Month: June 2020

OPW – June 11 – The IDEA webinar on Video dating happened last Friday.

We discussed the behavior of Internet daters as they move towards using video more. The challenges of video dating, and the solutions.

Panelists:

• Geoff Cook, CEO/Co-Founder of The Meet Group
• Ravi Mehta, Former Chief Product Officer, Tinder
• Christof Wittig, CEO/Founder of Hornet
• Sai Swaminathan, Chief Portal Officer of Matrimony.com
• Shahzad Younas, CEO/Founder of MuzMatch

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Mark Brooks: Welcome everyone. We are here for the IDEA webinar, where we will be focused on video in the context of dating and online social communities today. We’ve got an amazing lineup of panelists for you. I’ll let the, the group do the individual introductions and I’ll start the ball rolling.

My name’s Mark Brooks, and I run IDEA, which is Internet Dating Excellence Association. It exists to help the dating industry deliver on its true potential and promise. I also run Courtland Brooks, which is a little niche consultancy. You can follow the news at opw.news, which is another endeavor that we run.

I’m joined by Geoff. if you’d like to give your introduction. Perhaps also mention the way the Meet Group does video. It would be nice to get some context on how each of you does video on your platforms.

Geoff Cook: I’m the CEO and co-founder of the Meet Group. We run five apps: Meet Me, Skout, Tagged, Growler and LOVOO. They’re all dating apps in one form or another. We’ve been integrating live streaming video into these apps for the last three to four years. We’ve seen dramatic increases in video engagement with the pandemic.

We have two models of video. One is a broadcast video model, which is a one-to-many or few-to-many model. The other is a one-to-one model. The few-to-many and one-to-many is dramatically more important. We’ve started taking that model and bringing it to other apps in the dating space, including a trial that we’re in with the Match Group’s POF app, and potentially others as well.

Ravi Mehta: Hi, I’m Ravi. I’m the former Chief Product Officer at Tinder and prior to that, I was at Facebook where I led a team focused on teen engagement. We were focused on really understanding how young people are using social media, how that was changing over time and what Facebook needed to do within that space to keep young people engaged. I spent the last few years really thinking about what the trends are with younger users, and video is the biggest trend of them all.

The amount of time that a Gen Z is spending on video is significant. When people think about where a Gen Z spend their time, they naturally think of Instagram and Snapchat. However, Gen Z spends more than twice the amount of time on YouTube. If you collectively look at video consumption and video communication on mobile it accounts for more than 50% of time spent. So, video absolutely is the medium for young people’s lives. One of the reasons that I went to Tinder was to help realize that vision for Gen Z.

Tinder’s been thinking about that in a couple of different dimensions. The most interesting is the launch of Swipe Night in October. It was an interactive video-based entertainment series where people could come in make choices and the choices that they made were reflected on their profiles. That really taps into video, not just as a communication channel, but also as a channel for entertainment, and for connection with other people.

Christof Wittig: Hi guys. My name is Christof Wittig. I’m the founder and CEO of Hornets, which is the world’s largest only gay social network which allows gay men to connect to the community anytime, anywhere. With 25 million users, we are offering a broad across the world access for many people in various locations, to express themselves and to find the place where they belong. It is a place where they are accepted the way they are, but also where they can authentically connect with others. That’s the main sort of value proposition for us.

Video has played a role for the last two years. Of course, video is many things. We use video as in a long form and curated video to stimulate engagement around video. It would allow people to surface thoughts and engagement in discussions, which kind of surfaces the interest and takes a bit away from the physical sort of profiling and moves towards interest-based connection. We are about to launch short story video because, obviously, like Ravi said, Generation Z is expressing themselves in video as creators. It is something that’s very generationally specific and they’re comfortable doing that.

I think the key is getting it right in terms of what’s content and who is expressing what, rather than just having that functionality. For us, getting that right is a very cautious and more a farming approach than a gunshot approach. You really need to create a culture and a tone that will allow for people to get that sense of belonging and love that they’re seeking, and not just having another place where you can express or post another toxic comment. This is unlike other forms of social media.

Sai Swaminathan: I head the product for Matrimony.com. We are the pioneer and the leader. Bharat Matrimony owns close to fifteen product portfolios. And you also have Community Matrimony, which offers close to 300 plus product offerings. On Android, we manage 150 to 160 apps. For each community group in India, we have a service. We are slightly different in terms of the market position, because as you know, in India, marriage is more of a family phenomenon.

People who are living also in India, but always using some video solutions because they cannot obviously the bridal group cannot travel just for seeing one person. People already use services like FaceTime or WhatsApp video. All those things have been used with our audience. After COVID-19, that trend is catching up with the people who are like in India because of the social media. Social distancing and all the restrictions the governance put in in terms of interstate travel and stuff like that, people are not very comfortable going out. They probably are seeking some of the solutions which are already there.

