Online Dating Insider

Online Dating Industry News 5-23-12

dave@digicraft.com — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:21:06 +0000

How We Did It: Catherine Cook and Geoff Cook, founders of myYearbook.

Social Discovery app Ntro launched months ago, backed By $1.7 million in funding, via TechCrunch. Other similar apps have been pulled from the marketplace, yet Ntro raises $1.7 million. Have you heard of or used this app?

Here Are Almost All Of The Possible Reasons Why You Were Dumped, In A Drop-Down Menu via Forbes.

MusicPound gives users deeper insight into those they are compatible with by analyzing their music. Unlike tastebuds, MusicPound does not require any manual entry, the app uses a patent-pending process to seamlessly scan the user’s iTunes and extract information about not just the music they listen to, but how they listen. Eye2i is looking for interested parties to either license the technology or partner. Check it out: www.musicpound.com. Inquiries can be sent to sherif@eye2iapps.com.

More social dating startups, connecting friends-of-friends with Acquaintable. Not a great signup process, who’s idea was that?

Discover your personality type with MyType.

Mate Out Speed Dating.

I’ve been talking about ways that dating sites can further monetize their members. How about captcha’s as games? Supposedly, ad captcha’s don’t work as well as brand captchas.

The Top Questions Asked At A Y Combinator Interview. Startup founders should be very familiar with most, if not all of these. If you can’t answer these, you probably shouldn’t be running a dating site, or any business for that matter.

Insights in Human Knowledge, From the Minds of Babies. Nothing to do with dating, but I love hearing researchers talk about their work and someday maybe someone in a dating lab somewhere will have an egads! moment and figure out how to match people more efficiently and effectively than what we have today.

Dating Industry News 5-21-12

dave@digicraft.com — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:44:12 +0000

I love love love HowAboutWe’s Flash Contest from March (lag, I know!). No question, the HowAboutWe marketing department runs circles around the rest of the online dating industry and their goofy 20-something’s blog is pretty awesome (says the older guy who doesn’t get 1/2 of what they post there but hey it seems like the kids love it.)

The contest was to promote the launch of HowAboutWe Couples, which I guess is couples suggesting date ideas to each other over the interweb, with some sponsored date ideas or something. Hasn’t launched yet so who knows.

Google Updates its search index every few months with names like Panda or Caffeine, which changes just like Android release names: Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, etc. Match branded their algorithm Synapse (great Slate article). Very snappy, sounds like great name for an electric car. I haven’t seen any indications of the Google Dance when Match updates its algorithm, have you?

Check out Match’s mobile app loading screen. Each of these photos should be a link to their profile, and I would pay big bucks to be featured on it for a day in my area code. Instead of 75 little photos, just have a gallery of 10 or so and sell the space to members. Badoo makes $150 million a year doing this, it does work. Yes its a loading screen, masking a lot of things going on in the background and being downloaded to your phone. Instagram is masterful at how they mask whats going on behind the scenes, which is why the app seems so responsive. Their presentation on designing for mobile is a must-read.

POF is getting serious about their Freemium offer. 530% increase in the chance that someone will respond to me? I’ll take it.

Then I see that OKCupid says that their Test results are up to 1594% accurate. Thats almost 2,345.67% more accurate than POF. That OkCupid Staff Robot is hilarious. Almost as funny as the Freddie the Mailchimp monkey.

Oh SNAP!

SNAP Interactive, makers of Are You Interested, says revenue increased for the 12th consecutive quarter.

Quarterly revenue increased 54 percent to $5.7 million compared to $3.7 million for the comparable period in 2011;
Net loss for the quarter increased to $1.7 million compared to a net loss of $0.9 million for the comparable period in 2011;
Deferred revenue increased 9 percent to $3.4 million at March 31, 2012 compared to $3.1 million at December 31, 2011;
Diluted loss per share for the quarter was $0.04 compared to a loss of $0.02 for the comparable period in 2011; and
SNAP’s balance sheet position continues to be strong, with $7.4 million of available sources of liquidity (includes cash and cash equivalents plus investments) at March 31, 2012.

First Quarter 2012	$ 5.7 million
Fourth Quarter 2011	$ 5.5 million
Third Quarter 2011	$ 5.1 million
Second Quarter 2011	$ 4.8 million
First Quarter 2011	$ 3.7 million
Fourth Quarter 2010	$ 2.8 million
Third Quarter 2010	$ 1.7 million
Second Quarter 2010	$ 1.2 million
First Quarter 2010	$ 0.9 million

Product Highlights for Q1 2012

Added 3.8 million new profiles to the AreYouInterested.com brand;
The AreYouInterested.com iPhone application was downloaded approximately 750,000 times from the iPhone App Store;
Increased mobile engagement to 15% of all unique logins during March 2012 from 13% in December 2011; and
During March 2012, we averaged over 550,000 daily sessions or visits to our mobile AreYouInterested.com platform (including iPhone, mobile web, and Android sessions)

More at Dailymarkets.

