Tag: oktrends

OkTrend pipes up…

I Hate It

3 Years later, Ok trends (OKCupid’s blog about trends across the Okcupid service) pipes up with a new entry, titled We experiment on human beings. In a cynical  move to get in on the facebook controversy. Maybe they are feeling the heat from Facebook and its enviable rise to take over online dating.  So threaten, they decided to let everyone know they are still around and relevant ? Maybe I’m being too skeptical?

However there are some interesting parts… to this rare and burst of information.

A while ago, we had the genius idea of an app that set up blind dates; we spent a year and a half on it, and it was gone from the app store in six months.

Of course, being geniuses, we chose to celebrate the app’s release by removing all the pictures from OkCupid on launch day. “Love Is Blind Day” on OkCupid—January 15, 2013.

All our site metrics were way down during the “celebration”, for example:

But by comparing Love Is Blind Day to a normal Tuesday, we learned some very interesting things. In those 7 hours without photos:

And it wasn’t that “looks weren’t important” to the users who’d chosen to stick around. When the photos were restored at 4PM, 2,200 people were in the middle of conversations that had started “blind”.

Those conversations melted away. The goodness was gone, in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.

Basically, people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be.

I think OKCupid is right on this. The technology drives the way people decide to use it. This is why its critical not to drive people into a gamified  model or cognitively overload them with information.

I also wondered what happened with OKcupid’s blind date app? Not so frank this time about the lack of take up! I’m pretty sure it received a flurry of activity but now no ones actually using it at all. Nice idea OKCupid but your own results prove it, no ones using it and its time it was retired me thinks…

I’ll be interested to see if more stats will be coming out of oktrends in the near future. They took away the paid for dating one and who knows what else they are going to do to

 

OkCupid’s Crazy Blind Dating a failure?

Blind dating up an blind alley?

I’m putting this one out there…

Is the OKCupid’s Crazy Blind Date app a failure? too crazy, a failure or just smudge on the horizon?

Is Crazy blind dating taking us up its own backside never to be seen again?

Who knows?

Heck it could be the future of online dating (doubt it greatly)

It launched under a fanfaire of opinions about it being great for woman and blah blah… But I have not heard a word from it in many months. Worst still is when ever I have tried to use it, nothing much happens. Pretty tragic for the 2nd biggest city of singles in the UK. On top of that OkCupid is full of woman from Manchester, so either they are not aware of the application or they might have tried it and decided no thanks.

I did hear reports that woman were actually a little freaked out about the application, but its so hard to tell without hard data. And I very much doubt Oktrends are going to release those any time soon, if at all…

Human insights in the data of Qriously

could the chromebook be googles ipad

Data is a really interesting but you already knew that… I hope…

Qriously insights reminds me of the excellent insights we use to get from OkTrends (okcupid’s blog) before Match.com bought it (wheres the cool insights now then?). In aggregation there are some really amazing things which can be pulled out. Qriously puts the power to ask the questions and define the sample and scope in a very simple way.

I’m hoping to be able to use it at Ignite Leeds to finally decide who should pay on the first date?

More details are due soon… but the Leeds digital festival looks great, well done to Imran and others. Thanks to Monica Tailor too…

The inhert flaw with paying for dating 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.

Pay Sites Want You To Message These Dead Profiles

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?