Category: Q & A

Let's step back from the details of the question for a sec…

What you can learn from someone checking out your profile is simply that their account is active, nothing more. If nothing else, this should say to you that they are worth writing to, if you are interested.

Don't overanalyze things. If you write and get no reply from someone who did check your profile, you have exactly the same amount of data about their interest level as someone who hasn't seen your profile and doesn't reply to your message.

Given all the other reasons they may not have messaged you (many sites only let paying members send messages, for example), it's in your best interest to pursue everyone you take a fancy to when you're searching online, so long as you take your time, and make a proper effort.

To be perfectly clear: I don't think that "who's viewed me" is a useless metric, but I think that it shouldn't carry much. I also don't think that "never viewed me" users are more likely to be interested.

In the end, I'm just concerned that the querent might spend so much time trying to find someone "likely to be interested", that they forget to BE INTERESTING, and to PURSUE PEOPLE THEY ARE INTERESTED IN. 🙂

If you know that someone has visited your dating profile and not sent you a message, is it better to contact them or to explore other matches?

Off the top of my head:

• Differentiation between paying and non-paying members
• Differentiation between real people and bots/scammers
• Differentiation between active and inactive members
• Reliable behavior-based matching systems
• Iterative feedback on member dates/interactions to improve their matches over time

What is missing on existing dating sites?

This depends on what you mean by "online dating".

If you mean the "modern http-based web (aka InterTubes™)", that will take a bit of research to pin down in terms of "verifiably chronological ancestor to all dating websites"… Definite early front-runners as far as mass adoption would be Match.com and YourOneAndOnly.com, which Match later acquired and replaced its own offering with (1993-1994 timeframe).

Prior to that, however, numerous "sites" existed for online dating via USENET, Gopher, Telnet-based BBSes and MUDs, etc.

Even further back, proprietary dialup services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and the like, as well as local dialup offerings in major metro areas running PC-based BBS software (only one I can personally recall is "Date-a-Del", running a Citadel variant in Minneapolis, MN, certainly active at least as far back as 1988) all offered various solutions to post and respond to personals advertisements, or even rely on computer matching algorithms to select potential mates.

And none of these includes all the sites/services that were used extensively for dating purposes as a by-product of some other function or intended mode of communication.

Note: I included dialup candidates in this answer specifically because of the origins of the word "online" itself in the context of computing – "a central computer establishing a connection to a peripheral or remote device".

What was the first dating site?

Answering my own question, but now there is:

• whatsyourprice.com

Which does exactly that: "generous" members bid to go on dates with "attractive" members. It's done in a little too gender-rigid fashion, in my opinion, and also seems very openly to be skirting prostitution laws, rather than outright avoiding the potential linkage altogether.

Still, interested in any other competition, or failed prior attempts…

What are the arguments against paying singles to participate in online dating sites?

There are a quite a few ways to do this:

Leverage a user group/mailing list/other asset you already have. For example, if you ran a physical dating service, you could encourage your brick and mortar customers to join the site – even offering to pre-fill their information, and possibly give them a nice discount/comp account

Incentivize your first 5-10,000 users – free lifetime accounts, one on one consultations, the chance to win prizes, etc. Then further incent them by giving them an "extra chance to win" for each additional person they recruit, etc.

Use a white-labelled dating software solution to run your site. These solutions often come with the ability to leverage an existing pool of accounts shared by all the sites using the software. Warning: what you get in numbers is offset by having a large pool of members who aren't actually aware they joined your site – because they didn't!

Pay people to generate real user accounts and commit to participating in the site to some extent.

Pay people to generate fake user accounts, across a variety of demographics, to give the site the appearance of being fully populated. Alternately, pay someone for a pre-existing list of such fake users with all associated profile data/profile pics/etc included in a single tidy ZIP file for your site admin to integrate. For bonus points, once you start getting real people to sign up to the site, you can start removing/hiding the fake accounts incrementally over time, until all your users are "realish".

The last tactic even has a name in the industry – "Seed and Weed".

Some other "non-seed" methods you might try:

The media blitz. Just advertise the hell out of it, really pushing a unique selling point to the jaded media. Sometimes, that initial explosion of awareness can snowball into a healthy/sustainable volume of users. But that's pretty rare.

Give people something useful while they wait for enough potential matches to join up – even a regularly updated blog with insights similar to the OKTrends blog might get people interested enough to join… And when you start turning on the spigot of dating matches, they might stick, because they already appreciate your content. Other ideas – some form of integration with their existing dating life – analytics on their profile(s), email replies, etc… A curated events list to give them dating itinerary ideas. That's just a couple to get you started.

Begging. Never underestimate its power! Just ask people to join, and be honest about the likelihood that anything will come of it. Go door to door if you have to. Get it done!

Create a product so new, different, and amazing that people just can't help but sign up to try it out, and tell their friends about it. Often possible to leverage nascent platforms to achieve this – think of the first dating sites to "get" Facebook, for example. Simply by staking claim to empty territory, they were able to ramp up quickly before the traditional "big sites" could react.

How do you seed a new dating website?