Most of the engagement occurs once they get to know the match and once they talk to the person or to the parent of who it is. Once they get comfortable, then they generally will see them in person. But now that is getting substituted by a video. While we still don’t have a video asset or a chat on our platform yet, people are already using FaceTime and WhatsApp. They are very popular media. It is very new for people.

This collaboration as a family in video is something which people are not used to. It’s more like a house party. That is, if you talk about a boy and a girl and the family as such, like getting to know each other, that’s something that’s very new to the country as such. I think people are receptive to it, and we are seeing good traction in terms of people coming in telling us that. They are even engaging with our relationship managers to use video. That is a good trend and I think it’s here to stay.

Mark Brooks: Shahzad, you recently introduced video?

Shahzad Younas: Yes. I am the CEO and founder of Muzmatch. We’re a Muslim matrimony app, so we basically help Muslims get married. We have many taglines. One of them is, Muslims don’t really date. We just marry. That very simply explains what the difference is. We set up six years ago to fill in this kind of gap where we felt conventional dating apps weren’t really kind of hitting the mark for a lot of Muslims in the Western countries, also in Muslim countries.

We’re just about to hit 3 million members worldwide. I believe that this is about to be the biggest in the world for this audience. That is amazing from our side. We’re based in London, and as soon as knocked down was in effect, we ramped up our engineering priority list for video and voice calling. We blitzed it in about one and a half months and released it last week. It’s live too. It was just kind of a big bang. We released it to all our users at once and we will see what happens. It’s been amazing.

So, one key difference with ours is it is very permission-based. It’s not just that you’ll match and then, suddenly, you’re able to call the person. You must request permission from the other person to be able to call them. At any time, either party can decide to opt out of calling with that match. So, we’ve done it with a lot of control to both parties as standard. The kind of good thing from our side is every day, since we launched video and voice calling, there’s been a much busier day than the previous in terms of, volume of both number of calls is what as duration. So, it’s been received very well on our side.

Mark Brooks: Thank you, Shahzad. Congratulations. We’re all in business of meaningful relationships, helping people connect, meaningfully. Thinking about video and how that enables us, what would you say is the best way of using video to help people connect? And maybe not the product that you’ve got right now, perhaps one step forward. And what do you see as being the best way to help people connect meaningfully on video, Geoff?

Geoff Cook: I think you must step back and say, well, why are people coming to these dating apps? Obviously, people are coming for multiple reasons. You know, they may feel lonely, but it all boils down to looking for some form of connection and interaction. Maybe they’re looking for someone to meet up with in a week or two, maybe they’re not. In any event, they’re looking for some form of connection and they have alternative use of time. They could put Netflix on and just be entertained.

The way we think about video is how do you get the most users possible engaged in the video, both, as viewers or as streamers. We have four plus million daily active users. That’s turned out to be one plus million people a day in our video solution. We take about a quarter of these users and we put them into video. And what we’re finding is that dating apps, even though they’re meant to cure loneliness or at least help with it, they’re often places where people feel lonelier. It can be very lonely waiting for chats to come in. Nobody’s reacting to you, despite your endless swiping. What do you do?

What we’ve noticed by putting the broadcast video model into the apps is it becomes more of a community-oriented hangout. So, we’ve always thought of our apps as kind of the mobile version of the bar or the coffee house. This makes it real. You can see the person over there. They’re funny, or they’re doing something of interest. You can almost listen in on their conversation. You can shout at them and they’ll answer your question. You could buy them a virtual gift, which is, you know, what we would say is akin to buying a drink at the bar.

So, we really like live streaming video in this one-to-many and few-to-many context, most of all. We like it because it turns these dating apps into not just entertainment platforms, but social entertainment platforms where people do feel meaningful connections to the people they’re meeting. That’s where we are. Obviously, we’re always working on different ways. We do a lot with one-on-one video. We’re looking at group video, but it’s really this one-to-many and few-to-many format that’s been powerful.

Mark Brooks: Fascinating. Thanks Geoff. So, the bar or coffee house, I like that. That’s a good visualization. Ravi, putting your Tinder hat on, how do you think the philosophy of Tinder is for video? What do you think is the best way? What do you think Tinder will eventually do to help people connect more meaningfully on video?

Ravi Mehta: Tinder today has announced that they’re adding in video chat. I talked earlier about Swipe Night, which is more of an interactive video experience. I think as companies think about video, both from a dating standpoint and a social standpoint, it’s worth separating it into a few different things. There are three different aspects of video that plays in people’s lives.