Here’s an in-depth article about Skout, which recently raised a whopping $22 million for their growing mobile social app.

Fab, the failed gay social network that pivoted to online shopping, is launching its third iteration, improving upon social shopping. This is the best “We failed at a relationship site but lets try something else” story I’ve ever heard. Big success, big revenue, an all around win. More at VentureBeat.

Zoosk has more than 50m users in more than 60 countries. The service is available in 20 languages. Social-dating site Zoosk makes jump from retail colo to wholesale, moving to a turn-key wholesale data center solution in San Jose operated by Fortune. A year ago, Spark Networks filed a lawsuit against Zoosk, OKCupid and other dating sites. What ever happened with that? I have a big piece of Zoosk in the hopper, will launch that next week, heading to Boston for a few days.

TechCrunch says Cheek’d is online dating in reverse.

Use your LoveID code number to SMS, call or email people. You have total control and can block anyone at the click of a button or SMS. None of your regular contact details will be passed on. You decide when to share your more intimate details.

Love this Andrew Chen article about him doubting Facebook could build a billion dollar business. Reminded me a lot of the dating companies I come across every day. Ninety-eight point zero five percent of them will never go anywhere, so how do you identify the outliers that will pop and go big time? Is it features? Rarely. People argue with me all the time that their features are what differentiate them from their competitors.

The value of a dating site is the people on the site. Either they are your people (relevant to you in some way), or they aren’t. Doesn’t matter how good your matching algorithm is if its not using a base of your people to begin with.

People on eHarmony are generally not a good fit for Match people. OkCupid people are not likely to date POF people. Datehookup people and Mate1 people are probably not going to meet up with HowAboutWe people.

Little else matters except a matching system that surfaces a handfull of likely candidates every day. And now we have any number of mobile, social dating, friends matching friends, verified people type sites launching. If 25 sites launch that justify their existence on low customer acquisition costs based on spamming your Facebook friends, only a few are going to make it, the rest will run out of cash too soon. So how do we identify the few companies that are going to make it? This is exactly what Andrew talks about in his blog post. The winners exhibit certain non-typical attributes, which are incredibly difficult to suss out, but doing so is part of the fun. Thats why I talk to at least 10 dating startups every week.

Every once in a while companies will send me samples of their products. I am contractually obligated to tell you that as someone who demands high performance products to enhance their love life, Astroglide Personal Lubricants such as Astroglide X enhance the comfort and ease of all of my intimate physical activities.

There are several social dating startups that my spider-sense tells me have something going for them worth talking about, so thats what I’ll be doing next week.

Dating Industry News 5-18-12

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:44:09 +0000

I’m psyched about my 1.5 million Facebook shares, which is going to make me filthy rich. I’m planning on dumping them this afternoon, moving to the tropics and becoming a banana farmer. I kid, I kid, but can you imagine how the new crop of multi-millionaires and billionaires feels right now? Minutes away from changing their lives forever, amazing and somewhat depressing (looks down at drawer full of 20 years of startup options that never vested).

Got this from Match and Chemistry.com. This was not how I expected to start my day:

Dear David Evans:

We regret to inform you that you have been removed from the Match.com Affiliate Program. Removal may occur for a variety of reasons, including violation of copyright/search policies, failure to comply with legal terms, inactivity of your account, or changes in content site.

Thankfully, I have my 1.5 million Facebook shares to fall back on.

Global Personals acquires Smooch.com. Deal includes the WooWise white label system and Mancentral.com, which will help Global Personals grow its gay dating division through own-brand and partner sites. Martin Bysh and Marcus Hamilton will remain as advisors to the business. Looking into the deal, Bysh said in an interview at one point that he spent $400,000 before Smooch.com was even operationally profitable.

Global Personals is crushing it in the white label dating space. Revenue is way up and these type of acquisitions are only going to help. I think the company will be doing $100 million in revenue sooner rather than later if they keep this up.

Dating Factory is making big changes as well. New mobile initiatives like mobile vs. web surfers reporting, mobile landing pages customization and new updated web interfaces with adaptive technologies are in the works.

Not to be left out of the white label market, Badoo has entered into an agreement with HotOrNot to power their service. From TechCrunch: This deal signals another direction for Badoo’s growth: as a backbone, B2B provider for other social networks. Other sites that also use Badoo’s service like this include icq.com (for a short time), gentemessenger.com and clubnx.com.

But wait, there’s more white label dating news.

New Scientist Connect gives you the chance to meet like-minded people who share similar interests to you – whether you’re looking for love, or just to meet someone on the same wavelength, no matter where you are in the world. (Ha, wavelength, get it?)

Operated for New Scientist by The Dating Lab, which also offers white label services to a number of dating sites, publishers and brands.

