The Issue With Online Dating
+8* KoreaPublished April 2, 2007 at 10:51 pm Comments OffWhen visiting Paris last month, we took the chance to meet with Europe’s leading online dating company. Though we did not have immediate projects to discuss, we were wondering how a Western company would deal with some specific issues of online dating. Namely:
- What is the image of the industry
- How can they guarantee profiles are accurate
- What are the revenue models
From the work we did in Asia with online communities (including dating), we now see those as key issues to enabling trust, guarantee quality and generate revenues.
There is no arguing that the sector is booming and is actually solving a social problem: we meet mostly people in our work environment, friends-of-friends or random people here and there. So not only the group in which to pick a partner is fairly small, but it is also quite random, and all this happening at a time when… we don’t have much time as we are building careers and busy socializing with more or less the same friends.
Back in Europe we asked our friends there if they used online dating – all said no – and if they knew people who did – most said no again. This first impression that something was wrong was confirmed during our meeting with the leading player: they spend half of their revenues on advertising!
Now we understand the main reason is because there is almost no word-of-mouth around their services. Because of this ‘image’ problem. Imagine what would happen if each user was inviting another user to join. What would be the profitability of the service, merely from saving on ads?
So this is the first problem.
The second one is about profiles’ quality: can I register saying I am a Harvard MBA, tall and handsome? At the moment there is no checking. The point in checking profiles is to enable trust: if I know that others’ profiles are accurate (let’s say: appearance, education and job) that’s already much better than the disappointment I might feel meeting them and being cheated. Especially now that everyone is proficient in Photoshop ^_^;
This verification seems a bit heavy at first but think about it: would you trust better a service where there is a verification process on profiles? I you don’t like to waste your time and are at least a bit serious about relationships, you would rather start on solid ground. Also, without trying to measure the emotional (and time) investment, the quality you would get from such a service would certainly be worth something for you.
Last, the monetization problem. If your content is low quality (users profile, mostly), you are in the eyeball business, with advertising, or in the flirt business, in which case you can charge a fee based on not-so-high expectations from users. But there are more services that you can bill: notably, enabling matchmaking with better profiling, mobile alerting, ‘instant date’, etc. We won’t detail all of them here, but there are much more than one might think.
To conclude on this: it seems that even though the image of the industry is changing, it is quite slow, and the pie is not growing that fast as a result. The good news is that… all those three problems have been solved some years ago in… South Korea! It is now part of the social fabric to use online services, several services have systems to check profiles and many rely only little on advertising.
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