OmniDate Virtual Dating

According to Hitwise, the top three social networking sites are responsible for 2/3 of the market - that’s huge!  After that, there is a big drop … as if falling off a cliff.

Who do you think is drawn to Virtual Dating?  If you guessed “young males” - you’d be wrong.

Take a look at the demographics for OmniDate, which has developed a virtual dating application that it licenses to dating sites.  The company also maintains a small virtual dating site for the purpose of testing and refining its product.

According to Quantcast, a leading provider of internet metrics, OmniDate appeals to Women and people in the 35-49 age range.

(more…)

Recently I had an interesting conversation with someone about why it makes sense to bring certain “virtual world” elements into the online dating space. We talked about how in virtual worlds there is much to do, but little purpose for being there … while in the online dating space, the opposite is true: a clear purpose for being there (i.e., to find a mate), but little to do (other than flipping through profiles and sending emails). So, giving users with a purpose a better virtual experience should keep them engaged longer … and, thus, should result in longer “time on site.”

So, today, I wanted to see if real-world data would lend support to this thinking. I pulled up Alexa (an online analytics tool) and compared “time on site” for several “virtual world” sites and OmniDate, which is a proxy for a “virtual dating” site. (more…)