The first one is entertainment or consumption. The second one is creation and the third one is communication. And each of those different applications of video are meaningful, I think within dating and social community, but meaningful in different ways. So, the consumption piece and the entertainment piece are really thinking about how you make that social consumption more interesting and more socially relevant. So, there’s been some interesting work in this space.

Netflix added a watch party feature and Facebook has had a watch party feature. The thing that we were really trying to solve for with Tinder and Swipe Night was when you consume a video, it is by nature as a social experience. People watch things, and then you have the water cooler conversations later in the day or the next day and it becomes a great facilitator of conversation. Swipe Night was really an effort to compress that into one limited time space where you get everyone on online at the same time.

You get people going through an entertaining experience which they naturally want to talk about afterwards, one-on-one, when they’re swiping on each other and going into conversation. That’s an interesting pivot on video where it’s less about video as communication and more about video to facilitate the conversation. It becomes a way to facilitate finding interesting things to talk about and finding commonalities. I think an interesting set of things are happening in the consumption space. I think there’ll be more things there that happen, both from a dating standpoint, and the social standpoint. Entertainment is becoming more social. We’ve seen that first in gaming and now that’s coming into video. The second interesting area of video is in the creation space. Hornet is adding short format stories. Instagram added stories and Snapchat has stories. I think one of the things that’s true about Gen Z is they are masterful creators with video. Never have we had a generation that’s been so skillful at expressing themselves through video, and there’s some advantages to doing that. Anyone can take a beautiful headshot or a great portrait, but you can’t really see a person in three dimensions, you can’t get to know a person.

I think the interesting thing about video as a creation tool, or a way to present yourself within the dating context, is that, before you talk to someone, you can get a more meaningful understanding of who they are. You can connect with them on a deeper level and decide based on that video-based presentation of themselves, is that someone that you want to connect further with.

The third thing I think is a well-tread topic, which is video communication. Video chat will, of course, be essential to all forms of communication. I think for Gen Z, video chat has basically replaced text messaging. They’re as comfortable with it as millennials were with text messaging. They do it as fluidly.

I think now with COVID, we’re all getting more familiar with video chat. A lot of the barriers and frictions around communicating with someone via video such as: “how do I look,” or “am I in the right place?” have sort of been broken down. I think we’ll naturally see that, you know, one of the ways in which social discovery and dating move is that, at the end of the day, people move more into video chat than they do into text chat. That’s got lots of advantages in terms of creating meaningful connections.

Mark Brooks: Thank you, Ravi. Christof?

Christof Wittig: I do agree with all that has been said. Maybe I’ll just add on to that. I think our role is not necessarily just doing the plumbing. We see that with the social networks, they said, look, we’re just platforms we don’t take any responsibility for what happens on them. It’s a big discussion going all the way to the political side of the aisle. What I think is important is what people do on the platform. So, of course, we want to see more engagement. We want to see it because it makes our business healthier and engagement seems to be something that people gauge. That sounds positive, but we also know, being in the industry, that engagement is directly proportional to the amount of skin on the surface of the screen.

The type of engagement also matters. The question is how do you foster and nurture quality engagement, quality creation, quality entertainment, and consumption? There are, frankly, bars or coffee houses I don’t want to be in, and I don’t want to listen to certain kinds of conversations in those bars either. But, specifically online, we have a big level of stigma because people kind of sometimes hide behind the anonymity. We know anonymity sometimes brings out the worst in people. Sometimes people don’t have certain sort of culture constraints, which sometimes fosters sort of a more inclusive and better behavior of themselves online. It tends to sometimes cue people towards the worst, especially if they feel there’s no correction.

Our product is not the plumbing. Our product is who is on the platform and what do they say and do and post. That is a farming approach. So, it’s not about just, you know, putting the pipe in the ground and then seeing the water. Whether it’s sewage or drinking water going through it; and we say we don’t really care. It’s up to you. We think about how we use it.

How do we nurture a roster of influencers, featured guys, and creators that set the tone? How do we police? How do we moderate and police if necessary? How do we encourage and nurture a behavior that’s inclusive, that’s loving and getting the best out of people? I find it very hard. And that’s why we are in this business to see this kind of inclusiveness and this responsibility of the platforms.

For this tone and among the social networks that are out there, we take our clues for, instance, from an app like Strava. If you’re an athlete, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a platform that is inclusive. You get kudos. I’ve never, ever had a toxic comment on my workouts, even though they’re embarrassing. But it’s something where I feel encouraged, empowered. I look at it and I always feel better and feel that I’m in my better self, even though I’m just a mediocre athlete after using it. We try to get that same sense of inclusiveness support online, that in many cases you get offline. I think is a product beyond the plumbing. It’s the people, the culture, the tone, and the content they post. And that’s a very difficult thing to really build if you will, because you of course have no full control over it.

