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The biggest problem is that the incentive of the dating site is to make money, not to help people get together. If your service is really good at getting people
by dusklight 18y ago
The biggest problem is that the incentive of the dating site is to make money, not to help people get together. If your service is really good at getting people together, boom! There goes your userbase as they all hook up and log off.
Financially speaking it is better to give users the ILLUSION of someone out there being for you, while stringing them along and milking them for as much cash as possible.
- aston 18y agoYah, this is too true. The worst thing you can do for your bottom line on a dating site is make a real, long-term match. There go two really happy users, and whatever ad revenue or monthly subscription fee they were making you. But if you don't care about your site making money, this is a non-issue. And if you're growing faster than you're connecting people, it's a moot point anyhow.
- sanj 18y agoThis seems to be a failure of imagination. It seems to me that a successful long term match should be your best advertising. But I haven't seen any web sites capture that or use it at all effectively. Or feed it back into their site/algorithm design. I'm not saying this lightly: I got married about 6 weeks ago to an amazing woman that I met (thanks Aston!) on OKCupid! I'd be more than happy to do testimonials and such, but no one's ever contacted me.
- aston 18y agoCongrats, man. OkCupid loves testimonials and was for a period of time collecting and categorizing them for some vague future use as publicity. You should send something their way just in case. As far as using that stuff for algorithmic purposes goes, I think they mostly are interpreted as proof that what exists is actually working (and thus doesn't need tweaking?). Also, depending on your demographic, certain types of testimonials are less appealing. Not sure if OkCupid is still courting the youngsters, but if they are marriage stories (as awesome as they are) may serve to scare away a profitable demographic, advertising-wise.
- mattmaroon 18y agoeHarmony has such testimonials in their ads all the time. It's kinda their bag.
- gaius 18y agoI'm not convinced that's true. E.g. you go to the newsagents and there is a rack full of wedding magazines - how many people buy a subscription?