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Who pays on the first date?
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In my first talk in 2012 and first of a few this month (#smc_mcr and #tedxmanchester to come). I spoke at the excellent igniteleeds.
Unusually I didn’t talk about technology or social change, instead I did a 5min talk about who pays on the first date? Seemed to go well and I even had a woman who admitted publicly she had pulled the whole reaching for her purse waiting for the other person to offer to pick up the whole bill (as per my early slide).
Unfortunately after reaching for my virtual bag while demonstrating the whole reach down, I pulled the VGA cable out of my laptop and had the panic of putting it back and then switching to mirror screen again. Wasn’t a big problem, just meant the whole presentation was over 5mins for sure. Good thing it wasn’t auto advancing, because it would have been real short.
I had a couple of conversations with people afterwards, one was with guy who didn’t see the point in my talk… The other was a guy who said he had this exactly conversation last week with a female friend of his.
The event was real fun and the speakers were varied and each quite different. We had social poetry to diy bio and most things between. It was a good night and I’m happy I was able to speak at the event hosted by the amazing imran ali.
If you found the talk interesting and your around Manchester, we’re planning Geeks Talk Sexy season 2, so keep your eyes peeled.
Next stop #smc_mcr on Tuesday… Perceptive Media…
I’m trying to decide if I should apply for this groundbreaking dating experiment or rather TV dating show
We’re looking for single people to take part in a groundbreaking dating experiment.
Are you looking for Miss or Mr Right?
Would you like to be set up with your ideal date?
Using the science of compatibility testing, our relationship experts will be creating 500 compatible couples who will meet for the first time at an exciting TV dating event.
This is the week that our compatibility test goes live, so make sure that you don’t miss out on the chance of meeting your perfect date by getting in touch now!
I might not be able to apply due to being a BBC member of staff but you never know… Actually the only reason I’m considering it is because its BBC. However its BBC Three, so who knows what it might end up like.
I’ve asked on Twitter and Google Plus and its been a mixed response, but now the deadline is coming up and I need to decide.
Can I remind you about the last time I was on TV, and that was without me even signing up to anything!
What you can see is a slide from my presentation which is all about who pays on the first date. I’m going to give a balanced view on the topic at Ignite Leeds on Wednesday 18th Jan. Of course once I do the talk, I’ll post the who presentation on Slideshare along with all my others.
Josh (technicalfault) will never let me forget about my idles to not date anyone who regularly shops in Aldi supermarket…
After reading my latest blog post he took to Twitter to tell me I’m a hypo-critic :)
He then puts forward a scenario…
how about this. a lady shops in Aldi so she can save money to help pay for parents medical treatment. yet you judge her!
Actually no… maybe I do but for good reason. We all have filters, preferences, likes. Like it or not, its being human
So why the dislike of Aldi? Well its a complex one, and can not be put down to some simple snobbery. Heck even I shop there between supermarket deliveries… But I don’t like it. Its about my own values…
Here’s some justification, which may make me sound like a snob but I’m not…
- Good food costs good money…
I buy free-range eggs instead of barn eggs (even with the huge cost increase). Even when I was a student and had no money at all, working in starbucks coffee, I would still mainly buy free-range eggs. Very occasionally I bought barn eggs and although I knew they were basically the same, I felt terrible for doing so… That was my own values being stretched – not anyone elses. My own values tell me food pricing is screwed up… Good food should cost quite a bit and specially in the case of fresh food, the premium we pay should go to the people who help bring us that fresh food. This is why although Aldi does provide very cheap food, I’m not a fan because I feel good food should cost. (To note: I’m not saying everyone should pay that if they can’t afford it. Our values and priorities change through our lives, and right now I don’t have a problem paying for good food, I know that makes me very lucky) - Quality of food…
In my honest opinion, fresh food at Aldi is generally crappy… Things like Grapes and Apples taste really bad to me. When compared to Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys, Booths and even from the Arndale local Market. I can’t stand to buy fresh goods from Aldi no more after multiple tries. Maybe its just my taste buds but I believe its about right for the money you pay. Yes they have a reasonable selection of meats and cheeses but there fresh food is very poor in my view. So I would have a slightly tarnished view of people who enjoyed the fresh food… Its not me looking down, well at least no less than those who enjoy Apple products
I can go on for ever about Aldi but I just have so many problems with our local Aldi beyond what I said above…
Josh will hate my justification but frankly its a small filter and a little more context, we were originally talking regarding Asda’s supermarket dating service. I joked Asda dating (at least in Eastlands Manchester) would be a poor state of affairs. It would be like dating on Plenty of Fish while something like Sainsburys or even Booths supermarket dating would be more like dating on Okcupid. The later certainly would attract more of the type person I’d personally like to meet… Its not a snobbery thing, actually Sainsburys and Booths are both in Salford.