Mark Brooks: That’s fascinating. Thank you so much. It is less the media and more the culture. That’s great insight. Thank you, Christof. Sai, what would you say is the best way to use video to help people connect meaningfully?

Sai Swaminathan: I see video as a threefold advantage. The first one, I think, is that it enables deeper connections because text can always be deceptive. We cannot judge how people are just by looking at what they text. Thanks to all these modern apps everywhere, you have options. There are predefined templates which expresses a person as nice or cool when it may not be the case always.

The depth in terms of connections becomes special when you have a video, because, that is a personal connection to the person. It enables you to judge if the person is going to be okay in terms of the body language and whether they will be a good match. It may show if the person you’re looking at has a good sense of humor or a positive attitude that you want. Most of these things can be probably judged to some extent. I think we can focus on the depth of the connection

I think, especially in a country like India, it’s not very easy because you have people registering in very remote places. Not every town is connected to a flight. So, you may have to take a train overnight or catch the buses. It’s not very easy, as such, if you must go visit someone. Also, not every place is going to have the comforts of hotels or places which will enable those kinds of meetings.

Video, in some sense, takes away all those problems. From the comfort of sitting at home, the person can choose how to schedule and have a conversation. They can probably involve the family, or they can do it one-on-one. You’re saving lots of time in commuting, especially going to central India. It’s very remote. The COVID-19 situation, I think, is something which is causing video to be sought after by users.

The third bigger advantage I see, especially from the aspect of women, is that in safety. If she must go and meet someone, it’s not going to be that easy in the matrimony context. It might not be easy to find some place that she’s comfortable trying to meet someone who’s probably a stranger. There are lots of questions, such as how to meet safely. Is it okay? Should I do it? Should I not do it?

I think video probably takes away that fear. It gives freedom to women to be brave. With the initial few video conversations, you can gauge the comfort level. You can choose to go and meet that person, or you may not want to go because you think that person’s probably not very suitable. I think, in short, people, connections, comfort and safety are the three advantage that I see.

Mark Brooks: Video is not easy, and you’ve all been through certain challenges with putting in video on your platforms. What would you say are some of the biggest and more demanding challenges in getting video right on your platforms? Geoff?

Geoff Cook: We’ve been on an interesting journey for video and dating. It’s kind of interested me for a while. I’ve been in this space for 15 years. We launched a web version of video meets kind of casual gaming in 2008. In 2009, we launched kind of a Tinder meets Vine sort of product called Charm. It was a kind of short looping video back in 2012 or 13. These previous failures of video, at least, indicated to us that video is high friction. The creation of video content is difficult. Many people don’t want to do it. That’s even still true today.

For our most recent foray, which has worked significantly, we basically realized that, you know, every single creator of content is going to entertain or engage 10 other people. That’s going to be why it works on the platform. Not everybody has to be the creator. Some people could be the ones entertained. They’re not just being entertainment, which I think is the key point. There’s communication via the real-time chat. There’s communication via the guest box, where people can queue up to be.

One of the challenges I think we’ve had is how to create these structures married on top of live streaming video. One of the things we’ve been very focused on for now more than a year, is allowing everybody to be the star of their own little mini dating show.

We launched features like Next Date where people can queue up to date the streamer. The streamer gets to pick next or date on each one. If it’s a date, then one-on-one chat permissions are allowed. It’s basically speed dating with the public twists. Other people are watching. Then we did a spin on that with Blind Date where we allow the personality to come through first. The person is still in the guest box, but their video is blurred, and you don’t see them until the streamer taps for a date. That allows for higher matching percentages and is also a more fun game to watch.

Certainly, the challenge we’ve seen in video would be friction. You can’t discount it. Even today, there’s dramatic friction for most people to think about putting themselves on video. We’ve kind of solved it by having a high viewer-to-creator ratio. We’re also providing structured activities, like Blind Date and Next Date. We have a whole line of things like this.

The points were already mentioned about the plumbing and safety, which is critical, obviously. In the video side, we have 500 plus people on our safety team. We have a significant AI, which is always looking for bad content. We’re experimenting now with biometrics for age estimation, device blocking, and textual screening. There’s no shortage of things that you will need to get right once you go down the live video side.

Mark Brooks: Thank you, Geoff. Ravi, what are the challenges you faced?

Ravi Mehta: To Geoff’s point, there’s an overall challenge in terms of how do you keep video safe? It is, you know, much more of an immersive media and it’s harder to detect these activities. It’s one of the things that I think is hard about video. The value of video is the sum of its entertainment value, plus its social value. There are multiple points along that efficient frontier where you can get to product market fit. The video on Netflix is incredibly entertaining, super high production value and has little social value. It really lives based on the entertainment value of the content. On Tik Tok, you have somewhere in between where there is social value. You can connect with the creators. You can have a conversation with the creator.

