The Love Techs
Even if you've never been to an online dating site, you can probably imagine how they work. On the whole, the genre is still not far removed from the AOL and Yahoo chat rooms of the mid-'90s that were online dating's murky wellspring. Those places were, by today's standards, awesomely crude social networks: Just pick a screen name, make sure no one is on the telephone, and join the fray. Once in, you could while away the hours in a "singles" chat room, a bizarre den of possibility where you could engage in hilarious/confusing/alarming conversations with boys pretending to be men, men pretending to be women, and men and women pretending to be attractive.
The one important update to the business model came in 1995, when Match
.com went live as a subscription-based website. As this was back in the heady days when companies like AOL were still charging by the minute for Internetting, the pay-to-play service seemed a logical way to go. And for years, that general approach has held sway: Users create unique profiles, add pictures, and—depending on the site—fill out some sort of compatibility survey. Then, in order to search through other users' profiles and find potential matches, they throw down a credit card.
A significant stumbling block that bedevils the large sites is the "lightning-rod effect," wherein the bulk of the attention is slathered on a few attractive users, while the unwashed masses grow frustrated and bored. What a user finds on OkCupid, on the other hand, is based on what made TheSpark so successful (aside from its plot synopsis for Madame Bovary, I mean). One of the old site's signatures was a series of quirky personality quizzes, and when the trio launched OkCupid, they decided it should have the same. Then they started letting online daters write and submit their own. In Internet parlance, this is the kind of thing that characterizes the thrust of Web 2.0, in which the users of a Web space are also encouraged to generate its content. Aside from making the experience fresh and more reflective of the people who visit OkCupid, the strategy has the added benefit of being dirt cheap. Today, more than 30,000 of these surveys float around the site, scoring users' tastes and desires on everything from tolerance for erotica to devotion to the Red Sox.
When it comes to matching up would-be daters, OkCupid relies on a series of questions—as many as 3,000 of them—that users answer. But notably, unlike the massive and staid questionnaires employed by subscription sites like eHarmony (which purports to use a complex algorithm to systematically match people looking to find serious suitors), OkCupid lets you answer as many or as few of its queries as you like.
As simple as all this sounds, it's a wild departure from the prevailing dating-site standard. To understand how, OkCupid CEO Sam Yagan says, it helps to know the difference between "transaction" sites and "destination" sites. Typical online dating services qualify as the former. Think of them as supermarkets: They want you to come in, find what you need (a date, ideally), and, as long as you've paid, get out. OkCupid, however, is a destination site. Like Facebook and MySpace and other free social networks, it makes money from advertising. And because advertisers pay according to page views, OkCupid has to not only get you to its URL, it also has to keep you there, clicking around. That makes OkCupid more like a bar than a grocery store. Drink specials and the lack of a cover charge may pull you in, but it's what's going on inside that'll make you want to stick around.
Yagan likes that analogy. "When you're single and you go out in Boston, do you just go from girl to girl, talking to them until you find one you might potentially like? Of course not. You might talk to some girls, but you're also going to play some pool, talk to your friends, et cetera," he says. "What we've tried to ask ourselves is: What does dating look like in the real world? And we've tried to replicate that."
