Online Dating Insider Editor David Evans shared 2012 dating industry highlights, trends for 2013, investment updates, hot startups to watch and much more.
8. Dating Startups: 2003
• Buy expensive servers
• Write code from scratch
• Basic functionality
• Stale boring profiles (still the case)
• Ineffective Marketing: pop-unders!
• US Revenue in 2002: $224 Million
9. Startups: 2013
• Test Assumptions
• Sign up for Google Adwords
• Keyword popularity queries
• Message Testing
• 20 ads, $250
• Drive to landing page
• Software, white label, Amazon cloud, API’s
• $1.5 Billion revenue 2012 (guesstimate)
10. Startups 2013
• WhiteLabelDating.com
• 7,600 sites worldwide, 16 million
members, $75 million revenue
• Dating Factory (11 million
members) and others trying to
catch up
• Dating site software still not great
15. Sector-Specific Growth
“Recent data from comScore, an
analytics firm, shows that traffic across
the 10 most popular dating sites did
not increase over the past year.”
JENNA WORTHAM
Published: August 21, 2012
16. Ouch!
“To date, there is no compelling evidence
that any online dating matching algorithm
actually works.”
“I think people should meet potential
partners in the flesh and blood rather
than through online dating profiles.”
Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern
22. 2012 Highlights
• Match heads towards $800 Million revenue
• Stir: 800 venues,1,600 events,150,000 attendees
• Cupid PLC is Spark Networks 2.0
• WLD paid out over $80 million to partners
• ChristianMingle $30 MILLION ad spend
23. Badoo
• Paid exposure: Badoo $150 million
• Owns/powers many sites
• HotorNot, Hi5, Blendr, etc.
• Forced everyone to add HotorNot-style
photo browsing
• Fake profiles?
24. Deals
• Skout raises $22 million for mobile expansion
• HowAboutWe raised $18.5M, 1million users
• Meetic acquires Twoo for $25 million in cash
• Cupid PLC Lots of acquisitions
• IAC acquires DateHookup
• Thecomplete.me (LikeIt) raised $500k, including
from POF (several investments)
• Bing Fund invests in LikeBright
25. 2012 Highlights
• Social discovery: We Met Through Friends
• Social exhaust: FB, Tweets, Pinterest, Spotify
• Daily matches: Driving engagement
• Emphasis on 6-month subscriptions
• Branching Out/Couples: eHarmony, Zoosk,
HAW
• Oh, mobile too
• In-app purchasing issues
26. 2012 Highlights
• eHarmony shutters Jazzed
• Airtime deflates
• Adultery and adult/casual booming
• Photo Likes are the new winks
• Dating sites are selling your private
information
• Social huge in non-English speaking
countries.
27. Background Checks
• Here we go (again)
• Match, eHarmony.com, Spark Networks
• Back-end, not consumer-facing (RelyID)
28. STOP IT!
selling profiles
It pisses people off
Needs consumer opt-in
29. Branching Out
• eHarmony helps employers find that special
someone
• OkCupid:
• Launching Roommate-Matching Service
• Tech powers match-ups between
teachers and students on Tutor.com
• Launches People Discovery Service
Tallygram
• Cupid PLC launches Airbnb clone.
30. Couples & Date Plans
• Zoosk signups for Couple Profiles has
reached 3.3 million users in the six months
since launching
• couples.howaboutwe.com
• Facebook Launches Couples Pages so users
can chart their relationship
• Great Expectations Dating Concierge
• Pair, Tokii, WeSync, Dateini
35. Social
• Insanely crowded industry sector
• LikeIt, Likebright, Badoo, Twoo, 25+ others
• Nobody is even close to figuring it out
• “Almost” better than StumbleUpon
• Current startups are under-funded
40. Video
• Long way from mainstream adoption
• Rounds
• $5.5 million from investors
• Raising $8-$10 million more
• Frimper video speed-dating FB app
• VideoDate
43. Boom!(ers)
From PeopleMedia’s OurTime.com
• Over the last year, the number of people 50 or older using online dating
sites has grown twice as rapidly as any other age group (according to
comScore)
• 22.7 million Americans will turn 50 between 2010 and 2015. That equals
huge growth potential from a business perspective.
• 2.5 Million members joined OurTime in the last year alone; over 4
million since the launch of the OurTime community
• 200% member growth over last 2 years
• 300k communications daily, 1k success stories per week
• 10x size of largest competitor
45. Mobile
• Location-based social/dating apps struggle to
succeed. Expensive to ramp up standalone
density.
• Banjo, Sonar+Foursquare, Hilight, many
others.
• Skout crushing it.
46. Mobile
• Bolt-ons prosper (Match, POF)
• Mobile is just another screen.
• Evow (subscription-based POF sister site)
releases mobile apps: Markus says that 4
co-op students built the Android and
iPhone apps.
49. POF
• POF has 67.5% of time spent on all dating
apps
• 50% market share in terms of daily visitors
for the month of November 2012 in the
US.
50.
51. • Dr. Warren is back
• Housecleaning
• Invested $600-$700 million on advertising
since it was founded in 2000
• $66.5 million in 2011
52.
53. “Facebook is able to predict with great
accuracy the probability for two people
exchanging casually on the network to
become romantically involved.”
Frederic Filloux, Monday Note
56. Prediction
Facebook will release a relationship
discovery API to Graph Search that accesses
their internal algorithms targeting
relationship potential.
57. Big Data
• Behavioral and other data
will influence
recommendation engines.
• Social exhaust
• Behavior: views, favorites,
messaging, replies
• Credit history, sentiment
analysis
58. Big Data
• Hadoop et al.
• Splunk Helps SNAP Interactive Uncover
Key Business Insights
• Members with >2 photos get 4X
messages. Women 2x response to
messages about music than books.
• Badoo and Actian Vectorwise
• Match profiles are Facebook "objects"
59. Revenue
• Old days: subscriptions only
• Today
• Freemium
• Paid exposure
• Ads (captcha, logout, magazines, bundles)
• OfferPal-style offers in the rear-view
• Up-sells, credits, free/cheap weekends
60.
61. Retention
• Is it really easier to re-engage stale
members?
• Re-marketing Messaging
• Re-billing Strategies
• Up-sell Strategies
68. • Relevance shifting to social shares/activity
• Link building will be de-emphasized
• Art of PageRank/EdgeRank sculpting
• Gaming the system while you can
• Invisible Like button overlays
69. Social Marketing
• OKC took survey answers, messaging
habits, self-descriptions, and other statistics
from OkCupid's millions of members and
compared that information with external
data.
70. Social Marketing
• First OkTrends post: 30,000 hits
• Processed the messaging habits of over a
million people
• "It's helped us a ton in search-engine
optimization and traffic"
• Two million blog visitors. monthly unique
visitor count has nearly doubled, to 5.5M
71.
72. The Future
• DNA + browser history + sentiment
analysis + FB Search Graph + API-based
matching + anti-spam + user behavior
modification + rich profiles = #winning
• Someone figures out meta-search
• Unlocking real names on dating sites?
73. Startup Consulting
• Experience working with everyone from
scrappy dating startups to the Top 10
• Dating Site Startup Bootcamp
• Investing, M&A
• Short/long consulting engagements of all
kinds
• Let’s talk