I’ll be hiding from the comments and twitter wraff for the rest of the week… I’m never too far from controversy it seems…
I warn you I don’t always follow my own advice, but I had a little read of CTS’s post in the telegraphy titled, If you’re looking for love in London make sure it’s in the right places.
But before I start my comment, I’ve been reading and following (thanks to the forever good friend Kate Norman for the pointer) CTS’s 52 first dates, which really intrigues me and makes me wish I had blogged my many dates…
Here’s the deal. I’ve been single since time immemorial. So, in an attempt to remedy my eternal singledom, and to get over my nauseatingly pathological fear of dates, I’ve decided to challenge myself. The challenge? To go on one first date a week for a year! So in 52 weeks time, I will have either found my Mr Right, or I’ll stay forever Miss Write. This is what happens…
Here are the rules to the 52 First Dates challenge…
1. A first date must be had once a week, EVERY week, for 52 weeks.
2. Taking someone home after a drunken night on the cider does NOT count, otherwise this challenge would just be slutty, and none of us want that do we?!?
3. Second and third dates are allowed, I must continue first dates unless there are exceptional mitigating circumstances. For example, God forbid, the start of a relationship.
4. Each date must be blogged.
Great concept and to be honest I’m kind of hooked reading some of her blog posts… I’m sure I’ll comment more about them in future.
So now on to, places to meet…
in reality, the prospect of catching a fellow passenger’s eye on the Tube is unheard of and the very notion of verbalising a cheeky flirt during rush hour would probably cause the entire Underground system to implode. It just doesn’t happen, it’s not the done thing.
Although I do agree mainly its not totally unheard of… In my time living in London half the time I was married but before that, I had some great experiences communicating with people on the tube. Yes they were very rare but there is nothing better than when the driver/announcer makes a mistake or says something funny. You can’t help but just look at the person opposite you and smile or even laugh. Well next time say something, don’t try and be funny just say something which refers to the current situation. You will be surprised what might happen…
Yes it breaks the silence and yes Londonners don’t talk in public much but hey who knows what can happen if you cease the moment? Reason why I mention it is I’ve met some interesting people on the tube this way. Now to be honest its never been a romantic type of thing but I’m sure with enough times something might have happened…
CTS (really need to find out her real name) ends with this…
Regardless, if you want to meet someone in this heaving city perhaps it’s best to dive right in and see who’s available online. They say there are plenty of fish in the sea but reeling them in at bars and clubs is hard work – online dating could well be the best way to find a lifeguard.
I agree, online has been better but like when me and Sarah first met in reality, that was when things really clicked.
The thing I’ve always done (or at least tried to do) is keep an eye open when you go places you personally enjoy. Chances are if you enjoy that place, the person you want to meet also will be there. So enjoy shopping in ikea, the person you may want to meet is maybe there too. I personally love Manchester’s cafe culture and spend plenty of time hanging out in them, yes nothing to show yet but a few twitter name swaps for example. But likewise if your not a fan of say old man pubs (like me), then its not going to be the kind of place you may want to meet someone else romantically…
I can talk quite a bit about the social objects/places thing but I’ve done enough of that here.
