So IAC now owns Match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, and PlentyofFish. Are there any competition concerns there? I only looked briefly, but couldn't see any market share figures.
EDIT: and Chemistry.com, Meetic, and PeopleMedia.
EDIT: and Chemistry.com, Meetic, and PeopleMedia.
It wouldn't surprise me if IAC has over 50% of the US dating market at this point.
There's a blatant competition issue there, but the online dating market isn't likely to attract much anti-trust scrutiny at this point, for at least three reasons: there needs to be some evidence of consumer harm (I'm not aware of much in that regard); competitors would have to be getting Washington's attention; the dating market isn't considered to be very attention worthy, minus something egregious going on.
http://www.jessmeetken.com/ is based on introductions from women to other women, which eliminated the problem that women's inboxes are filled with lots of low-quality (and occasionally vulgar) messages.
However, I don't know how I'd feel about being introduced to a potential romantic interest by a female friend.
I don't claim to be an expert on dating, but I intuitively understand how social dynamics work.
There's a lot of situations in which this dynamic would work just fine.
He is right that there need to be some kind of filtering though - the problem is that the men women want to date are also the girls most likely to put up with the filters.
You don't know any women?
I think that this differs from your scenario in that Jess is vouching for a guy for basically anyone, vs. Ken asking all of his female friends if they know anyone they'd be a good match with.
That said, I don't think that matters for the site in question. I'm just not a part of their target audience. Doesn't mean their idea doesn't work for other people.
If you knew "a" girl, it doesn't necessarily mean she'd want to date you, or that you'd date her girlfriends (what if her friends were all guys?)
The idea is that you have a female to vouch for you, which is social proof.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/digital-love-consol...
OKCupid's clever bypass for this was to get people hooked answering all those little questions. Heck I knew early adopters that signed up just to answer those questions, not necessarily for dating, and then fell into using it.
Tinder's was the swipe right/left that has now become a term used outside of the app in other parts of life.
Yes, you need a critical mass of people, but what this means can be very different for different people. Some dating sites have a warm body approach where you probably need lots of people because the set of matches is terrible.
However if you had a dating site for swedish people living in miami who only wanted to date swedish people even having 40 people on there might be plenty.
IAC seems to be making a macro-bet: we don't know what online dating will look like in 5-10 years, but we want to control it.
Interestingly, they "incubated" Tinder via Hatch Labs (where I was an employee). Pretty impressive control of that vertical.