I found OKcupids power point investor/partner pitch (May 2008) today while browsing the net. Provides insight into their white label strategy and some real funny details on the industry.
Evidently Match.com has only 1.2 million active users every 8 weeks. Guess they didn’t read that match.com signs up 60,000 people a day. That alone is 3.6 Million active users in 60 days assuming 0 retention. Meetic only has 400,000 active users and no other dating sites in the industry break 100k active members in two month time span! Okcupid supposedly has 500k “active members” oh and plentyoffish is excluded.
Okcupid got 3 million signups off one $15,000 ad buy. Wow the rest of the dating industry needs to spend $15 Million for those kind of results. Match.com only has 20 million members, if OKcupid spends ONLY $90,000 on marketing they will have more members WOW.
Okcupid has been real busy lately, posting press release after press release about how they are the biggest free dating site. Something Industry insiders have noticed.
My favorite is the Growth data slide. Messages per day are up a staggering 83% in 5 months… from 22,000 messages a day to 40,000 messages a day.
Eharmony 1 Million emails + per day, same with Lavalife, Match.com, Plentyoffish and Yahoo personals.
Download here or view online here
David Evans, who helps write Okcupids press releases, keeps hounding me and others to “innovate” and add useless features that don’t work. Lately its been Video Speed Dating, which a whole bunch of sites tried in 2000 to 2003 and died because they couldn’t control the porn. As far as I’m concerned singlesnet has been the only real innovator and its grabbed them a lot of marketshare. True.com and others didn’t have sustainable ideas or plans, Singlesnet does and you can see it via their attention marketshare, something that all the spam in the world can’t buy you, as true.com found out.
May 28, 2008 at 11:16 pm |
Markus, from some reason, you are the exception to the rule for most everything and your readers probably don’t understand that.
Adding features to dating sites that enable people to interact before they go on a date is not useless. Videodating is but one example of that but it makes a good blog post to slam the concept.
How in the world is SinglesNet an innovator? Explain.
I would be interested to hear how you have innovated. Free, forums and no customer service is all people every talk about. Curious how you define PoF in terms of the competition, I think that would be helpful.
Read my post about OKCupid and PoF today.
Hows the new place?
Dave
May 29, 2008 at 4:54 am |
That OKCupid presentation is only for the “Partnership Opportunity German Speaking Market”
But it did not mention competitors Parship nor Be2 nor FriendScout24, that I suspect many persons are using for free.
Anyway OKCupid uses an ipsative personality test, the “Dating Persona Test” (Similar to Myers-
Briggs Type Indicator, with 32 different personality types) so it could not be as “EFFECTIVE” as it claims!
Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
http://www.bidnetwork.org/artefact-50155-en.html
May 29, 2008 at 1:11 pm |
I wish you’d listen a bit to the requests for innovation. Yes, POF has hit the sweet-spot of of lean dating and forum content. The last thing I’d want is an over-stuffed web2.0 interface for online interaction. But it’s disappointing you don’t appear to be growing your forum side into your online-dating side.
The best way to meet someone is participation in common activities. In the online dating world that activity is forum discussion. One day an online dating site will grow their search so that one can find matches based on their forum activity as well as the color of their eyes.
May 29, 2008 at 3:09 pm |
Nice find, Markus. Sounds like the usual marketing and PR interpretation of statistics:
OKCupid get 3 million people to take their test, but doesn’t say how many of those they converted to returning members or data.
Similarly, those 60,000 daily Match signups include surely include all the spammers, scammers, and one-time window shoppers.
They do make an interesting argument that being a social destination gives them an advantage over pure dating sites, as noted in my now-dated OkCupid review. That also puts them up against Facebook and MySpace, though; and given the rush towards open application platforms there, it’s going to get much tougher to compete for people’s time.
May 30, 2008 at 2:46 am |
[...] THE PARADIGM SHIFT — May 28 — OKCupid power point investor/partner pitch. Evidently Match.com has only 1.2m active users every 8 weeks. Meetic only has 400,000 active users and no other dating sites in the industry break 100k active members in two month time span! Okcupid supposedly has 500k "active members" and PlentyofFish is excluded. FULL ARTICLE @ THE PARADIGM SHIFT [...]
May 30, 2008 at 8:59 am |
The private messaging/e-mail bit cought my eye, how many of they are just scammers ! lol
Markus what precautions do you have to stop spam pm’s going around !?
On a site i moderate i am thinking of banning particular countries ?! Maybe to extreme ?
May 30, 2008 at 2:24 pm |
You can’t ignore plenty of fish the thing is a monster….
Doug
May 30, 2008 at 3:42 pm |
Oh ban entire countries and a heck of a lot more…
May 30, 2008 at 6:09 pm |
banning countries helps a little but not much. Most scammers and spammers use proxy servers with a US IP address.
May 31, 2008 at 4:02 am |
I made 40 cents today with adsense. My biggest haul for one day in three months. Yeeeee Haaaaah. I can by a piece of gum!
June 1, 2008 at 12:13 pm |
Hehe I use PoF to find local sluts, while I use OKcupid to find someone more long term. It just seems to make sense. Chicks who use okcupid seem to be more serious about the whole dating thing, girls who use PoF … just seem to like all the attention they get.
But yeah, okstupid seems rather full of themselves when it comes to their marketing.
June 2, 2008 at 2:05 pm |
“Hehe I use PoF to find local sluts, ”
So you will find a honest girl on okcupid and cheat her with girl form pof?
Man there is a moron a million… just don’t end up on one of my sites pls.
June 2, 2008 at 2:10 pm |
Wow you ban whole countries ! lol like it !
- Aaron had a good point also. I will think about it.
June 2, 2008 at 5:03 pm |
Yep just watch proxy lists and add them to your filter.
June 3, 2008 at 8:47 pm |
“So you will find a honest girl on okcupid and cheat her with girl form pof?
”
Nah – I wouldn’t do that … well I did once, but that was totally out of my character. And I met her from PoF before I met the honest girl on okcupid. Then things were kind of … yeah I totally bungled that whole relationship up. Whatever, she’s happy now with a new boyfriend, I’m happy being manwhore, it’s all good.
I’m noticing that some emails I write on PoF are either:
not being sent at all with no error message
OR
are being sent, but do not get reported in my ’sent’ mailbox.
This seems to keep happening. In case any one cares.
June 3, 2008 at 9:36 pm |
Oh yeah – the email problem is totally alive. I just tried sending the same user 3 emails, and it says “Message Sent” but I see nothing in my sent box.
I remember having this problem like a year or more ago.
I was arguing at one point how PoF’s email is more reliable than my college’s – and they have 3 network admins working that setup. I guess I’m going to have to take that back.
June 4, 2008 at 7:38 am |
“Whatever, she’s happy now with a new boyfriend, I’m happy being manwhore, it’s all good.”
LOL
Thats OK.
The email problem could be in SQL not refreshing back data.
June 9, 2008 at 9:03 am |
Hi Marcus, what was the ad Okcupid placed for $15,000 – where can I see it, what type of ad was it, where was it??