Dating Services

Just when you think Facebook couldn’t possibly get any bigger than it already is, it goes and shatters all expectations. For the 8^th quarter in a row, Facebook’s earnings beat projections.

Much of that growth is in mobile, where Facebook is growing twice as fast as it is compared to its services as a whole. Facebook currently logs 654 million daily mobile users and 1.07 billion mobile users each month. Thanks to the continued increase in smartphone usage, 62% of the social network’s ad revenue came from mobile in Q2. In total, Facebook now has 829 million daily users and 1.32 billion monthly users. Altogether, they are responsible for a spectacular 2^nd quarter for Facebook. The company beat Wall Street’s estimated earnings of $2.81 billion to end Q2 2014 with $2.91 billion in revenue.

Here’s how that stacks up against Q1 2014:

• Facebook's total user count is up 3.125% from 1.28 billion total monthly users to 1.32 billion
• Total daily user count is up 3.36% from 803 million to 829 million
• Monthly mobile user count is up 5.9% from 1.01 billion to 1.07 billion
• Daily mobile user count is up 7.4% from 609 million to 654 million

Revenue isn't the only way Facebook is exceeding expectations. Some critics have said the social network is losing its influence with Western users, but its monthly user count in the USA and Canada grew by 2 million this quarter. And for anyone who dared to suggest that Facebook wouldn't survive the transition from desktop to mobile, Facebook's 391 million mobile-only users dwarf its 240 million desktop-only users.

Internationally, Facebook is showing equally impressive numbers. Ad revenue is up everywhere, and the site hit an all-time high average revenue per user in every region around the world.

The only low point was payments revenue, which Facebook largely derives from the 30% tax on the in-app purchases from its Web games platform. Total payments revenue dropped slightly to $234 million from $237 million in Q1. On the plus side, it's still up 9% compared to Q2 2013.

On the horizon for Facebook now is the launch of Facebook Audience Network, the company’s mobile ad network that will bring in revenue by incorporating its targeted ads in other companies' apps. Another big development is Slingshot, a photo and video messaging app that Facebook hopes will be a competitor for Snapchat.

When asked for his thoughts on Facebook’s remarkable 2^nd quarter, all CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to say was “We had a good second quarter. Our community has continued to grow, and we see a lot of opportunity ahead as we connect the rest of the world.”

To find out if this social network makes a good dating tool you can read our Facebook review.

eHarmony is well-known in the online dating space. It has been around over fourteen years and has grown to be one of the biggest competitors due to its emphasis on finding people serious relationships. Now, it wants to get serious about your job search, too.

The company’s strategy and technology is all about compatibility matching. Subscribers to the dating site are put through a rather lengthy sign-up process to ensure that the technology behind the site really captures the essence of what each person wants, along with his or her relationship tendencies. (One of the best things about the sign-up process is that eHarmony provides a snapshot booklet of who you are as a dater: the kind of personality you have, they type of person you gravitate towards, and the positive and negative ways that your dates may interpret your behavior. It’s incredibly insightful, and helped make me a more observant dater.)

Now, eHarmony is taking this compatibility matching technology and applying it to your job search. The new site called Elevated Careers by eHarmony is set to launch in December.

According to MarketWatch, few details were revealed about how the career-matching algorithm will work. But eHarmony CEO Neil Clark Warren said some of the likely qualities that will be analyzed include “conscientiousness, honesty and conflict resolution,” among others.

When asked why Dr. Warren thought eHarmony should move into the career space, since it seems so far removed from romance and peoples’ personal lives, he countered that love and work are more connected than we think. “If people come home and they’re unhappy with their job and boss, it puts a lot of tension on a marriage,” he told MarketWatch.

While eHarmony boasts that is has made 600,000 marriages, they have also gained a divorce rate of 3.9%, slightly higher than the national average of 3.6%.