For those who can’t read the poll, 100 people answered from around the world via Qriously the question of who should pay on the first date? Something I talked at length about before.
60% said the man should pay on the first date, 27% said the woman and only 13% said go dutch (thinking I should have put split it instead of go Dutch, to avoid any language misunderstanding). Yes the man should pay is the number one option but what totally surprises me is the small amount of votes for going dutch?
I didn’t tweet the poll and to be honest I forgot to change it because it was meant to be part of the Leeds ignite talk I was going to give on the 15th November. This has now been put back to early next year…
The Insight…
60% (60) people are in favour of The Man (Top Geographies are United States, United Kingdom, India)
13% (13) people are in favour of Go Dutch (Top Geographies are United States, Thailand, India)
27% (27) people are in favour of The Woman (Top Geographies are United States, Spain, Chile)
The poll was answered by 46% Female and 54% Male and the average sentiment is strongly towards The Man
There was 100 Answers and 2,963 Views over only 18mins uptime, not bad for a first time without any additional push from myself.
I will run it again during my talk at Leeds Ignite and change the “go dutch” note and focus it on just the UK and maybe Europe?
It wasn’t long ago that I removed the OKCupid application from my android phone because frankly it wasn’t all that and it was more like an extension of the website. But I was talking to my friend Nicola who I had been telling for a while to stop paying for online dating sites. In the past she has filled me in on the problems Guardian Soulmates was having post there redesign. But today she filled me in on OKCupid’s new beta application feature called Locals.
In actual fact Locals I’d heard about but hadn’t tried till she explained it.
Simply its Grindr for the OKCupid crowd… Sam Yagan (OKC founder) explains why its anti-grindr
So Grindr is obviously the most successful mobile dating app out there. The things that make it so successful—I’m going to terribly stereotype this community—but it’s larger used as a vehicle for short-term, physical relationships. Now it turns out, taking the stereotypical heterosexual case, that the vast majority of women don’t want that. In fact that’s what creeps them out the most about this. They’re worried about stalkers, they’re worried that it’s 10:30 at night on a Friday and you know someone at the bar next to you thinks you want to have sex with them.
How is OkCupid Locals different?
Number one, we’re populating Locals with the OkCupid database. Our entire reputation is built around the fact that we have this data-oriented way to understand people’s personalities. We can actually layer in compatibility. So now, when you make yourself available in Locals, it’s not just, “Oh, who are the people around me who are hot and horny at this moment.” It’s sliced by who are the people around me who are compatible with me. Instead of it being like everyone’s out there in this meat market, it’s more like I can say, “Who wants to go to karaoke.” You can post that not to just everyone in the West Village, but you can say: everyone in the Village who has a compatibility with me over 80 percent.
It sort of cleans the unwashed masses. It’s like, ohhhhh. You’ve been on OkCupid for a couple years, you know that people with high match percentages tend to be people that you could tolerate having a beer with. (Or not—there are creepy people everywhere in every compatibility index.) But in general we’ve got this sort of filter of the users, which I think is super valuable.
And I he’s right, you can just say something like I’m in X place for Y amount of time. Then set who you would like to see there (based on your OKC profile), so for example mine options is Girls who like guys and everybody.
The thing which makes me think this could be a success is the fact I was already doing this on twitter as such. For example I’d say, I’m in central London tonight, anyone fancy joining me for a meal or a drink. Because I have quite a few twitter followers I tend to always catch someone but now I can do the same and hopefully meet some real cool people who, who knows might be rather cute.
