We attended the recent 2009 Internet Dating Conference in Miami Beach (tough venue in late January, I know). The conference targets the owners of internet dating sites and services (not users — although some of the owners drink their own cool-aid and date online, too). Honesty Online had a high-profile presence, with a booth and sponsorship. Our CEO, Mark Ezra, and our SVP Biz Dev, Ric Fleisher, both spoke at conference seminars.
Attendance at the conference was down roughly 20% from last year, not surprising given how many companies are cutting back on discretionary spending in the current economy. The reports we’ve heard from many dating websites, however, are that traffic is either steady or up. Apparently, online dating is one thing people don’t cut back on when times are tough.
Based on formal and informal comments I heard from representatives of many dating sites, there’s one characteristic that’s true of every successful site, regardless of category — serious-relationship or “casual dating”, paid or free, traditional website or Facebook app. A successful dating site is run by the numbers, and the most important numbers are sign-up numbers.
There was a spirited discussion at one conference seminar about how innovation and a greater emphasis on user experience should lead to higher user satisfaction, greater retention, and ultimately greater profits. In the online dating industry, however, that romantic notion is apparently not the path to success.
This makes sense to me. Online dating is by its nature a fickle enterprise. The more value you deliver to the user (by pairing him or her up with a significant other), the quicker that user leaves your site. Success in this industry naturally skews toward acquisition over retention.
Internet dating sites may be built on affairs of the heart, but success is based on unemotional business execution based on good analytics — just like most other web sites.
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So the less chance that you actually hook up with someone and then stay on their site the better for profits?
Let me put it this way (and I’m conjecturing without hard numbers):
If a dating site has perfect efficiency in matching people, its users will immediately find somebody and then leave the site.
If a dating site has zero efficiency in matching people, its users will never find somebody and keep looking.
What these two statements leave out are the second-order effects of return traffic (I met somebody on your site, it didn’t work out, and I’m back in the market and therefore back on your site) and of reputation (that nobody ever meets anybody else on dating site X eventually gets around, and nobody goes there any more).
I believe the balance tips toward lower efficiency. When was the last time you heard any good information about how easy or hard it was to meet somebody on a particular dating site? You’re less likely to pick a site based on statistics about its matchmaking efficiency, more likely based on its immediate appeal or brand power.
True. And that’s why casual dating (hookups) is the way to go. Rather than “serious” dating performed inefficiently.
If you mean “the way to go” for the site operator, a qualified yes — I would expect casual dating users to be more profitable per user than traditional/serious dating users.
I hope it is not naive of me to think that the audience for casual dating sites is smaller than for serious dating sites. A larger, lower-profit audience vs. a smaller, higher-profit audience — take your pick. YMMV (Your Morals May Vary)
I guess responding to your thought would take more number crunching and research than I feel up to at the moment. The amount of number crunching and research I feel up to at the moment being “none”.
It doesn’t feel like an unreasonable assumption, even if I’m not sure it’s accurate. Intuitively my feeling is that it’s more of a gender issue than a pool size issue. Again, could be way off.