iDate Coverage - Final Panel Debate

OPW - Jun 18 - The final panel debate is the culmination of the Internet Dating Conference. Panel participants include Frederick Vallaeys from Google AdWords, Mark Brooks from Online Personals Watch, Tai Lopez from Niche Enterprises, Violet Lim from Lunch Actually, Karinna Kittles-Karsten from Sacred Love, Julie Spira, and Victor Daniel from Elitemate. 

The first discussion topic was the growing mobile market and its affects on online dating. The mobile platform is a powerful tool, but screen size limitations and platform limitations will affect site design and revenue models. Mobile sites and applications must be streamlined and intuitive to work well and be adopted by consumers. Advances in mobile technology, in particular smartphone platforms, are helping to increase the end user experience and development capabilities. Multitasking capability is one important advancement which will improve the user experience. Push technology also keeps the information flowing and drives user engagement on mobile devices. 

Users tend to download mobile dating applications and use them for a short time, normally a week, then go inactive. The key to breaking through this problem is continuing user engagement to keep them active on your application. Mobile applications and sites have the potential to open up additional revenue streams for online dating companies through proper monetization and billing solutions. Mobile is gaining ground, but as with all new technologies, it will take time to ramp up and gain strong traction in the industry.

The second topic for discussion was social dating. What is fueling the growth of these sites and how well do they retain users over the long term? One aspect of social dating is the safety of meeting people within a group of people known by your friends. Another aspect is the ease of adoption and signup for the sites. The true test of the success of social dating sites is how effective they are at connecting people and creating relationships.

Discussions continued on to the importance of partnering with academia to further develop the dating experience. The science and psychology behind human interactions and relationships need to be implemented into the online dating experience to create successful and lasting matches. Site operators should put efforts into educating members in the skills needed to be successful in dating and relationships. 

Finally, all of the panel participants believe that the online dating market will go up over the six months.

Comments

[Fernando Ardenghi]

"The science and psychology behind human interactions and relationships need to be implemented into the online dating experience to create successful and lasting matches."

There is a plethora of NEW & FRESH papers about the latest discoveries in theories of romantic relationships development with commitment, but unfortunately:

The biggest scammers in the Online Dating Industry are not from Nigeria or Ghana. Biggest scammers are precisely the owners and C-level executives of major online dating sites, more worried in attracting, converting and retaining subscribers with automatic renewal of their subscriptions and other credit-card billing trickery, than offering a good compatibility matching method.
although, during Q2 2010 traffic still continued to decline in major paid Online Dating Sites and many Social Networking sites. The phenomenon started in January 2009, 18 long months losing traffic.

Dating sites:
Severely losing traffic: True, SparkCOM, Singlesnet, MeeticFR, MeeticCOM, Date, Be2DE
Slowly losing traffic: Match, Perfectmatch, Chemistry, ParshipDE

Social Networking sites:
Severely losing traffic: Sonico, Hi5, Friendster, Friendfinder, Fotolog, Bebo
Slowly losing traffic: mySpace, Orkut

It is not due to the traction of Facebook, it is the Online Dating Fatigue Phenomenon due to Obsolescence of Dating Sites offering Compatibility Matching Methods.

Daters are understanding that the entire Online Dating Industry for serious daters in 1st World Countries is a HOAX, performing as a Big Online Casino, with a low effectiveness/efficiency level of their matching algorithms (less than 10%), and new proposals like the ones offered by the new PlentyOfFish Marriage predictor, eDarling, 12like/VisualDNA, IntroAnalytics, MatchMatrix, Moonit, LittleHint and similars, are not better than the old ones.
They cannot break "the online dating sound barrier".

[Sam Moorcroft, ChristianCafe.com]

Can someone *PLEASE* ban this guy from posting? It's the same garbage repeated over and over and over and over ad nauseum, on this and other dating blogs.

I am sure I speak for numerous readers when I say this.

[Evan Marc Katz]

Amen.