The production quality is not important. The fact that, you know, there is a social component to it makes the whole experience more valuable. They’ve done a good job of figuring out what are the most interesting videos within the ecosystem all the way down to one-on-one chat. There the production value is not that important. What’s meaningful in one-on-one chat is the social value.

I think that where companies get into trouble is not thinking about the interrelationship between those two things and arriving at a point in that curve where you don’t have product market fit. That’s where things like fostering a community, rather than just providing plumbing, are important They set a standard within the community about what is high quality and what is acceptable. What are the types of things that people want to talk about?

With video, if you just provide the plumbing, then you’re, you’re leaving that equation largely up to your users. Oftentimes, you know, the quality will deteriorate. As the entertainment quality deteriorates, the social quality will also deteriorate unless you’re encouraging meaningful social interactions between people. I think that’s the hardest thing around video is just finding product market fit somewhere along that efficient frontier between a video that’s entertaining and video that’s socially relevant.

Mark Brooks: Thank you, Ravi. Shahzad, what would you say are the challenges that you faced and that you’re eperiencing now, having just started out with video?

Shahzad Younas: We’re early on in figuring out a lot of these challenges, for sure. I guess some of the early research kind of signified the use of video and how important it would be for us. One of the things that kind of sets MuzMatch apart is the willingness of people on there to travel to meet that partner. We’re firmly not in the casual dating market. We’re generally for people who are looking for something more serious. So, if you’re looking for something more serious, you’re more willing to travel. That’s kind of reflected in people’s own search criteria. They’re not looking for someone within a 10-mile radius. They kind of almost looking at the whole country or even different countries. So, having video helps that.

The security side is important, specifically for women. There’s no excuse or compelling reason to give their phone number out. They can have those initial calls on MuzMatch, knowing they are safe, knowing they’re protected, knowing their privacy is protected, and they’re always in control. Whereas, as soon as you give your number out, a thousand things could happen. So, I think that’s one of the key things for us in terms of getting video out. A permissions-based system was always important from day one. That’s how we’ve designed it, from our side.

We’ve mentioned some things here around the social utility of video and calling, et cetera. I think it has a role, no matter what. The second part is obviously more around content creation, either by users or by the entity. It may be MuzMatch, or the other companies involved. I think there are two slightly different things.

I think, specifically for dating apps, there’s something in the middle, which is the social utility of a call, as well as some structured thing to do on the call. So, you know, you might have a call more along the house party type thing. For me, that’s the most logical and useful utility of video on a platform.

It’s more than just giving the plumbing. In terms of people being able to make a call, specifically for a dating app, one thing you’re trying to do is hopefully help people match better. It helps people figure out if you two are suited for each other, et cetera. It’s about providing tools, be it game games, be it forms of entertainment within a video call, or some description.

For me, it’s kind of a good direction for a company such as ours, and probably others who are at that stage, to take. Meet Group is a great example, where there’s a lot more in the way of a one-to-many or many-to-many livestream type videos. That was great. It appeals to a certain segment of users who find utility in that. I think it depends on the stage at which you are in terms of the maturity of your platform.

Mark Brooks: Gotcha. Thank you, Shahzad. Christof?

Christof Wittig: Mark, when you invited me to this panel, I said I shouldn’t be on this panel because we are not a dating app. You said, well, bring your thoughts in, because we’re a social network and in a social context, obviously dating can happen. Entertainment can happen. All these things happen. Social settings are a big tent in many ways.

Hornet has gone through a very conscious transformation of, you know, nurturing the social value of the app to the users, over, let’s say the functionality of meeting a mate or a date. It happens, but we know it from our behavioral chords on our app that 75% are opening the app, not to look specifically for a date, but for just being entertained. They want to connect to the community and have some social sort of reconfirmation of who they are. That’s usually what you get from other people.

So, we always are very, very cautious about how people feel when they use the app, and how they’re being seen. That is beyond the functional dimension. Dating, in some ways, sounds like a function, right? I can order my dinner with a push of a button or I can order my dates. We are more concerned with how they feel when they date. I think the social component creates a big tent where dating or any form of social interaction happens. Some of it is serendipity.