It is an interesting idea at a time when job dissatisfaction is high. Roughly 70% of Americans described themselves as “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their workplaces according to a recent Gallup report. And according to an article in Entrepreneur.com, the average worker hops jobs every 4.6 years. That doesn’t lead to a loyal workforce or employee satisfaction when nobody is willing to commit. Perhaps it is time for a change, and for both employers and employees to look at compatibility, rather than waste resources training people who remain actively looking for another job.

I don’t think job satisfaction is completely reliant on company culture and employer-employee compatibility, though it is certainly a factor. Many people find themselves in careers that aren’t what they expected and want a fresh start. Perhaps there is a way eHarmony will use its technology to also advise what career might be best for each of us. Until then, we’ll see what Elevated Careers has to offer.

The Internet has been afire recently with the news that both Facebook and OkCupid have experimented on their users. Both companies have apologized or pseudo-apologized for their actions, while being careful to note that such online experimentation isn’t uncommon.

OkCupid took it one step further in their non-apology, candidly declaring that “if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site” and revealing two more experiments they’ve conducted on users.

The first was born out of OkCupid’s short-lived blind date app. To celebrate the app’s release, OkCupid removed all the photos from the site on launch day. During those seven photo-less hours, OkCupid noticed some interesting things:

• Users responded to first messages 44% more often
• Conversations were deeper
• Contact info was exchanged more quickly

In short, OkCupid functioned better without pictures. When the photos were restored, the conversations that had started blind melted away. “The goodness was gone,” notes the blog post, “in fact worse than gone. It was like we’d turned on the bright lights at the bar at midnight.” The blind date app revealed a similar phenomenon. When users got to the date, they had a good time more or less regardless of how physically attractive their partner was. “Basically,” the post reads, “people are exactly as shallow as their technology allows them to be.”

In a related experiment, OkCupid decided to test its original rating system that allowed users to judge each other on two separate scales: Personality and Looks. “Our thinking was that a person might not be classically gorgeous or handsome but could still be cool,” the blog explains, “and we wanted to recognize that, which just goes to show that when OkCupid started out, the only thing with more bugs than our HTML was our understanding of human nature.”

After gathering the data, OkCupid found that “looks” and “personality” were essentially the same thing to users. They ran a second, direct experiment to confirm their hunch that people just look and pictures and ignore profiles. A small sample of users were shown profiles that did not contain text, resulting in two sets of scores for each profile: one score for the picture and text together, and one for the picture alone.

The results were predictably disheartening: text is less than 10% of what people think of you. The blog says it best: “your picture is worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth…almost nothing.” Ouch.

Dr. Neil Clarke Warren left eHarmony a few years back, only to take control of the company he founded once again in 2012 to implement a turnaround strategy for its drastically sinking subscriber base. As it turns out, this new strategy has been key to eHarmony’s unprecedented recent success. This past week, the company announced that it has the highest number of subscribers in the company’s history, and has grown its base of users 54%.

This is quite an accomplishment, considering the growing popularity of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge. The market is crowded these days, so you have to effectively differentiate yourself in order to compete. Traditional online dating sites have struggled to make their offerings more competitive and accessible.

eHarmony is an especially interesting contender in the online dating industry. Going against the grain of its competitors who offer an easy sign-up process and a high number of matches, eHarmony has a rather lengthy and grueling sign-up process that can take up to 90 minutes to complete before you receive your matches. And you only receive a few matches at a time, ones that are selected by eHarmony, not you. On top of that, there is another “guided communication” process to complete with each match before you can just send them an email to meet for a date.

It seems to be working.

All of these steps are important to eHarmony’s goal: compatibility matching. This was the original intention behind the launch of the site, and founder Dr. Warren has remained firm in this vision, which numbers show is paying off. He brought in a new management team to improve the website and mobile design, the technology, and implement a new marketing program.

As a result, the company has gained subscribers who are also more willing to stay longer and pay more than in years past.

“eHarmony was created as a way for individuals to begin a relationship already a step ahead – with someone who is truly compatible,” said Dr. Warren in a statement. “We are proud of what we have achieved over the past two years, securing the largest subscriber base in our history. We are confident in our ability to continue to grow eHarmony in the future.”

