FORBES - Feb 15 - Match represents nearly one-third of what is a $2.1B market that grew 7.1% last year, according to IBISWorld. Sam Yagan came to IAC as a co-founder of OKCupid. The 20-year history of online dating, he says, can be read as three epochs. The first few years were about search - the ability to find other singles, and to filter them by age, location, eye color, etc. Then, in 2000, eHarmony introduced algorithm. Now users want easier and faster way to meet. Mobile dating app usage exceeded desktop. Yagan would be first to acknowledge that his beloved algorithms are imperfect. Algorithms depend in large part on the stated preferences of users, and users tend to be bad at “weighting” preferences correctly. “Mobile and social are going to bring new data sets, and you’ll start to see step-change functions in algorithm quality,” promises Yagan.
Comments