Going back to the coffee house or the group of friends with dinner, that’s still one of the most popular way to meet your dates. It’s not necessarily a function. And the question is, do you feel positive about actively dating? Or do you feel positive about having a dinner party with friends? Which one is a better feeling? So, how do we deliver this? This is really what we care about. Hornet is not a dating app, but dating can happen on Hornet. Hornet is a social network. And, like Ravi said on the other side of the aisle, it’s not just a consumption piece, it’s the social component of it. I think it’s the tent pole, where we can group these elements in these functionalities, including all the forms of video we mentioned. That’s kind of where we are. We focus on creating that online space that barely exists. I think it’s still in the making. It’s still very, very early in the market.

Mark Brooks: Thank you, Christof. I must say thank you also for being hugely inspirational. After we talked, I invited you to the IDEA summit some while ago. He was like, hold on. We’re not dating anymore. I was like, really? Okay. That’s interesting, but we still must meet. We still must find these conversations, because we can all learn from each other. Especially with vertical social networks and online social communities. I think in some ways, a lot of our internet dating apps are kind of morphing and becoming a little bit more social anyway.

It’s great to have you here and I’m looking forward to inviting more such online social communities into these kinds of environments so that we can learn from each other, We’re less competitive. So, I’m very excited to have you, and this is quite a precedent for us. Thank you for being inspirational in that point, Christof.

Sai, what would you say are some of the challenges that you’ve experienced with, or you are anticipating experiencing with video?

Sai Swaminathan: I think from the Indian context, one of the biggest challenges is going to be the network and the speed of the mobile internet. In India, mobile use is more than 90% of the Internet traffic. There are very few desktops or laptops. Many users are in of the small towns. Their contribution of traffic at the Matrimony office is very high.

The network connectivity is decent enough do something on a text or an app. Unfortunately, when it comes to something like video, which is very demanding with respect to the bandwidth, it’s still going to be a challenge.

It is a challenge, and it’s going to be a challenge for some time to manage mobile data. So many providers are struggling to keep up with the demand that has increased. That’s one part of the problem.

The second one is that there could be lots of technology challenges. The mobile market is very fragmented here because it’s a primarily Android market. Close to 80-90% of users are Android. You have so many devices, thousands of devices, which are there in the market, and everything has its own spec. It’s not going to be that easy for people to get started because of the challenges in the fragmentation of the device.

I think, in general, if you look at people who are a slightly older audience, not everyone will have access to the kind of apps which are really changing the behavior in India. That generation is still the younger generation, the millennials who are getting married. So that generation is still somebody who’s more serious.

When it comes to marriage, I think there are some people who are very self-conscious. They will say forget about video. Even if it’s a photograph, I think many are self-conscious because their profile will be out there. They think that this is how somebody will see me and judge me. That kind of apprehension exists. So, when it comes to video, it becomes even more complicated because people become very self-conscious in front of a camera. This is especially true if they are going to be talking to their prospects. It’s not going to be easy because they must manage the first impression. They’d probably be more nervous. So, I think that’s the next biggest challenge.

The last one is probably one of the largest challenges. In India, especially when you talk about matchmaking, a conversation mostly happens on a phone call or some text or something. Generally, the ideal matchmaking experience after a point goes offline. It doesn’t happen in any platform like us. What happens is people, as a family, they respect each other, and they try to understand the family circumstances. They try to understand what kind of environment the person is in and how settled they are. This is basically a lot of the comfort element that helps people move ahead. All those things are going to take some time to get out of the equation and ask them to connect to video. That is probably going to take some time, at the society level, for them to get used to. This is something that has been there for generations that they trying to change.

I’m sure it will happen just like how other things changed. Mobile Internet took over, and so many other things happened. I think this is also going to happen. Probably this is the time it’s going to start flourishing. In the years to come, this might get better.

Mark Brooks: Thank you, Sai. So, we’ve talked about how to use video to help people connect meaningfully. We’ve talked about some of the challenges of putting video in the dating context, but let’s talk about the future now. Let’s talk about what you think will happen in the future for video in the context of dating and on online social communities.

What do you think your members were really want in the future from video? How do you think it’s going to evolve the next few years? Maybe talk about augmented reality, even. I mean, that gets strange when we start thinking about augmented reality. Where’s it going to land in two to three years? What do you think, Geoff?

Geoff Cook: I think, during the pandemic, and obviously ever since early March, we have seen video kind of grow dramatically by 40 plus percent. Increasingly, video is a replacement for social interaction, right? People, instead of maybe meeting up, are getting their socialization via video. I think post-pandemic, we’ll increasingly see video as a filter for the dating interactions and the real-life interactions that they may want to have.

So, you know, I think the virus is likely to be with us for some time. People say every meeting is a potential exposure, including every meeting you might have on a dating app. People are starting to date again. We see society opening across the world really. People will continue to have, I think, some form of virus concerns. Someone who might have gone to meet you at the nearest bar after swiping right a couple hours ago, might be less willing to meet. Now they might want to see one video first and that’s kind of what I mean by video serving as a filter. Rather than persuing social interactions, they might want to be distant from you if they do connect with you so that they can assess if you’re coughing or sick.