Spotify jumps into dating game with two new musical matchmaking apps. Tastebuds, which I’ve mentioned before, and Fellody feature different approaches with the goal of helping users connect with new friends and potential dates based on favorite artists, most-listened-to music, and their Spotify playlists. More at HuffPo.

Online Dating Enters the iPad Age.

True.com launches free dating site, SinglesBee. It seems that having a really ugly-looking website is a prerequisite for free dating sites. And what is it with subscription-based sites launching free dating sites? They make a lot of money people charging people 20 bucks a month, and now everyone is so scared of sites like POF that they think they can build up enough of an audience to earn lots of revenue off of advertising? #probablynot.

Facebook dating app: TradingSingles. The app allows users to select their single friends to be “traded in” for matches in their area.

DuoDater makes online dating social with double dates, tips hat to StepOut (Ignighter). Speaking of Step Out, a recent email I received from the service led me to my inbox there, which was literally 100% spam. Huge in India, StepOut in the US, not so much.

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 37% Of U.S. Teens Now Use Video Chat, 27% Upload Videos.

You Will. The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs via the amazing Andrew Chen. Check the AT&T ad at the top of the article. Back in the day I was working for the firm that created the ad and ran it on Hotwired. It was exciting as hell to be uploading the first paid banner ads on the Internet, and watching them enjoy a 78% click-through rate, as compared to today’s sub-0.05% on Facebook.

While OKCupid continues to remove popular features, they’re adding new ones as well. New OkCupid A-List Features: See who rated you highly and anonymous browsing.

POF passes 100M weekly messages, 2 Billion Pageviews/Week, via Plenty of fish blog. #jawdrops. POF is also the top dating site in Brazil now. Visits to dating sites in Brazil have jumped 58 percent from this time last year. #hellountappedmarket.

Dating startup Cafe4tune launches Android app In Google Play store, combines standard or 3D social network interaction with secure online dating. In 2006 I wrote up a business plan for a client pretty much exactly describing Cafe4tune.

DateOften launches interests-based mobile social dating app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Do we really need yet another one?

DateMyFamily is the first free family oriented dating site, encourages active family involvement in the dating process. Kind of a creepy name, no?

Calling All Players: Match.com Wants You

dave@digicraft.com — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:30:17 +0000

Match.com is launching a game service for singles.

To play you are required to hack into a government mainframe with a secret password, and the game unfolds like this:

Joshua: Shall we play a game?
David Lightman: Oh!
David Lightman: Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?
Joshua: Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?
David Lightman: Later. Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War.
Joshua: Fine.

Wait, wrong game.

Casual gaming is a an enormously competitive multi-billion dollar industry, and thats just on Facebook. Everyone has at least tried Farmville, right? Over the years I’ve heard from lots of gaming executives who were going to crack the singles market. And from dating executives saying they were going to crack the gaming market. Heck, the guy who invented the entire PDA market runs a casual gaming/dating site for seniors at one point.

Before friends were matching friends, games were going make dating fun, because online dating needs to be fun, right? Whatever, I just want them to be more effective and not take a lot of my time, but I seem to be alone in this regard.

In recent years a number of companies have attempted to bring casual games into the online dating sites. And then there’s avatar-based chat for dating sites, which went nowhere fast, so moving on…

One would think that casual gaming would be a boon for dating sites. On some sites I’m sure it is, although I don’t follow that part of the market very closely. Games increase interactivity between members, give advertisers more places to sell their stuff, increase engagement numbers and give people a way to spend time together before they meet in person. Win win all around, right? Wrong, at least so far. Show me one top-10 dating sites that has games. Anyone?

Now we have Match moving into games, and from what I can tell, they are jumping all-in. They hope that games will enable you to know more more about someone in five minutes of gaming than two weeks of emails, which leads to more content users, which tell their friends, who pay for Match subscriptions, and so on. For Match’s sake I hope they are right, because this whole friends matching friends think isn’t working out so far.

Cities will have designated game nights, where people log into Match at a specific day and time to play against other singles in their area. This is necessary of course, yet brings up the whole issue of “I had a crap day at work, rent is due and now I have to log in and play casual games on Match.com” conundrum. In our DVR nation, it remains to be seen how actively people will seek out game night on Match.com.

I’ve been going to game night at a friend’s apartment for years. If the online version of these games is anything like our game nights, people will be buzzed and coming up with wildly inappropriate answers for Scattergories, at least thats how we roll.

Match games are not about levels and competition. They are a fun new way to meet new people. They are not about flirting for entertainment. They are about helping members get to know each other better (tastes, personality, preferences). No monkeybusiness, no funny stuff, just good clean fun, or so Match hopes.

Match will be rolling out seven fun and easy-to-play games that allow members to figure out whether they have chemistry with each other before going out on a date. Each game lasts one to five minutes each and are structured to create shared experiences and encourage interaction between players through instant messaging.

