Penthouse Media Group, operates ~40K sites. FriendFinder does not mix together all the profiles of all its branded sites. Because people from BigChurch.com for Christian singles for example, may not get along with those from another, say, Bondage.com. Many established online dating operators eschew the practice altogether, but it's fairly common, particularly in the U.K. where it's standard practice. Today, four companies control 77% of the $1.22 billion online dating market, according to research from IBISWorld. IAC controls 41% of the market, eHarmony is next, with 23.5%, in third place is Zoosk at 7.7%, followed by Spark Networks at 4.9%. Despite the competitive advantage conferred by niche markets, big data-driven dating clearinghouses may be the way of the future for much of the online dating industry. "Strategically, bigger is best," says Brooks, industry analyst and editor of Online Personals Watch. "If you consider what would be the perfect model for an Internet dating site, in theory it would have all the people in the world who are single on it, and you could find your perfect match within a day's work." A single major U.S. service that controls more than 50% of market share is "inevitable," Brooks says. In theory at least, a bigger pool means more happy matches, even if they're from unlikely sources. Data confirms: "It's kind of a waste of time anyway asking people what they want anyway," Brooks says. "Because they don't really know."
by Anne VanderMey
The full article was originally published at Fortune Magazine, but is no longer available.
See all posts on FriendFinder See all posts on Spark Networks
See all posts on eHarmony See all posts on Zoosk