Locals really hits the head of what makes OKCupid so cool. One of the secrets of OKC is its social nature. Its more like a place to hangout, do quizes, talk to people, etc, etc. Dating is a massive part but I know people who just use to chat to people in passing, read there journals and fill out the weird and wonderful quizes. If they can get people to do locale too… then there on to a new massive success
I know most people will screw up there face at the notion of Locals but for someone as public as myself, its going to be a whole lot of fun…
I was in a meeting today with 3 female collages (I won’t say which ones for now) about BarCampMediaCity and somewhere along the conversation we got talking about my love life… don’t ask me how we got there but something happened…
One of the ladies said something about first dates and I replied saying I’ve got some crazy experiences over the last few years I’ve been dating. We had a brief chat and somewhere along the conversation she said something which I had to unpick.
It came about that she believed that on the first date, men should always pay for the meal.
I was shocked! Like totally dumbfounded…
So shocked I had to pose the question on twitter… a few people replied including my sister and very good friend.
I can’t believe in 2011 we still have these old fashioned views. I was under the illusion that woman had moved on and wasn’t buying all this chauvinistic crap. I was also under the illusion that insisting to pay for the whole dinner put the woman in a difficult position, like you owe the man something.
It turns out I might have been wrong all this time.
But to be honest, I say rubbish… This sounds like something straight out of the rules.
I might be wrong but I certainly like to think the woman I go out with are not bound by such frankly stupid ideology. Its 2011 for goodness sake! I can make a lady feel better in much better ways than paying for her meal. I mean, come on… Is she meant to be grateful that I unimaginatively paid for her meal instead of something creative and from the soul?
Just because I don’t pay for the whole meal doesn’t mean I’m not into you, maybe I respect you so much that I’m not going to undermine you by paying for the whole bill. I understand you have a great job and would like to share the bill with me also out of respect…
Maybe in there lies my problem, I show too much respect for woman and I should also adopt this chauvinistic take? To be fair its worked for lots of my other friends but I deep down like to think the woman who I end up growing old with (in the end) is smart enough to see through this crap and is happy to take her own path and make her up her own mind. Not be pressured by this old fashioned legacy…
What do other people think? Should I cover the costs of all the dates I go on? It certainly will restrict how many dates I will go (time to loose the serial dater tag then) on in the future if so…
Lastly this is certainly something for the 2nd season of geeks talk sexy… Maybe its time to start thinking about it
From the Asda dating site via Tim Dobson,
Forget speed dating, supermarket dating is where it’s at.
Research reveals the supermarket has overtaken the pub and the internet as the nation’s number 1 spot to find love.
Supermarkets have always been a great way for singles people to meet.
So it makes sense that if you’re now shopping online for your groceries, why not find love online too?
Heard the idea of supermarket dating a while back but I’m not convinced. Can I also add that if I was going dating in a supermarket, it certainly wouldn’t be Asda, even though there is one just up from me.
Without sounding like a snob, can you even imagine what kind of people you would bump into? When ever I’ve personally gone into Asda, I’ve been frankly a little shocked at the people walking around. It might just be the prices but to be fair I’m looking for a lady who understands its not about getting the cheapest price of food. Quality costs…
Can you imagine going supermarket dating in Aldi or Lidi? I’m sure the cheap prices has a effect on the type of people who will go in there. However there are isolated cases like Manchester central where supermarket dating could actually turn up a whole bunch of young, lovely and beautiful women.
I imagine the inner city Sainsburys local and Tesco Metro’s would be a great place to meet such young and lovely ladies.
I heard the term a while ago while watching a channel4 documentary and someone was talking about it in a cafe once. but forgot about it till recently after seeing another documentary about a similar topic.
From Urban Dictionary, a serial dater
One who engages in the process of systematically dating an obscene amount people in short span of time. This definition encompasses but is not limited to internet dating, bar dating, long distance flirtations, phone service dating, blind dating, expiration dating, match making, one night stands, friends with benefits, and personal ad surfing. Can be considered a politically correct alternative to word "player" both with and without a negative connotation.
Examples
- You do not want to date my roommate, that guy is such a serial dater.
- Good luck getting anything meaningful out of her, she’s too much into serial dating.