The games are:

Best & Worst – share your best and worst when it comes to concerts, movies or road trips. Then, see how your partner answered too!
Food Critic – you’ll each act as a local food critic and name your favorite places to eat — burgers, tacos, pizza, you name it! Compare the places you love to eat, and you might find some new spots to check out too!
Romance Rip Off – you will work together to create a cheesy romance story by taking turns adding the next line to the story. Mystery, intrigue, passion and forbidden love…where will the story go?
Name That Dance – Is that the sprinkler or are you just waving hello? Watch our highly trained dance team perform hilarious moves for the two of you to guess. Let the dancing – and laughing – begin.
Gut Reaction – a simple game of word association which gives you great (and sometimes funny) insights into the mind of your partner. See a word, react quickly, then compare your answers.
Drawn Together – see who can guess the correct answer first as three quick sketches are drawn on the screen. The competition will keep you both on your toes!
If I Could – If you could pick one car, one thing for dinner, one show to watch tonight, which would it be? Answer a few of these fun questions and compare your responses. Who knows, you may share the same tastes!

The tag line for the games is “Forget the email, now you can play a game!” I wonder how many people will prefer to IM during games instead of emailing each other? Could IM cannibalize other forms of messaging and interaction on Match? I forgot to ask if I can play the games on mobile phones. Playing games on the bus/commute, waiting in line at the bank, etc, could be a big usage driver.

Match can design the entire user experience down to the tiniest details, but who knows what will happen when hundreds of thousands of singles start playing games together online. Imagine all those women on Match: You winked at me? Loser, to get my attention you need to beat me at Gut Reaction and chat me up for a while before I even think of emailing you. I think the law of unintended consequences is going to play a potentially fascinating role in Match Games. That’s going to be a lot of fun to watch.

New Match timeline: A friend takes you to a The Stir Match singles event. You like the event, so you become a free member. Then you realize that you can’t play games without being a paid member, upsell ka-ching. You browse profiles and wink at a few people. Nothing happens. You invite them to game night, and bam, you’re goofing off playing Name That Dance and flirting like a pro. Then it gets complicated. Do you let them win, like letting your boss win at golf, or do you crush them with your encyclopedic knowledge of obscure 80′s break-dancing moves? Will that turn them on, or off? Or should you, shudder, just be yourself? Because you know how well thats worked out for you in the past. What matters is that more and more people will join Match, deepening the dating pool, and some of them will pony up for a 6-month subscription. Who joins a dating site for a month anymore?

If they let you post your scores on Facebook, that would be pretty cool.

I was glad to hear that Match has put a lot of effort into making a more natural end to each game. At the end of a game session, the system will find out if you both want to a) play another game or b) keep chatting vi IM, trying to reduce the harshness of the dreaded c) next! Thats how I feel every time I try speeddate.com. At the end of the date, I think we really hit it off, and she bails on me. #lowselfesteem.

As with Match’s The Stir,they will leverage the years of work put into their current matching system to bring together members who *should* be a good match. We’ll see. Match says they will make it difficult for 60 year old men to invite a gaggle of 20-something hotties into games with reckless abandon.

Dear pickup artists selling weak e-books, your next book should be “How To Score @ Match Events and Games.” You’re welcome.

Talking with Match yesterday, I got pretty jazzed hearing about how they might take game results and feed that back into profiles. So many dating sites do so little with the incredibly-detailed treasure trove of information they gather about members’ behavior on dating sites. He’s 5’11, likes pasta, long hikes and kicking your ass at “Name That Dance.” Priceless. I kid, actually there are lots of opportunities for Match to leverage the game experience on profiles.

The good news is that Match has the long-ball view of their Events and Games efforts. No way no how are they going to get this 100% right out of the gate. These new services are going to take a lot of tweaking and refinement, and it sounds like they are up for it, which is great to hear.

Later this year, Match.com plans to integrate video into these games, further enhancing the experience by allowing members to play each other face-to-face. How many millions of times have I asked dating sites to use video? Go team!

Yes, you read that right, Match is seriously looking into integration various types of video back into the site. Of course, the devil is in the implementation, and monitoring and value of the videochat.

As for the games themselves, Drawn Together looks kind of cool (then again I go gaga for Cranium). The only parallel I can think of right now is Draw Something, which Zynga bought last month for $180 million. TechCrunch has a decent overview of why these collaborative games work.

Source: TechCrunch.

Look at that up up up and then….CRATER! Not that this has much bearing on Match games, but it is a similar service. Speaking of hype, don’t get me started on Pinterest. Although Match should make a Pinterest clone and hitch it to people’s profiles. That could be pretty cool.

Thinking about drawing games, one wonders if Match can get people to “level-up” for additional fee. Or unlocking new games, or more emotive emoticons, etc. Casual gaming companies have figured this all out already, all Match has to do is, you guessed it, copy them.

Food Critic feels like Yelp!, the game. That could be big fun. Almost every date I’ve ever been on has featured a food component or discussion topic.