In my sense, the shallower the app and the shallower the expressions of engagement, the more it will be impacted on the other side of the pandemic. I think people want, in video, some connection with someone meaningful to them. If I’m thinking to the question, like what is the future people want, know we want to be that bar or the coffee house. More precisely, we want to be that bar or the coffee house for you.

We want to be the neighborhood bar to the person looking for that, and the sports bar for the person looking for that, or the high-end cocktail bar, if that’s what you’re into. We want you to find the personalities and conversations that are going to appeal to you. That could take the form of topics or group video. There are all sorts of different ways of potentially solving that. None of them are easy, but that’s how we’re thinking about it.

Mark Brooks: Great. Thanks, Geoff. Ravi, what does the future hold? What kind of picture would you paint for video in two or three years and on out?

Ravi Mehta: I think what’s interesting is a lot of times when we think about technology and what the future holds, we think about it from a matter of what’s capable. I think one of the more interesting things about where we are today is how technology has shaped culture and how culture is going to shape technology.

The Millennials were the first digitally native generation. They knew how to use technology better than any other generation in the past. Gen Z is the first social native generation. They not only know how to use technology; they also know how technology shapes their social interactions and where it works in favor of what they’re trying to accomplish. They work with technology and where it works against that, they work against the technology and they use it on their terms.

And I think one of the things that we’re going to see is there’s several trends within Gen Z that will shape how culture forms and then how people engage with video as a result. I think one of the biggest ones is the one that you and Christof had talked about. I think the line between dating and social networking is starting to blur, in part, because there’s so much ubiquitous social connectivity between people. The line between is this a dating interaction or is this a social interaction doesn’t exist in the same way. And that’s going to particularly be true as more and more social interaction happens in video.

And so, I think what we’ll start to see is that dating companies will compete more with social companies. There’ll be more dating on Instagram. There’ll be more social interaction on the dating apps. All of that will start to blend together. And so, you know, the medium for that I think will be video.

Video in all these different formats, whether it’s a broadcast format or one-on-one format, or a consumption format, will drive those social interactions. And I think the dating industry we’ll have to look to what is happening within social media and Snapchat and Instagram to kind of take cues about how dating is shaping communication.

I think increasingly the social networks are going to have to look to the dating industry. In the past, social networks have been very focused on how we connect people that already know each other. Increasingly, because of COVID, and because of the prevalence of video, there’s going to be more people that meet online and where the relationships start online and stay online. The dating industry has been incredibly good at enabling that to happen.

I think there’s going to be this push and pull in terms of the role that dating or the role that social discovery plays, and the role that video plays within it. So overall, I think, video is going to become more ubiquitous. It’s going to become more real time. People are going to get more okay with creating it. They’re going to get more comfortable with creating it. They’re going to expect it as part of the process of getting to know someone. People will get to know each other over video. The Canary in the coal mine for all of that will be the way in which Gen Z is using video, both in the dating context, and to socialize more generally.

Mark Brooks: Fascinating. Thank you so much, Ravi. Shahzad, what does the future hold?

Shahzad Younas: I’m reading an article about the use of video, like Zoom and that kind of stuff, and what’s missing in such videos. Particularly, we’re missing all the kind of body signals that you give off. The subconscious kind of signals that you give off are a lot harder to read on video. And I think, especially in the dating context, when you’re having a video call with someone, you’re trying to gauge how they’re feeling. Trying to read somebody else’s body signals, et cetera, is a lot harder. That ability to kind of look someone in the eye and get that vibe about someone on video is harder than in real life.

For me, I think it is one of the future things that I think video will solve in some form. It could be solved with elements of augmented reality or some other way. Who knows? I’m not able to imagine where it will be, but it may provide some of the ability to read and engage those kinds of bodily signals. On a video call, it’s kind of from here upwards. That’s all you’re seeing. You don’t see the, I don’t know, the panic in someone’s toes. It’s quite different.

I think that’s the key when you’re trying to get to know someone. Let’s say, if it’s on a dating perspective where it’s a total stranger, and you’re having that very first video call. You know, you might judge it totally on the ability to hold a conversation with a stranger on video and it not to be awkward. That is fine as well. It’s big. That’s probably 90% of it. The other 10%, after you meet someone in person is, did I like being around them? Did I get a good vibe around them? All that kind of stuff is very hard to capture on a screen.

For me, I think the future of video, not just for dating, even for things like business calls, et cetera, is if it helps to get some idea of what that feeling is. How do you capture it and express it in some way? I don’t know how that’s done, but I think that’s a nice, difficult challenge for someone to figure out.