People I know have committed that I go on a lot of dates, but they only know the half of it. I tend to keep that side quiet because it would be very unfair for me to blog, tweet, etc about someone else. Specially those who turned out to be… well… best say… interesting dates. Maybe I should start a secret blog and write about my experiences on dates many other have.
I reject the notion that I’m a player because I’m not, I just enjoy meeting new people and well I love meeting woman. In actual fact I have 2 dates this week *smile*
What more can I say… I’m a ethical serial dater?
Talking of which, we’re currently planing the complete series of Geeks talk Sexy after our most successful episode yet. Following the success of Tara Hunt, we’ve been thinking about having more guests join us. It looks like we may have roped in some great guests including a couple of pickup artists. More news soon…
Tim Dobson sent me a tweet earlier this today but I only saw it recently because he usually sends dodgy and crap stuff (*smile*). Anyway the news threw me…
OkCupid Acquired by Match.com for $50 Million.
I’m shocked… and to be honest I really want to get off OKcupid pretty soon. But I really want to take my data with me. I’m already considering building some kind of scaper so I can get my data out. The only good thing is…
OkCupid co-founder and CEO Sam Yagan will stay on at the site to run operations.
Sam Yagan also recently said
We Will Not Charge Users Following Match.com Acquisition
“Our goal is that [the acquisition] will have no effect whatsoever,” Yagan told us, saying that no positions will change within the company, and that it will continue full-steam ahead as usual — sans censorship or fees.
Sounds great but is this all lip service? To be honest, as some people have already noticed. A article about paid vs free online dating has been taken it down!
Internet denizens have also pointed out that a popular OKCupid article from last year titled “Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating” has been taken down from the company’s blog.
“I chose to take that down. Match didn’t ask,” Yagan says, denying that the other site was attempting to censor OkCupid. Apparently, the story was pieced together from public information, and Yagan has learned that some of the assumptions made in it were untrue.
Also, he says, “It’s a common sense thing to do. We’re joining a bunch of new colleagues, there’s no need to have that post.”
There is the google cache of course. And no wonder it was removed… It starts this way…
Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating
Today I’d like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don’t realize.
For one thing, their business model exacerbates a problem found on every dating site…
Oi! No wonder it was removed, its a scaving deconstruction of the match.com business model, oh whoops I mean our new boss.
And if that wasn’t so bad enough, this bit will have you in stitches.
Match.com’s numbers are just as grim. They’re a public company, so we can get their exact subscriber info from the shareholder report they file each quarter. Here’s what we have from Q4 20094:
And finally this flow diagram kills it dead. The owners of Match.com must have been having kittens by the point.
Remember, sites like Match and eHarmony are in business to get you to buy a monthly subscription. There’s nothing wrong with profit motive, but the particular way these sites have chosen to make money creates strange incentives for them. Let’s look at how the pay sites acquire new subscribers.
That for me is a clear sign that we’re about to be shafted. Yagan might be right that he was not told to remove the blogs but to be honest the fact he felt that he had to take it down speaks volumes! And its going to be a very bumpy ride down to the bottom, I can feel it now. And I want to get off now.
I want out! And I’m not the only one. I’ll be interested to see what kind of protest the people of okcupid put up. Might be worth starting off a specially branded avatar… Bit like whats been done on flickr before.
According to Stephen Mount, online dating goes something a little like this.
Person A: Hi
Person B: Hi
Person A: What’s your financial circumstances?
Person B: I’m skint
Person A: Bye
In my experience this is certainly not true. It would be interesting to hear where Stephen is meeting these ladies? The only time I’ve ever had someone challenge me about how much I actually earn is when I went speed dating for the first time and it ended up on ITV 1 primetime.
The woman (who I won’t screen shot for her own sake, although I really would like to) who is person A in the following role-play and I’m person B.
Person A: So what do you do?
