

Is Your Dating Site Selling Your Profile? - Ataub24
http://www.betabeat.com/2012/03/28/online-dating-sites-buying-selling-profiles

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goodside
For the record, OkCupid doesn't do anything even remotely like this. It's
strictly the purview of assholes.

Riley Goodside, Yield Optimizer, OkCupid

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untog
Kudos on a great site.

Dating sites fascinate me in a 'customer retention' sense- once someone ends
up in a relationship, surely they stop using the site altogether? An
interesting challenge. I used to work for a housemate matching site that faced
similar challenges, but at least apartments are usually based around 12 month
leases. If only relationships were...

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goodside
We never worry about this. Helping people find happy relationships is hard,
and there's no risk of us succeeding so completely that there's nobody left to
pair up. People in happy relationships also tell their friends that they met
on OkCupid, and we rely on that fact almost exclusively to bring new members.
We spend no money whatsoever on marketing.

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klbarry
I'm not sure that's true. I believe the founder of OKCupid is speaking at an
internet retailer conference this summer on content for SEO. The lovely
linkbait data OKCupid releases certainly is marketing, and certainly cost
money to produce.

If you mean that you don't spend money on advertising, I can certainly believe
that.

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goodside
You're correct. It's only "zero" in the sense that it's so low that nobody
cares enough to quantify it. Several of our competitors spend over $100
million per year (each) on TV commercials, billboards, and online display ads.
We have a guy that writes blog posts when he has time. Oh, and we have a
Twitter account. So, yeah, there is that.

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nitashatiku
"But every new dating site faces the same problem: finding souls to mate."
Just ask the new-and-improved Nerve.com!

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pavel_lishin
_> finding souls to mate_

Obligatory meme image, after which I'll be a good HN contributor for the rest
of the day: <http://i.imgur.com/s70a7.png>

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jspaur
the question is are those sites selling it or did some scripter just scrape a
bunch of the public information from bigger sites?