Best and Worst stories = BadOnlineDates, brought to you by Match.

Gut Reaction game is going to be trouble. System says:”Evergreen”, She says: “woods”, He says: “penis”. System says: “orchestra”, She says: “violin”, He says: “Penis”. They better have a big red Easy Button for reporting people.

If I Could is probably the most though-provoking game of the bunch. I haven’t played any of them, but the type of information Match could gather from this type of game could slot right into people’s profiles and the matching system.

Match knows all to well that Events and Games are works in progress. Mandy, who’s been at Match for six years, knows that past attempts at events like Match Live didn’t scale, and she is excited and determined about the possibilities of each. So am I.

Games launch nationally next month.

Match’s blog post about Games: Beyond the Wink: Games on Match.com.

More at Mashable: Match.com’s New Event Service Takes Its Dating Algorithms Offline.

Any guesses at what percentage of Match members will be playing games every month after a year? Leave a comment with your answer.

Match Stirs Online Dating Up With Live Events & Games

dave@digicraft.com — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:28:10 +0000

This morning I had a Skype videochat with Match.com President Mandy Ginsberg and Shar Dubey, Vice President of Product. Mandy and Shar took some time out of their busy Internet Week in New York schedule to share supplemental detail to the Match blog posts and press releases flying around the intewebs today.

Let’s start with a few paragraphs from the boilerplate announcement.

Match.com, the largest dating site in the world, is transforming the American dating experience with new, innovative features for connecting people that eliminate the distinction between online and offline dating. Rolling out nationally over the coming weeks, Match.com will launch The Stir, a service that brings single people together in thousands of events across the country, and a proprietary collection of dual-player games designed to let people get to know each other online in a fun, natural way. The games will be available to all Match.com subscribers this summer, and the Stir will begin rolling out in more than 20 U.S. cities by June and nationwide by September.

Match blog post: The Stir: Events by Match.com.

“Our mission has always been to help single people have more success at meeting new people, in order to give them a better chance of starting a relationship,” said Match.com President Mandy Ginsberg. “Now the advent of new technologies has allowed us to leverage our massive national membership scale to meaningfully expand the extent and nature of the positive impact we can have, and to make it more fun and natural along the way.”

Notice how the company line is to give people a better chance of starting a relationship. They never promise that their matching algorithms are perfect, only that they will surface, or expose to you the most appropriate people (according to Match). After all, people are really good at screwing up relationships, Match just takes the credit for introducing them to you. The nuance of this statement seems to be lost on a lot of people.

Fun and natural is not a phrase commonly associated with online dating. Will the re-introduction of live events make dating via Match more fun and natural? Lets find out.

Consider the phrase “Leveraging massive national membership” from the press release. This is something that most dating startups don’t seem to grok at a deep enough level. Match and Spark and POF and several other sites will out-bid you on keywords on Facebook and Google so badly that you will never have a chance at competing with them. Thats a fact of the business. I’ve never seen a new dating site in a decade that didn’t make it to the big time without an enormous marketing budget. It doesn’t matter if you’re mobile, or friends matching friends or you give every new member $25.

With 10-20,000 new members every day (a mix of paid and free subscribers), Match can afford to try something new every once in a while. Not that they venture outside of their comfort zone very often. But who’s to blame them, mo’ members, mo’ money has been the name of the game for Match the last few years. The company has around 1.7 million paying members, with three million people paying a subscription fee over course of the year.

When it comes to marketing, Match is going to to a big push around Events and Games (we’ll talk about games later), including television. I love the Match TV ads, which strike a positive note while depicting first dates, traditionally perceived as very uncomfortable experiences. Hopefully we can show you the new ads here before they launch nationally in the US.

Match has been doing a number of test market events, focusing on different crowds ranging from young to urban, gray-hairs and even the gay market.

We’ve talked about MatchLive in previous posts. That was a decade ago before everyone involved with the new Match initiatives were even at the company. After a decade of online dating, perhaps singles will warm up to the idea of congregating with other singles expressly at a given location to meet others interested in forming relationships.

Then its just a matter of Match’s silicon brain inviting the right people to the events. Cooking classes are stupid, I don’t want to hang out with losers at some lame bar on a Monday night. I want to drink scotch and then hunt deer with grenade-tossing brunettes. An extreme example the breadth and diversity of singles in America, but indicative of the challenge Match faces as they strike various event partnerships, which will be super-important to the success of the Events initiative.

Now, let’s talk mobile.

The Stir will feature a whole bevy of functionality focused on increasing pre, during and post-event discovery and messaging. See who’s going to be at an event, discover like-minded folks during events, and stay in touch with them afterwards. During the event, food, drink and other specials will be offered via mobile as well.

