Category: OkCupid

An OkCupid Experiment

Posted on June 20, 2012

Okcupid-on-trialZDNET – June 20 – Amateur data analyst Jon Millward published the results of ten fake OkCupid profiles to asess the male-female dynamic in online dating. Men face extreme competition. The two most attractive women received 83% of all messages. It took 2 months, 13 days for the most popular woman’s inbox to fill up. It would take the most popular man 2.3 years to fill up his. Most men compliment the attractive women a lot or they ask a general question about travel or something equally boring.

Millward concluded that a successful message should:

  • Demonstrate creativity, intelligence and great sense of humour
  • Be totally different to anything she may have received before
  • Be obviously unique and not a cut-and-paste job
  • Show that I’ve read her profile and absorbed facts about her
  • Not be needy

by Violet Blue
See full article at ZDNet

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Privacy On OkCupid

Posted on June 14, 2012

Okcupid logo aktualniBOSTINNO – June 13 – OkCupid is famous for making the most of its users’ data, whether to analyze on its OkTrends blog or to make money. OkCupid used nine different tracking companies and ad networks to obtain information about its visitors. These trackers aren’t a part of OkCupid: they’re independent third parties mining user data like clicks, ad views, pages visited, and time spent viewing a particular profile. Even if you delete information from your profile or account, OkCupid states that “we may keep such information archived indefinitely.” After digging into OkCupid’s Privacy Policy, we learned that they say that “third parties” and “service providers” can access members’ personal information in order to “direct and display specific advertisements” to them. Match.com, IAC, and all of IAC’s properties may now access all of OkCupid’s user information.

by Sarah Downey
See full article at Bostinno

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OKCupid’s Founder Digs Into Data On Daters

Posted on June 11, 2012

Okcupid sam yaganINTERNET RETAILER – June 10 – Observers can tell a lot about a person from their online dating profile, Sam Yagan, co-founder and CEO of OKCupid told attendees this week at the Internet Retailer 2012 Conference and Exhibition. “Our brand was built on our data,” Yagan said. OKCupid has demographic, psychographic, lifestyle and consumption data. That’s why a large, unnamed retailer contacted OKCupid to try and learn more about its customers, Yagan said. Retailers can use OKCupid’s model to determine what a shopper wants, not, however, by what she says she wants, but by her actions. Older women, he said, are more positive and have more self-confidence. They also enjoy sex more and are interested in casual sex more than younger women. Women who like the taste of beer are more willing to have sex on the first date.

by Katie Deatsch
See full article at Internet Retailer

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Research: Do Dating Sites Help Those Who Need Them Most?

Posted on May 31, 2012

Okcupid logo aktualniHARVARD COLLEGE – May 31 – Associate Professor Mikolaj Piskorski investigates whether dating sites are helping the lonely or just making life easier for young singles who are popular already. He is documenting his findings in a book, due to come out in 2013. OkCupid provided Piskorski with information about its members, covering user demographics and usage patterns – how users learned about one another's profiles, how many profiles they viewed on average, and how many introductory messages they sent after viewing those profiles. The big finding is that men who view most profiles are least likely to message. Older, shorter, and relatively overweight men tended to view more profiles. People who expect rejection may simply refrain from writing, unless the site gives them an encouragement to do so.

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IAC’s Online Dating Q1 Profit Jumps 56%

Posted on May 3, 2012

Iac logoWSJ – May 2 – IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Q1 profit soared 91% from a year earlier as the Internet conglomerate ramped up revenue from its online dating and search engine businesses. Revenue from Match.com, OK Cupid and Meetic increased 56% to $174.3M. Meetic saw particular gains under IAC's control, boosting revenue 44% to ~$36M.

The full article was originally published at WSJ, but is no longer available.

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OkCupid CEO Sam Yagan Talks Geo-dating

Posted on May 2, 2012

Okcupid logo aktualniCANADIAN BUSINESS – May 1 - Last August OkCupid added a new feature to its apps: location. Other dating apps like Skout, Blendr and Grindr also do this, although a little differently.

Q: Why did OkCupid add location-based features to its apps?
Sam Yagan: The ability to search, plan and schedule dates in real-time while you’re out and about is really valuable. There’s a tremendous opportunity for us to enhance our algorithm by actually knowing when people go on dates and how those dates go. It help us do a better job matching you up in the future.

Q: How do you tell from that whether or not people have met?
A: I’m looking a little more forward than what our app currently does. Imagine you can check into your dates. We don’t offer that right now, but going down the path of building location into our product has those implications.

Q: So kind of like checking in with Foursquare?
A: Yeah, but I’m just using that as one example.

Q: If people are checking into places, should we be worried about privacy? 
A: It’s all about being smart with this stuff.

