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.
eHarmony and Zoosk are the only two majors left standing independently.
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.
The problem with that is that if I knew a girl I wouldn't need online dating.
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.
> The problem with that is that if I knew a girl I wouldn't need online dating.
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.
How so? I don't have any female friends (I don't have any male ones either). If I started looking for a girlfriend (which I currently don't), I would indeed be looking solely for a romantic relationship, so I don't see how having female friends would be a prerequisite.
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 really love women, you'll love being friends with women just as much as you love being in romantic relationships with women. If you don't really love women, I'd likely suggest that you just don't date - loneliness or social proof of your value are shitty reasons to get into a relationship.
A factor in any antitrust analysis is barriers to entry for new competition. In this case, those barriers are extremely low. How much effort does it take to whip up a dating site/app? Not very much. So even if IAC were to own nearly all existing dating sites (and thus in theory charging monopoly prices for date finding), 5 other people could start up competitors to undercut them on price in the next month without much trouble.
It is quite difficult—just not necessarily in terms of code. What makes it really hard is the chicken-egg problem that people won't come to it until there are people on it to browse, and there aren't people on it to browse if nobody signs up.
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.
Doesn't matter. No matter what your churn is, if you currently have a thousand times more members then your competitors it will be drastically easier to attract new members. In other words, your competitors have a much higher customer acquisition cost. It's still a big barrier.
The churn is so high on dating sites that everybody is constantly re-acquiring customers. One test for anti-trust is also how they think the market would respond to a price increase.
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.
The website built on spam to extract money out of desperate guys? (I could write a blog post on this - Badoo is legitimately deception across the board).
From what I understand, dating sites typically experience a valuation headwind since the purpose of the site is a high userbase turnover (i.e. match making). Is there any reason to think that controlling market share can somehow offset this effect? (other than the standard price-setting power of monopolies)
I think that that in addition to the price-setting / risk-spreading nature of the "monopoly," they're also trying to control new "experiences" as it relates to dating. OKCupid / Match offer a fundamentally different experience to Tinder or HowAboutWe.
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.
EDIT: and Chemistry.com, Meetic, and PeopleMedia.