While lots of people have smart phones, the majority are still using feature phones. That was great when Dodgeball was *the* social networking app for mobile, but these days, getting a solid feature set to run across myriad phones is a PITA. Match is going to be trying and testing things to see what works best for the largest amount of people.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the Crowded Room app has nothing to do with The Stir. I would have thought that with all the effort IAC, Match’s parent company, put into CR, that it might be part of the mobile aspect of Events & Games. Not so.

Talking about mobile Shar said something interesting, that they would love to have technology like Bump for sharing information. I’ve been using Bump for years, and am surprised that it’s not been acquired and rolled into iOS as a baked-in feature. Sharing custom contacts and photos, revealing only what you feel comfortable with a certain person, is a great way to network. At first you get a few photos of me and my throwaways gmail address. If things progress nicely, I’ll share more personal information, perhaps even my Facebook URL.

At The Stir, answering questions in order to be connected with people is in the works. Kind of reminds me of Lock And Key Parties, which are actually quite fun, if not overly analog in a digital dating world.

Oh, and The Stir is not going to have speed dating, so 8 MinuteDating and all the rest don’t have anything to worry about. Now Speeddate.com, something tells me they should be a bit nervous.

Besides the algorithm improvements (can I get an ROI on that please?), the last Match feature of any import that I remember talking about was Daily 5, and that was several years ago. Granted, over the last few years Match went out and bought most of their competition. People Media, Meetic, OkCupid. who else is there to buy that can contribute meaningfully to the Match empire? I’m not talking just eyeballs, but value to the company, in terms of innovation. Its too bad that the dating industry doesn’t take after Facebook, buying a few companies a month, usually called talent acquisitions, to bolster certain areas like matching, messaging and meetups.

Back to the Company Line:

The Stir, consisting of hundreds of local events each month, will range from large-scale happy hours to more intimate events, such as cooking classes, wine and tequila tastings, dance lessons, bowling nights, rock climbing and more.

A big part of meeting people is going out and being social, and the Stir improves that “going out” experience. When you go to a Stir event, everyone will be single, everyone will be looking to meet someone, and each event will be customized through our group matching algorithms in terms of age, gender and interests. In short, the Stir addresses some of the fundamental pitfalls of a typical night out for single people.

Members can learn about and sign up for these events via Match.com, and subscribers can even invite friends and bring them along as an added benefit. At each local event, attendees can leverage their mobile devices by checking in and receiving special offers from the venues on food and beverages. Over the coming months, Match.com plans to introduce other ways for online elements to enhance the event experience, such as the ability to invite other members to an event, create in-event engagement, and re-connect online afterward.

As part of an ongoing beta program, Match.com has organized 60 Stir events across 10 U.S. markets to date. The response has been tremendous, and the initiative will accelerate by September to include over 200 events each month, with thousands of people participating every week.

Like most cocktail parties, Match has observed that the first 45 minutes of singles events can be uncomfortable. After that, people tend to relax and loosens up, due to alcohol intake or just that sense of “What the hell, I’m here, might as well make the best of it.” Getting people to stick around that first 45 minutes is key. If I went to a Match event, I’d show up right when it starts.

Match has created a new Events business unit to manage the many moving parts behind getting hundreds of thousands of people to attend hundreds of events each month. The logistics behind marketing, managing third-parties like cooking schools that take payment for services and have to share that money with Match, evolving the algorithm to suggest better blends of compatible singles, and many other tasks, is no doubt daunting.

Speaking of algorithms, its interesting to see Match extracting additional value out of their greatly-improved matching system. I’ll leave it to you to define greatly improved, but allegations of ineffective matching systems aside, the Match system is pretty amazing and its great to see them leveraging it to create pop-up singles events with at least a bit of the randomness removed.

I learned long ago that certain types of people will always say dating algorithms doen’t work. I’m tired of that discussion. Of course they don’t work very well, but at least dating sites are beginning to make an effort to move matchmaking out of the Paleolithic era. Nothing else I or anyone else can say or do is going to change this anytime soon. Remember, dating sites are simply introduction services. Once you make them out to be more than that, you put them on a wobbly pedestal thats guaranteed to disappoint some of us from time to time.

eBay needs to be perfect, days in and day out. Online dating is, and will always be, a best-effort industry.

Creating more meaningful connections is what Match is about, and they are getting serious about innovating past the “online dating hasn’t changed in a decade” argument that is perpetually thrown at the industry. With The Stir, Match has two primary areas of focus, increasing customer lifetime value and converting free members and their friends into subscribers, all while we’re checking in to locations, getting free drinks and chilling out with other singles at freeform early-week bar takeovers or more structured, fee-based events. After talking to Mandy and Shar, I’m pretty optimistic about the new services. I’ll definitely make the trip into Boston to go to one of them to check it out to see how different they are from the many other live events I’ve attended over the years.

As I was writing this I came across SceneTap on VentureBeat.

