I was disappointed to see just now that the latest entry is from April 2011 :\
http://www.columbia.edu/~jhb2147/why-you-should-never-pay-fo...
Perceived
Value
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Also, this market space is so crowded with higher-quality free apps, it will only get increasingly brutal.
(Btw, what's it like to be female and dating in China?)
The posts took a lot of work to create. When I was there, there were two and a half people working full-time[0] just on OkTrends (two engineers full time, and one founder part-time).
I can't give an average time per post, but to give you an idea, "The Real Stuff White People Like"[1] was predominantly my work[2], and it took almost two months, from start to finish.
If you're wondering why it took so long to create that, remember that we started each blog post as a blank slate - at most, we had a vague question that we wanted to explore, and it took several iteration for us to hit upon anything closely resembling the analysis that you'd end up seeing in one of the OkTrends reports.
It might be easy to create something if you have a specific destination in mind at the start, but the key to making OkTrends posts work was not having a specific result in mind - instead, letting the journey guide the process.
Anyway, I left to go back to school, and around that time, the other engineer on the data team started having to do more internal data work on top of the OkTrends research (he stayed at OkCupid for over a year after I left, but he's since moved on as well). That's what caused the slowdown in the posts during late 2010 to early 2011, not the sale to Match.com. As noted below, Christian is working on other projects as well, which have unfortunately left little time for OkTrends.
It's very unfortunate that the timing makes it look like Match.com put the kibosh on OkTrends, because that's not at all what happened, though I definitely see why people would make that mistake.
[0] By "half", I mean that we two engineers spent close to all of our time working on the data/stats, and the founder spent about half his time working with us on the projects and writing the posts.
[1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-peopl...
[2] I did the stats/munging/research - none of the writing. Christian is a much funnier writer than I am.
You're not the first person to tell me that! A friend of mine met his husband on #gaynyc. I still love OkCupid, but I always idle in that chan now, just in case.... :)
>>"Whether one begot the other is a question I'll leave to the reader." hahahahha