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. 

Vindicia provides on-demand billing and fraud management solutions. Among its customers are Online Buddies, SpeedDate, Avid Life (Ashley Madison) and other large dating sites.  Chairman and CEO of Vindicia - Gene Hoffman answers our questions in today’s exclusive interview for the readers of DatingAdNetwork blog:

Q: How can dating sites benefit from Vindicia CashBox?

A: Vindicia CashBox is an on-demand billing solution that enables dating sites, big and small, to continually acquire and retain customers.  From the acquisition perspective, CashBox supports multiple payment methods and payment processors; handles numerous business models, including subscriptions, one-time payments, and hybrids; calculates the applicable taxes (sales tax, GST, VAT) through a built-in engine; and automates the process of managing and disputing chargebacks.  On the retention side, in particular, CashBox features automatic payment-retry logic, which helps subscription clients consistently raise their successful transaction rate every month by 1-2 percent.  In addition, with CashBox, dating sites can communicate with customers in multiple languages, a win-win for global outreach.

In short, CashBox manages the entire billing process for dating sites so that they can focus on their business of helping people find that special someone.

Q: How does CashBox differ from other billing solutions?

A: CashBox delivers many distinct advantages besides automation of the order-to-cash process. Most of all, CashBox helps clients optimize their customer acquisition and retention capabilities, resulting in boosts to customer lifetime values north of 10 percent annually.  No other billing solution manages chargebacks as effectively as CashBox, which tackles the friendly-fraud challenge that all dating sites face and rightfully returns revenue due them.

Typically, Vindicia wins 60-70 percent of the chargebacks that we dispute on clients’ behalf.  CashBox also provides our clients with a great deal of flexibility and versatility with its support for multiple business models, global payment methods, languages, and currencies. With CashBox, dating sites can quickly respond to evolving business conditions without having to wait for their billing infrastructure to catch up.

Q: Many payment processors are averse to dating sites and consider them a high risk. Why are you interested in working with them?

A: We’ve found that dating sites that take appropriate risk-mitigation measures for fraud are, in fact, high-margin businesses and ideal for the services offered by CashBox. Since many sites have as a goal notto retain customers for too long (after all, their success is defined as /not /needing a dating site), a simple, transparent, robust, and logical billing and payment service is a key facet of a satisfactory customer experience.  Bottom line: We believe that we can help dating sites grow their business and stay successful through our unique approach of building online revenue.

Q: Tell us more about your fraud-screening and chargeback management capabilities.

A: CashBox’s fraud-screening capability generates a risk score for each sales transaction so that dating sites can identify obvious fraudsters before the transaction is complete.  Many variables are factored into the risk score, including the geographical location of the customer’s IP address, validation of the billing address and BIN, detection of the related proxy, and card velocity.  Unique to the fraud-screening score is a database of chargebacks that we’ve created across a broad client base on the basis of hundreds of millions of past transactions.  As soon as CashBox detects that a credit card has been associated with a prior chargeback in our system, CashBox raises the risk score of the related transaction–essentially a red flag.

Chargeback management with CashBox comes into play post-transaction.  Oftentimes, chargebacks do not result from stolen credit cards or “true fraud,” but from people who make purchases but decide not to pay for them.  We call this behavior “friendly fraud” though it certainly isn’t.  For those cases, CashBox takes the chargeback data from the payment processor and maps it to usage and other pertinent information from the client site.  CashBox then creates a documentation package and a letter tailored for the customer’s issuing bank and “re-presents” the charge.  Aside from the positive impact of reversed revenue, our experience has shown that fighting chargebacks also provides our clients with valuable insight into their marketing efforts.

Q: Which dating sites are using CashBox?

A: There are quite a few, including Online Buddies, SpeedDate, iChurch, Avid Life, and others. They are either using or in the process of implementing CashBox.