Imagine this. You and your girlfriend walk into a neighborhood bar, order a cocktail, and, unbeknownst to you both, a camera above is scanning your faces to determine your age and gender. Your deets are combined with data on other bar patrons and then spit out to looky-loo mobile application users trolling for a good-time venue with the right genetic make-up.

SceneTap is a maker of cameras that pick up on facial characteristics to determine a person’s approximate age and gender. The company works with venues to install these cameras and track customers. It also makes web and mobile applications that allow random observers to find out, in real-time, the male-to-female ratio, crowd size, and average age of a bar’s patrons.

And you thought Facebook and Google knew a lot about you. Seems like the natural evolution of Assisted Serendipity. The Chicago-based startup went live in San Francisco at 25 bars on Friday.

Next up, Calling All Players: Match.com Wants You

Match.com Re-Launching Match Live Events?

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:33:55 +0000

This week Match.com’s PR department reached out to set up a time to talk about an important upcoming announcement. Then today the Match blog, Up To Date, features a post, Stay Tuned for an Exciting Announcement from Match.com.

Match.com will be making a BIG announcement on Monday, May 14th that will change the way singles connect, meet, and date- online and offline! Stay tuned here on the Match.com blog to hear the exciting news before anyone else on Monday.

Companies usually show their hand a bit early, often via inadvertent slip-ups, and it appears that Match has done this. The image name for the blog post is “match-events-preview-pic1.”

More obvious, the photo shows a man and a woman in front of a bowling ball rack. Steve Jobs was the master of misdirection but unless Match has taken a page from the Apple playbook, the image is telling us that some sort of live events service is coming from Match on Monday.

Here I go out on a limb to pre-announce that Match is bringing back live events next week. Let’s break it down, shall we?

Like many “new” things happening in online dating, what’s old is new again. Match ran Match Live for several years, shuttering the service around 2004. I went to a number of Match Live events ranging from dinners to wine tastings to Celtics games. It was a great way to meet 25 or so Match members all at once in the flesh, without resorting to speed dating. These were fun yet ultimately useless events. You couldn’t filter the people who showed up, and I was often stuck at a dinner table with people I had nothing in common with, but that was part of the allure of the experiment. Who shows up at these events and would I like them? Turns out I liked the sporting events better than the company, but it was a good and worthwhile experiment.

I think the official explanation of the demise of Match Live was that events were too much work and didn’t bring enough value to members. Someone correct me if this is wrong. Events were basically a drain on Match. Some portion of attendees were already paying members, so Match was spending money while actually reducing customer lifetime value. But then again there was a $25 fee, so there is some revenue but damn that is an expensive way to make money, especially with the event coordinators in each city. I wonder if they saw live events as a way to convert free members to paying members?

Could live events have anything to do with Speed Dating? Thats great for some people. Some people being a fraction of a percent of the overall dating population. Few experiences register on the awkward scale higher than speed dating. I have two absolutely hilarious speed dating stories that I’ll share on here someday. Not a bad business for a few companies though.

If Match is bringing back events, what form will they be in? Lets see what we know so far. First fact, Match cloned HowAboutWe. This was incredibly poor form on Match’s part and I will never forgive them for screwing over HAW. Match spent millions on the dog we call SinglesNet (another rare screw-up on Match’s part), and they didn’t have the decency to at least flow some cash to HAW for doing all the innovation and hard work for them. That said, tons of sites have cloned HAW by now, but still, Match, grrrrr. Read Match Flatters HowAboutWe By Copying Them. Again. for details.

Rant over, now lets get creative and throw in the idea of group dating on top of curated dates. There are only two people in the announcement photo, which dampens the prospect of group dating, but you never know.

Traditional or group date, the question becomes how will Match approach group events to avoid the problems they had with them almost a decade ago?

One scenario that we end up with is a Match live events service where people pick their date ideas on Date Spark, and Match organizes the date on their behalf. No organizers to manage, it all happens on Match.com, so it scales.

Or what about self-organizing group dates? I propose an event, and invite lots of people from Match to the event, in effect making me an event planner and matchmaker. I like this idea much more than paying some woman in Texas $500 to basically match me with other Match members #valuepropositionfail.

Meetcha did self-organizing group dates, that was a tremendously great idea, but alas, Meetcha, which was sold last year to Lavalife, doesn’t even exist anymore .

Maybe Date Spark/ Events will only be available to paid subscribers (is Date Spark available to free members?).

Perhaps Match is out to monetize the entire event timeline. pulling revenue from subscriptions as well as from event venues. That seems like a stretch, unless they have a third party who takes care of the details behind offering Date Deals with thousands of merchants. There’s money there, but its like fracking, a difficult and potentially poisonous process if they screw it up.

Or is Match simply going to use the PR machine to promote Date Spark itself? am I over-thinking things too much here? That is a distinct possibility.

What about Crowded Room? Is that the mobile part of live events in Match’s Big New Thing? Does anyone reading this know what Crowded Room is, or even care?