Person B: I work for the BBC on a special project which I love
Person A: Oh thats a shame, I heard the BBC don’t pay very well
After a slight delay (I was weighing up in my mind how this would play out)
Person B: Well that only matters if your a gold digging ******
Person A: **** ******* ******** ******
Lets say the next 2.5 mins were some of the most difficult conversation you could have with a stranger…
Luckily its only ever happened once and even more luckily it was not caught by the camera for the ITV viewing public, because that would be too embarrassing at the time but ever so funny now.
People ask me why would I choose to open my ideas to the world, for anyone to take and make money on. For example mydreamscape.org.
But the way I see it is, I’m very unlikely to dedicate 10 years of my life to one idea, grow it and nurture it through all the stages of making it successful. I actually put this to Richard St John a while ago at TedXSheffield, because I was really interested in what he thought of those like myself who don’t necessarily want to be successful (as such). He cleverly turned the question around and said actually what i’m actually after is success in the idea or the meme. Ideally I would have a team of people and certain people would make there job to take an idea forward for the sake of the team.
But back to the point…
I’ve been sitting on the same principle idea for a long time to do with online dating. It was actually the wider part of what I presentation at Ignite Leeds.
I’ve stated before that some of the largest benefits we will see from creating and maintaining our Lifestreams will be the services created on the backbone of that data. We are starting to see the first big service phenomenon from that coming in the way of content readers that are built specifically for us based on the data shared by our social graph.
Early on when I first started writing about Lifestreaming I gave thought to services that could be built off of the data and one of the first that came to mind was a dating site. In fact I had multiple interviews at a top dating site a few years ago that was very interested in my knowledge and thoughts around Lifestreaming data. I didn’t get the job, but I still felt that Lifestreaming data would at some point help power the matchmaking process. Well apparently a new dating service called Wings feels the same way.
Wings has taken a unique and interesting approach when it comes to dating. They figured that instead of creating a site from scratch that people need to join, they’d just tap into the 500+ Million Facebook users and build a dating app within their eco-system. The innovation doesn’t stop there as when you join there is no super long, multi-page questionnaire. After joining the service will analyze your Facebook data and let you also connect your Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts to help paint a picture of who you are. I feel this is a much better way to build a profile for someone. Instead of a static survey filled out and frozen in time, your profile is dynamic based on the data collected on a daily basis.
This is the crux of my idea.
One of the most frustrating things about online dating is the lack of portability but also having to fill in those bloody profile statements or questions. So if you could leverage your lifestream instead to teach the system about who you really are. Then you might actually get better results. This would/could also cut down on Spam and more interestingly the lies people tell in online dating.
I thought about using the same principle as in APML to mark up whats important in peoples lives. Now what I realize is this can be better done with a “like” button or “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” So if you don’t want your drunken pictures from last night on your dating profile, you can vote it down or bury it all together.
When you interfere with the stream, the engine would mark the item up in a way to say it was interfered with. So it discourages you from simply removing all the bad crap from your stream and painting a perfect picture of yourself. The more you do it, the more it indicates the changes.
So why did I not post this on my blog earlier?
Well I thought the notion of a lifestream was still a very alpha geek thing (still do) and most people only have a couple of services they sign up to (and therefore can make use of). Remember if you don’t use the services then theres no way of the engine being able to work out what you like.
I’m also unsure if revealing your impact across the web will certainly generate better matches. Someone (wish I could remember who) said the thing about the profile is its your best foot forward (the best bits of you). Letting people know about you straight away is a massive risk that lots of people wouldn’t want to take.
However, I’ve noticed more and more, people linking to different parts of there impact across the web. For example in my okcupid profile I have a link to my blog, my last fm profile, my flickr and my twitter stream. And i’m not the only one, quite a few people have links to there last fm or/and flickr. Some even go as far as to link to there facebook (rather them that me).
OkCupid does a interesting thing when your replying to someone, it pulls out things you both like, so for example…
I think you both like cooking, films, poker, fight club, and donnie darko.