Mark Brooks: Thank you, Shahzad. Christof?

Christof Wittig: I can really second what all what the other speakers said. I think it’s not that we are competing on, or innovating, necessarily on the newest, shiny toy. It has marginal benefits if the underlying value proposition either isn’t served or broken. We all know that there’s a big disruption happening in social networking, which is the biggest tech industry in the world. Facebook is challenged. They’re losing users, and people are having negative attitudes toward Facebook. So, this industry is massively disrupted.

It’s not about adding another bell or whistle to it. It is about thinking, what social networking meant to be and deliver it to users. I think, Facebook, in some ways, addresses, or tries to address, this with groups or breaking it down into more vertical areas. But I think this is the opportunity for us to compete on and deliver to our users.

What they’re looking is a space where they feel safe, where they can express themselves, where there’s a tone in the culture that’s nurtured, and if, in fact, the brand takes responsibility for the content that’s on the platform. That is something that Facebook, for instance, specifically says they’re not going to do. I think this is where the industry is going.

I think the future is less about, you know, another feature or shiny toy. These are all what I call the social network primitives. You can have a comment, a like, or a chat. You can use them in a good or a bad way. It’s not how the feature can help certain shape behavior. That’s of course also what Ravi said. But in the end of the day, innovation happens around what type of context and community you’re forming, what tone you’re creating, and how you assemble those primitives in a way that it becomes a normative as a social network proposition to the users.

I think, is where the innovation lies. Sorry, that that’s not the answer to where we say they have a shiny new toy. But I think that’s exactly where the industry is going. It’s massively disrupted. There’s a massive change happening right now. And I think that’s the opportunity.

Mark Brooks: Thank you, Christof. Sai?

Sai Swaminathan: With video, I do I think I can take some analogy, or some parallel. You can look at matchmaking, or people looking for a bride or groom for a few years. Maybe two decades back, or maybe 15 years back, it was predominantly done offline. So, people are not even looking at online as one of the primary sources for getting married. Right? But then over a period, this became mainstream.

Now, if you look at anyone who wants to get married, the immediate choice that comes to their mind is a matrimony site. Because they know for sure that we have wider choices. They don’t have to go behind the limitations of relationships or a network. They don’t have to have limited types of choices and break their hands worrying about who they should probably choose. That’s a lot of empowerment that the platform has brought to these people.

I think video is the new tool which is probably going to be empowering the newer generation. Given that already people are very active on Instagram and Tik Tok, especially in terms of India. This generation is also getting very comfortable with the whole idea of the video.

I think, slowly, this is going to get mainstream. Once people start realizing how to apply video as a tool for matchmaking, it will be popular for collaborating or doing the same thing that you do offline with your families. They are trying to figure out how to present themselves. They are learning how it saves time and how it provides them security and safety. They will realize how it saves the commuting and how it saves their effort in terms of going somewhere.

They can communicate in the comfort of their own home. At the same time, maybe they can decide to what to do through a video. I think these advantages are more positive than the downsides that anyone could think of. I think in a couple of years, maybe, India would have better connectivity. With those things in place, and with so many innovations happening in the matrimony space, I strongly believe that video would become one of the mainstream features. More and more people would be more comfortable with video, and probably would be collaborating more, not just as a person, but also as a family. They may be making decisions based on video.

I see a trend where people are getting married on Zoom. So, if that’s the case, finding a match on a matrimony app through a video introduction, I think is going to be here to stay. It will become mainstream a few years down the line. That’s my take.

Mark Brooks: Fascinating. Thank you, Sai. I think we should consider the arc of our industries-the internet dating and online social community industries. The arc is largely driven by media shifts, and a big media shift, of course, was to mobile. Some made it and some didn’t. Some came through and stole some thunder, with this incredible media shift towards mobile.

But that didn’t take that long, you know? I mean 15 years ago, really, there was a company called Webdate and they enter introduced the first downloadable app that was half decent, but the infrastructure wasn’t there. It was another really five years before it became interesting.

We went through this mobile period where you’re either on mobile, or you were left by the wayside. I think we’re entering the video era this stage. There’s no question about it simply because the utility is there for users. It models the real world better. It’s safer. It’s the new standard that everybody will require on our platforms.

I’ve got to say, though, there’s another era which I would predict, and that is I think we’re going to skip virtual reality. I just don’t think that’s that interesting. But I employ you to try on a Microsoft HoloLens, because I predict that will be the next meter shift five years out. It’s going to take a while. It’s going to take another two versions of Microsoft and Apple to start introducing it. But I think that’s going to really have an impact on us when it comes to video.