Long odds are that the new service is some sort of video dating, another Match feature from a decade ago that they shut down. They should have kept video introductions going, another rare poor decision on Match’s part.

But the bowling balls, that alludes to live events, not digital. “change the way singles connect, meet, and date- online and offline.” that makes me think of matchmakers or friends matching friends. How does a live event change how we meet online? That doesn’t make any sense, yet.

Currently, Matchlive.com redirects to Match.com. Keep an eye on it.

Thats enough prognostication for one day. What do you think Match is going to announce on Monday?

Bailing on Scoop.it, Whats Up With Me?

dave@digicraft.com — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:51:22 +0000

After testing out Scoop.it for a few months, its proven to be a great platform for quick posts, but there’s so little traffic being generated that I’m bailing on it. Great platform without a doubt, but just not a good fit for me. I wish WordPress would integrate some of the Scoop.it features, that would be helpful when sourcing photos and content for posts.

Life has been incredibly busy and different the last few months. Deciding to move into a quirky log home in the VT woods for a year was just the first step. Now that I’m here I have to deal with dive bombing cardinals, coyotes, bears, setting up new house and home office, the list goes on. And then there is the dating pool out here…

The next year is all about getting back to basics and keeping things simple. Things that usually elude me.

My ToDo list for the next year:

Blog more, and about different topics
Read more books (fiction and non-fiction)
Offer more/better advisory services to dating industry clients and social networks
Land more advertisers
Land more advertisers
Land more advertisers
Take periodic large projects, but for the most part keep things small and simple.
Figure out what’s next

So, no more Scoop.it, and another page of my life story.

Couple of Dating Domain Names

dave@digicraft.com — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:48:03 +0000

Someone for the love of God go buy www.SingleHumans.com for $495. Details at Sedo.

Deeper pockets? How about datingonline.com for $40,000? Details at Snapnames.

Why are the landing pages for these domain so crappy? One would think you would at least stuff a few good links on it, even the Godaddy parked pages look better.

Badoo Hits 150 Million Users

dave@digicraft.com — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:14:25 +0000

Big news, social discovery/dating site Badoo is on track to hit 150 million users today. Corporate communications at Badoo told me that they attribute the 150,000 daily new users in part to mobile and US growth, specifically. Thirty-five million active users per month worldwide is incredible, to say the least.

I spent 30 days straight on Badoo a few months ago and have spoken at length with executives about the company’s past as well as its future plans. I even wrote a position paper on Badoo for a top 10 dating site, which was smart enough to see the writing on the wall in terms of social discovery and the opportunities and challenges it brings to traditional dating sites.

Looking at Badoo, I can’t help but feel the same as when I started tracking Skout, Zoosk and Are You Interested back in the day. All three have grown to be mature businesses that have come to define the mobile social dating and discovery sector. Of course there are others like MyYearbook, which has been a strong presence in to social space for years.

With social discover being such a hot topic and investor money pouring into the space, expect a whole new crop of similarly-focused sites and apps to proliferate over the next few months as everyone chases after the “We’re tired of Facebook, I want to meet and/or date new people” market.

Its been a blast watching this sector grow over the past few years, and while none of these sites are for serious daters, they certainly know how to go after the casual market. Recently, Zoosk saw the writing on the wall, and has been doing some rebranding to try to appear more social in nature. It remains to be seen how thats worked out for them.

I’m surprised that POF didn’t go after the paid exposure market. that would have been a great fit for them. Maybe POF is making big bank on their daily deals site and decided to stick with that strategy, we’ll see.

Some quotes from Tech Crunch about Badoo:

Mobile usage has grown by 100% since November 2011
More than doubling mobile revenues
U.S. growth is also being powered by mobile
Android app is now one of the top 10 most popular apps (No. 7) for social networking
iPhone app is now a top 25 social networking app, up from No. 60 late last year

Impressive. Badoo had a fun US launch in New York City a while back, and is seeing US growth primarily centered in Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston.

While 150 million users is no small feat, in order to really make an impact in the US, Badoo has to do some serious refactoring of their interface and add some features. There’s simply not much to do on the site and its easy to use it for a few weeks and they bail, although in other countries the site has proven to engage members for quite some time.

A TechCrunch commeter mentioned that the 150 million users number might have been inflated due to Badoo acquiring HotOrNot, good point.

Badoo makes around $1 per user, which is low, but with 150 million people, they are hard at work figuring out ways to further monetize users, just like Facebook. I wonder where Badoo will top out at? 200 million users? If they could get the “Tired of Facebook” people, that number could be much larger.

Yes, Tagged is at something like 300 million users, but honestly I haven’t been on the site in years and don’t pay attention to it.

Who owns the patents for this social discovery stuff? I bet they are just sitting back waiting for the marketplace to reach a certain level and then start trolling for dollars. That’s going to be fun to watch.

Here’s some backstory on Badoo from WIRED.