Sam Yagan and the folks at OkCupid have been running some interesting experiments on what works and what doesn’t work in online dating. In this interview with DatingAdNetwork Sam (co-founder and CEO of okcupid) sheds some light on those analysis. Listen the interview here.

Q:   How big is your website OkCupid in terms of the customer database and visitors?
A:  OkCupid is one of the largest and fastest growing free dating sites on the web.  We  have about 5 million unique visitors to our website every month.

Q:  That’s pretty large.  How about your other site CrazyBlindDate ?
A: We do run several other sites in our network that offer different dating products but OkCupid is the core site that we run and is definitely the largest.

Q:  In your presentation last month you displayed some metrics about phrases people use in their messages and how dramatically it affects the responses they get.  Those were  very interesting analysis that I have not seen anywhere else.  Which of those metrics came as most surprising when they first look at them?

A:  What we do is we analyze all of the interactions that are happening on our site.  We aggregate the data, we do some statistical analysis to try to find trends and we publish those trends back out on our blog.  One of the studies we did recently was on first messages.  What content in the message does best at drawing responses?  Just like when you go to a bar, that first line that you give, that pick-up line, is really important in determining whether that person is going to talk to you.  In the same way, what we found when you write that first message to someone on OkCupid, the content of the message is very important.  One of the first rules that we found is that grammatical errors are a very big turn-off to recipients.  So it’s very important that your message is grammatically correct and that you don’t use any sort of internet shorthand like the letter ”U” or “UR” and you should be thoughtful in structuring your message just like you would be thoughtful before you go and talk to a girl at the bar.  Another thing that we found was that men should be modest.  Yes you should be confident, but don’t focus too much on how great you are. 

 
Q:  What useful conclusions can be drawn from those metrics?
A:  I think the conclusions are that in many ways online dating is a lot like offline dating in that first impression you make is very important and that you should actually spend time reading the persons profile that you are sending the message to and customizing that message as much as possible so the recipient is really interested in what you bring.

Q:   You are doing a lot of contests and games in your site.  Could you tell us some most recent and most interesting ones that you are doing?

A:  The biggest thing that we do is every couple of weeks we publish a new post on our blog which is basically a study of the activities that are taking place on the site.  The one that we currently have on the site talks about the impact of age on dating.  What we found is that men actually do better as they age up into their twenties, then they taper a little bit more gradually.  A man in his upper twenties or early thirties is actually very desirable across a very large swath of women.  So women in their mid-twenties, women in their mid-thirties, women in their upper-thirties are all interested in men around the age of thirty and in their early thirties.  Women on the other hand peak much earlier.  Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five year old women are the most desirable and once a woman turns thirty or thirty-five, their demand goes way down.

 
Q:  You started your site when there was already a strong competitor on the market and hundreds of other sites are trying to get there.  And yet, you managed to make your site very successful.  Is there any special ingredient to your success that you can share with our listeners?

A:   We have three things that are key to our success.  The first of course is that we are free.  We really believe that women especially don’t want to pay for dating.  The second is that we brought the fun back to dating.  We think that dating should feel more like going to a bar than going to your psychologist.  Third, we use math to make dating more effective.  Ultimately if you use OkCupid, you are more likely to get a date than if you are on one of those other sites.

Q:   Speaking about the free websites, there seems to be a recent trend with paid sites opening free portals and free sites adding paid services.  Do you think that in a few years down the road, there would still be a breakdown by free and paid sites as we know them today?  Or will they evolve in some mixed models?

A:   I think everyone is working on mixed models.  I think the challenge is that the  subscriptions sites that are predominantly paid sites right now have built their entire business around having a certain expertise which is spending a hundred million dollars in marketing and trying to acquire customers that they have monetized at very high levels.  I think it’s going to be very hard for a site like e-Harmony or Match.com to change the model very much.  They do not have the right DNA, they don’t have the right expertise to build a free site because a free site has very different dynamics.  Ultimately, what we have seen in the last three years is that Match.com has stopped growing.  They have about 25% fewer subscribers today than they had three years ago, so I think that shows the market leader on the subscription side is not doing well.  What you are going to see is the free sites already out there are going to continue to grow and they are going to keep becoming the dominate players in the space. 

We’ve received a lot of feedback on the previous post and would like to give Robert Fathers another opportunity to speak on our blog. Below you can find his thoughts on the dating industry, as it moves and changes in the current economic climate.

The Big Dating Sites

Dating is divided into several markets. Let’s say, the Big guns, like Match, Lavalife, Meetic etc; they are totally focused on their brand and very little else, they mainly rely on mass media advertising which is expensive and, more often than not, ineffective. They are purely working on a Business to consumer basis and miraculously many of them don’t have an affiliate system, mostly rely on expensive alternatives, such as Commission Junction and other larger services for affiliates, but of course CJ takes most of the money and the end result is very little profit and high advertising costs. This year highlighted many of these companies as losing money; my own belief is they will survive by their sheer size and backers, like Microsoft behind Match, but never to be that successful in their own right; their sites are also so basic, that most dating scripts even have more to offer.

