Online Dating SummitDavid Evans

Online Dating InsiderOnlinedatingpost.com

Dating Circa 1966

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

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)

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

Third Party Tools

Most-searched 2012

1. PlentyofFish

2. Match.com

3. OkCupid

4. eHarmony

5. DateHookup

6. Zoosk

7. ChristianMingle

8. AdultFriendFinder

9. JDate

10.Singlesnet

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 WORTHAMPublished: August 21, 2012

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

Slippery Sales Funnel

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

Badoo

• Paid exposure: Badoo $150 million

• Owns/powers many sites

• HotorNot, Hi5, Blendr, etc.

• Forced everyone to add HotorNot-style photo browsing

• Fake profiles?

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

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

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.

Background Checks

• Here we go (again)

• Match, eHarmony.com, Spark Networks

• Back-end, not consumer-facing (RelyID)

STOP IT!

selling profiles

It pisses people off

Needs consumer opt-in

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.

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

Couples & Date Plans

Couples & Date Plans

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

Social is Hard

Triangulate: $750k seed round

Social Is Complicated

http://circl.es

Social Getting Easier

Video

• Long way from mainstream adoption

• Rounds

• $5.5 million from investors

• Raising $8-$10 million more

• Frimper video speed-dating FB app

• VideoDate

Speeddate.com

4 million monthly visitors

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

AARP Partners With HowAboutWe

Mobile

• Location-based social/dating apps struggle to succeed. Expensive to ramp up standalone density.

• Banjo, Sonar+Foursquare, Hilight, many others.

• Skout crushing it.

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.

Mobile

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.

• Dr. Warren is back

• Housecleaning

• Invested $600-$700 million on advertising since it was founded in 2000

• $66.5 million in 2011

“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

My Dating Profile

Prediction

Facebook will release a relationship discovery API to Graph Search that accesses their internal algorithms targeting relationship potential.

Big Data• Behavioral and other data

will influence recommendation engines.

• Social exhaust

• Behavior: views, favorites, messaging, replies

• Credit history, sentiment analysis

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"

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

Retention

• Is it really easier to re-engage stale members?

• Re-marketing Messaging

• Re-billing Strategies

• Up-sell Strategies

Freemium

• Enhanced search

• Increased exposure

• Message non-paying members

• Read-receipt

Dating investment is getting frothy

Maria Serendina - Founder, eAmore

$600k For Daily Matches

Crowdfunding• Friendlylook is seeking funds on Indiegogo.

Marketing

• 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

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.

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

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?

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

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David Evans

dave@digicraft.com

onlinedatingpost.com

http://about.me/daveevans

617-939-7916