Q: Do you expect most of your users will eventually be using location-based features?
A: Yes. And if you think about it, people already are. They’re already searching based on their zip codes.

by Trevor Melanson
See full article at Canadian Business

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Crown Publishing Nabs Book By OkCupid Co-founder In 7 Fig Deal

Posted on April 18, 2012

Okcupid christian rudderPUBLISHERS WEEKLY – Apr 19 – Amanda Cook at Crown took North American rights for a rumored seven figures to a nonfiction title called Dataclysm by Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OkCupid.com. The book will be "a witty, provocative, visually fascinating look at how 'big data' is transforming our understanding of race, politics, age, beauty, sex, humor, even history, and ushering in a new era in the study of human nature." Rudder graduated from Harvard in 1998 and was one of the first employees at SparkNotes. With the same friends that created SparkNotes—Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan and Max Krohn—Rudder went on to launch OkCupid, which sold to IAC, in 2011. At OkCupid Rudder oversees the popular blog OKTrends. For the blog, Rudder mines the Web site’s mathematical data and offers amusing takes on the numbers.

by Rachel Deahl
See full article at Publishers Weekly

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Operation Match Version 2012

Posted on March 6, 2012

Online dating - couple walking on keyboardUNLIMITED MAGAZINE – Mar 6 – In 1965 a group of Harvard students started Operation Match that used questionnaires to identify compatible matches. When the students sold it three years later they had received ~1M responses which resulted in a few marriages. Today North America’s dating sites attracts 22M users a month, says online dating industry analyst Mark Brooks. Online daters have upwards of 1,000 dating sites to choose from, aside from industry giants Match, eHarmony, OKCupid and PlentyofFish. "Starting a dating site is like starting a restaurant," Brooks says. "It’s very attractive but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye."

Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout created HowAboutWe.com in 2009. The site is built around going on "awesome dates," with users able to see a list of date proposals in their immediate area. The company has raised ~$19M. Another site Sparkology is invite-only dating site. Other startups include Soul2Match, which links potential dates based on their photos and facial features, and Luv@FirstTweet, which uses Twitter to match singles. At TheJMom.com, matchmaking is left up to parents.

In a report in the Journal of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team looked closely and critically at the online dating industry. The researchers found that while online dating has great potential to improve meeting potential romantic partners, the exclusive matching formulas many online dating sites claim to have are unsubstantiated and likely little more effective than randomly approaching strangers at a bar. Sites and apps can facilitate face-to-face interactions quickly. Mark Brooks agrees. "I don’t think people want to come home and spend hours and hours tappity-tapping on the keyboard. They want to be in front of people," he says. "Computer-mediated communication is not gratifying enough for the human soul." Brooks thinks three trends will define the future of the industry: location-based services, mobile services and behavioral matchmaking. "Dating sites that do well will be serving their users’ interests, which means a little more immediacy, a little more help and going mobile," he says.

That instant face-to-face interaction is what MeetMoi, a location-based mobile dating company led by CEO Alex Harrington, has been facilitating since 2007. Users are matched with one another based on preferences and proximity, through application-based and mobile web-based dating.

by Cailynn Klingbeil
See full article at Unlimited Magazine

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Revenues Of eHarmony & PlentyofFish.com

Posted on February 20, 2012

Revenue moneyOPW – Feb 17 – Privco is a source for financial data of major privately-held companies. They've estimated revenues for eHarmony, PlentyofFish (POF), Zoosk and OKCupid, to and other Internet dating companies. According to Privco, eHarmony's 2010 revenues were $255M with projected 2011 revenues of $265M. POF revenues were estimated at $19M with $14M operating income in 2010.

Download the full reports for $99 at Privco.com.

We also learned from the POF report that IAC offered $175M for POF in 2008.

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As 20-somethings Take To Online Dating

Posted on February 13, 2012

OREGON LIVE – Feb 12 – More 20-somethings are on online dating sites than ever, and their numbers are growing. Only 8% of users on Match.com are under 30. Free sites like OkCupid and PlentyofFish report much stronger numbers among 20-somethings. In fact, the majority of OkCupid's 8M members are under 30, with the most common age being 24. In the past year, countless more sites have sprung up promising to be the next big thing in online dating for the young adult. They tend to be more tech-savvy, carefree and interactive. There's MeetMoi, a mobile-based site that tracks your location through your phone, allowing you to invite nearby users on a spontaneous date. There's Clique, a site that lets New York City singles meet friends of friends by linking their profile to social networks like Facebook. There's Assisted Serendipity, which uses Foursquare check-in data to monitor a user's favorite hangout spots and notify them when the male-to-female ratio tips in their favor. There's even Spoondate, which lets users plan dates based on a mutual craving for, say, udon noodles.

by Kelly House
See full article at The Oregonian

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