With so many dating sites and apps competing for sheer numbers, it’s interesting that eHarmony’s more serious approach to dating and its focus on the goal - helping people find long-term relationships – is paying off. There is indeed a market, and a need, for people to find and make real-life lasting connections, and the continually growing numbers prove it.

Facebook caused a huge outcry back in June when it revealed it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million users as part of a psychological study to examine how emotions spread on social media.

The response was intense (to say the least), but Facebook is far from the only Internet company to treat its users like lab rats. OkCupid fessed up to conducting studies on its members via a blog entry posted on July 28. And they weren't exactly apologetic about it.

“We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook 'experimented' with their news feed,” the entry reads. “Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.”

Admittedly, they have a point. No matter how popular or successful OkCupid is, there are always improvements to be made and the only way to discover those improvements is to conduct experiments. Or, in the site’s own words, “OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out.”

In this case, the experiment told users they were more compatible than they really were to test the power of suggestion. Typically, among users who were given a 30% compatibility rating by OkCupid, a single message from one to another turned into a conversation just 10% of the time. But, if OkCupid told users with low compatibility that their compatibility score was 90%, the odds of having a conversation jumped to 17%.

The experiment found the same results in the opposite direction. When users with 90% compatibility were told their score was only 30%, the likelihood of a conversation dropped from 20% to 16%. OkCupid isn’t at all surprised that users take the compatibility rating so seriously – “after all,” notes the blog post, “that’s what the site teaches you to do.”

Then OkCupid took a step further. The question became “Does the displayed match percentage cause more than just that first message – does the mere suggestion cause people to actually like each other?”

As far as this data goes, the answer is yes. When OkCupid tells people they’re a good match, they act as if they are, even if they should be wrong for each other - which means that at the end of the day, the myth of compatibility may be just as powerful as the truth.

If you’ve been anywhere near a news source lately, you probably heard about Facebook’s big news feed experiment. The social network manipulated the news feeds of hundreds of thousands of users to see if the emotion they absorbed through reading content on their news feeds impacted the emotion they later displayed in their own posts. People were, unsurprisingly, not too psyched at the revelation that Facebook had toyed with their emotions.

Shortly afterwards OkCupid revealed that it, too, has experimented on users, and the furor started again. In their most recent experiment, OkCupid told users — falsely — that they’re compatible in order to spark more conversations. As a result, OkCupid found that perceived compatibility is just as effective as real compatibility.

Reactions to both experiments have been mixed. Some have said that OkCupid’s testing is less controversial than Facebook’s. Others have called the OkCupid experiment worse than Facebook’s. What everyone seems to agree on is that they’re not quite sure if they should be upset or not. On one hand, lying to customers seems like an obvious faux-pas. But on the other hand, isn’t that just how the Internet works?

As Josh Constine noted in a TechCrunch post, by using services like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and yes, Facebook, we agree to be part of experiments that change the way we experience the sites. The experiments are called A/B tests, and companies use them to figure how to encourage users to visit a site longer or click more things. This is nothing new.

However, there may be some room for concern. In academia, research involving human subjects is severely limited and carefully monitored by review boards to ensure that it is not deceptive and harm is minimized. Where companies are concerned, there’s no such thing as a review board. It’s up to the companies themselves to abide by the core principles of ethical research.

So how should you feel about Facebook’s and OkCupid’s experiments?

Any way you want. Unlike those two companies, I’m not here to manipulate into doing or feeling anything.

But if asked to take a stand, I’d have to put myself pro-OkCupid and less-than-convinced about Facebook. Facebook deliberately tried to change users’ emotions for the worse by manipulating content in their feeds, all without their consent. It’s hard to get behind that, no matter how much you enjoy psychological studies. For OkCupid, I’m willing to give a pass. At the end of the day, those kinds of experiments are just OkCupid doing its job. Without testing, OkCupid would never improve its ability to match users – and that’s the whole reason we’re there in the first place.