You can pretty much look at my blog, my delicious, my last.fm, etc to determine the similar things. So ultimately its about gathering the data with the permission of the user to build up a profile of that person, which they can use to tell others about themselves. Its quite a long shot but I thought it was too early. It would only work with certain public people like for example Tara Hunt (I actually did try and send her a email explain the idea a while ago)
Its all about dataportability
Up till I saw Wings and the blog post about it, the closest thing I’d seen to my idea was a weird site called Gelato which went half way but not the whole way. Gelato allowed you to put in parts of your lifestream but it doesn’t build a profile around it. Instead it supports openid, facebookconnect and a few other authentication methods.
I’m still looking forward to joining a site where the email system isn’t some propriety crap and the instant messaging system is even worst. I get the whole anonymity thing, but this can be solved by passing messages back and forth to a 3rd party (aka the company who is running the site). Using this method almost anything could be used including Twitter, Xmpp, etc. Wings is a facebook app which I guess is a interesting solution, although being a facebook app winds me up no end and the fact its only for an American audience also winds me up no end.
So is the idea dead? Not exactly, Wings is still a poor dating experience and doesn’t rely enough on the data which it has. You have to confirm a lot of things and to be frank, it really needs to be as enjoyable as Okcupid for me to really be interested. (In actual fact while were letting the cat out of the bag), I was going to build a dating site off the back of Storytlr before they stopped it and went open source. Everyone would be able to put in there streams and you would be able to identify people who were matches via a mechanism like dr foxxy.
What I’m saying is the concept is still sound (I think) but the actual implementation is terrible and I don’t think putting it inside of facebook actually works or does it any favors. So I look forward to seeing more sites based on our lifestreams…
From OnlineDatingPost
Speaking of sharing, Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers. Data portability isn’t something discussed in the dating industry very often in public. Dating sites sell profiles up and down the river every day, but that’s a big shhhh! topic. Everywhere else, data portability is the topic of the moment, and will be for many quarters to come.
While I’m glad the message is getting through, without some standards like APML your not going to see any portability in the dating field. Even OKCupid.com who is one of the enlighten sites doesn’t have support for Openid, Oauth or anything like that. Supporting profile and data sharing or portability is going to be a major stumbling block for any dating site, simply because the revenue models rely upon data being held, locked down and processed by the company. This doesn’t fit with data portability right now.
Once they work out they can track people around the web using cookies and other techniques (which I assume will make there searches stronger and there for make for better matches) I’m sure you will start to see they at least providing openid if not oauth between partner sites.
OkCupid has another excellent break down of dating sites, this time its showing how the business models of eHarmony, Match.com and others are conflicting with users finding each other on the site.
If you’ve ever joined a paid for site or even interacted with one in anyway, you will instantly recognise this problem, and this is just the start of the problems.
As you can see from the flow chart, the only way they don’t make money is to show subscribers to other subscribers. It’s the worst thing they can do for their business, because there’s no potential for new profit growth there. Remember: the average account length is just six months, and people join for big blocks of time at once, so getting a new customer on board is better for them than eking another month or two out of a current subscriber. To get sign-ups, they need to pull in new people, and they do this by getting you to message their prospects.
If you’re a subscriber to a pay dating site, you are an important (though unwitting) part of that site’s customer acquisition team. Of course, they don’t want to show you too many ghosts, because you’ll get frustrated and quit, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re relying on you your messages are their marketing materials to reach out to non-payers and convince them, by way of your charming, heartfelt messages, to pull out their credit cards. If only a tiny fraction of your message gets a response, hey, that’s okay, you’re working for free. Wait a second…you’re paying them.
There is a nasty speed dating service which I used once, which adds its results to a paid for dating service. Luckily everyone who was at the event could message each other if they both gave each other ticks in the speed dating section but you would also get loads of messages from people who were paid for members, so you couldn’t read the actual message. Of course most of the actual messages would be from spammers. Weirdly, I’ve gotten more spam from the paid for services that the free one. Maybe another investigation for OKTrends?
