Andrew Conru 1. Back in when you started up WebPersonals. I knew that the Internet was going to be revolutionary the first time I saw how it enabled people worldwide to see postings instantaneously. At that time, the dating industry was split between traditional matchmakers and newspaper personals.
It was clear to me that it was easier, faster, and cheaper to use a central online database than to go to a niche matchmaker or use phone-based newspaper personals. Is there any new technology that you see getting incorporated into online dating that will revolutionize it?
There are four elements to online dating: While technology can often improve the experience, the benefits are more evolutionary than revolutionary. As far as member profiles, most people are comfortable only with uploading photos and creating text profiles. I think one of the last areas open to the biggest gains in innovation is in matching technology. Matching technology includes searching, filtering, access control, privacy, and automatic agent-based services.
Two challenges facing online dating sites is the increasing expectations of members and imbalances in gender dynamics. After a few years, however, people become much more selective of their ideal match and now often feel less satisfied with the online dating experience.
They report that online dating sites have tons of profiles but it gets harder and harder to find a good match while actually, the matches are better than before just that they have become more picky. Imbalances in gender dynamics also currently results in a suboptimal suboptimal.
In most mainstream dating sites, men send 50 times more emails than women… this happens in part to the hunter nature of men as well as the fact that faced by an avalanche of emails, women respond to a tiny fraction of them which results in men having to send even more to get a single reply.
This in turn, makes men unhappy with their response rate and women unhappy with the quality and selectivity of the men.
I believe that the next wave of online personal services will be less dependent of gee-whiz technology but on the ability for people mostly women to select, filter, and challenge their suitors.
That is, users will start embracing software agents to dynamically interview each other prior to allowing human contact. A key consideration as to what technology can be applied to online dating is the extent to which participants are interacting in real-time. For the most part, online dating is pretty asynchronous — people filter and interact primarily via email message exchanges prior meeting. While there are many exciting applications of these technologies to facilitate instant hookups e.
You were one of the pioneers in developing niche community sites with AsiaFriendFinder and BigChurch. What do you see as the future in affinity dating and what made you think that these niche groups would be so successful? I think when people visualize the perfect online dating experience, they think of a site that only have perfect candidates for THEM. In the early days of online dating, we had to come up with ways to make people feel comfortable that they would find good matches and one way was to show them that all the members of a site matched their primary filter e.
Niche dating sites will continue so long as they have critical mass number of active members and larger general-purpose dating sites continue to give broad marketing messages.
Do you think that there is room for an emerging dating company to compete with the likes of Friendfinder Network, Match. The mainstream online dating industry has a few challenges that could be exploited by a disruptive player — namely that they charge for access and have to pay for traffic. While there are a few fast-growing sites that provide free services, they must find non-financial ways to throttle usage, provide user-intention validation and make enough revenue via advertising to buy traffic.
There is also always the potential for a first-mover company to take advantage of new traffic markets. Do you think they have done a good job on the brand trust side of things with their offline commercials? There are two general categories of online daters — those who like to take things in their own hands e. For many, there is a strong historical and emotional bias that a 3rd party or an expert can do a better job picking a spouse than an individual… just like people hire a stock broker to pick stocks… they believe that a dating expert or matchmaker can screen candidates better.
I believe that self-assessment tests, specific suggestions on how to better search, and many profile with personality data give online daters a better chance at success.
The challenge is to get enough members willing to spend the time to complete the tests. Their advertising seems effective by targeting older women who may have had bad dating experiences as well as by using anecdotal evidence on the effectiveness of their matchmaking algorithm. Just as financial firms will still advertise turning control to a broker, online matchmaking sites will continue to advertise the same.
If you never got into the online dating industry, what is another online business that you would have pursued? Search company? I was doing a couple different online companies about the same time as online dating — one being the first company to centralize banner ads, one of the first to do online shopping, and some early social networking sites.
It is often difficult to know what your opportunity costs are when you are focusing on your primary company. My educational background is in system controls and optimization which fits well to many aspects of Internet businesses.
Do you think that Social Networks are a big threat to the dating industry at large? Many people say that large social networks like Facebook could takeover the online dating world overnight.
I am a bit skeptical due to their current inability to have multiple, disconnected, and independently privacy-controlled profiles for a single user e. In , I modified FriendFinder. It turned out not to be successful because members found that interacting with their current friends was a separate process than discovering new friends and dates. They saw that enabling prospective dates to see their current friends was a dating liability.
We later consolidated the profiles back into one. Entrepreneurs will always try to apply dating in new markets. The challenge of Twitter Dating is that there is almost no filtering process that increases the value of an interaction. The result is a flood of responses with minimal net value. Do you think love can blossom in characters or less? Oh, stop… you had me at characters!
The question is more dependent on what the person had to do before they were able to send you that characters… how were they screened? You can always evolve your solution by listening to your customers. What are one of your favorite websites online and what site drives you crazy? One of my favorite sites online at the moment is Ustream. I tend to spend more time thinking about how to build and improve web services than actually using them.
I wish Craigslist would either innovate or forward their free traffic to a site that would. It has been a pleasure knowing Andrew Conru over the past few years and watching the Friendfinder Network grow into such a successful business empire.
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After that, Gps dating, the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Executive Committee was established by presidential directive in to advise and coordinate federal departments and agencies on matters concerning the GPS and related systems. But in order for any of the discussion of cost to make sense to us we first need to establish a basic understanding of how free cell phone tracking actually works. The result is a flood of responses with minimal net value. We later consolidated the profiles back into one. For the first part we need to look at the principle of trilateration. At the time, the Navy was developing the submarine-launched Polaris missile, which required them to know the Gps dating location. This deterrent Gps dating is why GPS was funded. After a few years, however, people become much more selective of their ideal match and now often feel less satisfied with the online dating experience. The second is how does the cell phone communicate that information to outside parties. That is, users will start embracing software agents to dynamically interview each other prior to allowing human contact, Gps dating.
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