Small General Dating sites

A very hard time for them: most are joining systems like our own, as they cannot get good deals with merchant accounts and overheads are difficult to cover in a market that is already flooded. However, the light at the end of the tunnel for them is by joining our system; this will help them to clear all operating costs and expand their brand with other languages, currencies and niches. This is a real solution for sites in hard times to expand and make money in an otherwise difficult market.

One off Niches

Each site should have their own unique quality, whether it’s a concept like eHarmony or a niche like JDate.com. These are, of course, more successful, but, of course, limited to a smaller segment of the market. Many of these sites cannot cope with ethnic sites. For example, try Chinese dating in the USA, or Indian dating in the UK. If jDate could cover all languages and countries then their niche becomes larger and, of course, more profitable.

Multiple Niches

The smaller the Niche the higher the profits, any Google AdWords specialist will tell you that this is the answer to real success. Building through 100 of these is no mean task.

Some ideas to dating webmasters and site owners

• How about starting your own dating empire? Where would you begin?
• A good name, a good Domain. Create your brand and design - and you have the beginning of your supersite.
• Build your site outwards, let’s call it superdaters.com
• Clone your site for each country, using the relevant language and currency for each site, link them all together.
• Create Niches around the same brand that cross sale well, like Gay dating or Adult Dating, and you are already making your own advertising for your other sites.
• Expanding on the above, you could create your own free dating site; why not add it to your social network? It’s a great fit and suits the free concept. Use the free dating site to make advertising revenue and then cross sell your free dating sites to your paid dating sites.
• The combinations of ways you can do this are endless; we estimate that you can create up to 13 million niches in our system. The beauty of it all is that anyone can do it from professional to amateur.
• This is a long lasting strong model that can last a lifetime and, I can say this honestly, completely addictive.

Robert Fathers, CEO, Datech Limited

Q: We know that Single Christian Network is one of the oldest dating sites. Please tell us a bit more about your history.

A: I wish I could say I had the most altruistic motives for starting Single Christian Network (www.singlec.com). In reality it just happened.

I was an out of work computer programmer. My dad published a singles newspaper for Christians. He wanted to create a computer matching program for them and gave me a call. I needed the money. I agreed to write his program.
What happened is that it worked too well. He got overloaded with trying to publish his newspaper and run the matching program at the same time. Instead of paying me for the work, he asked me to take it over. I did. The rest is history. It was called Christian Computer Match back then.

What I did was put ads in singles newspapers all over the country. I posted full pages ads in some of them. The ad was an actual application. A new member would fill out the application and mail it in. I would key that information into the computer and once a month I would mail out matches to all the subscribers. Remember now — this is before the internet. I didn’t even have an email address back then. Everything was postal mail.
Once a month I would run the matching program, print thousands of matching reports and spend the weekend printing, folding, stuffing and licking envelopes. It wasn’t the funnest job in the world. My house was filled with envelopes, paper, stamps and lots of neighbor kids helping fold and stuff.

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UsabilityTesting.tv published an article which outlines the most common mistakes made by dating sites. See for yourself if you have any issues from the checklist below:

1. Registration is too long.
2. Photo upload is not part of the registration flow.
3. No easy way to find who’s online.
4. Not letting members know the status of their emails (or asking them to pay for it).
5. Making updating a profile tougher than necessary.
6. No search by partial username.
7. Not notifying users when someone “hot listed” or “favorited” them.
8. Sending the content of the email to their personal email.
9. Not sending real-time notifications.
10. Connecting IM and Online status.

Source: usabilitytesting.tv

You’ve finally made the decision to enter the online dating market. You have come up with a splendid idea which will definitely make your visitors join your dating site. That’s great! Having a unique approach is so important when dating business is so competitive and the potential for dating traffic is bigger than ever.

This article will give you some tips for making your dating site a success. You want your database of members to grow daily, so you need information on how to ensure the delivery of quality dating traffic to your site. These 5 easy to follow tips will show you how to attract that traffic, identify what makes your visitors leave or stay, target your desired demographic and encourage your visitors to join your site.

How to Get Highly Targeted Dating Traffic:

Marketing comes in many forms. There is traditional advertising, which brings in targeted, immediate traffic; and SEO, which gives your site more visibility and enhances your reputation. Advertising can be online or offline and include a variety of different methods; SEO works by distributing links and information throughout the web to pull in highly targeted traffic. There are three types of traditional advertising and two SEO tactics you can use to immediately start seeing more visitors at your dating site.

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