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When I was building ProfileDoctor in 2003, I would always pitch the service as a website for consumers and a web service for online dating sites. The idea being that if you stumbled across PD from Google or an article in the paper, you were greeted with a traditional website front end, with all the expected functionality.
The interesting stuff would occur when our dating sites partners would embed PD services directly into their dating site. When users sign in, they would have PD services on every page of the profile creation process. As we learned early on during the research phase, people usually write their personal ad late at night, taking only a cursory glance at the questions and lackluster attempt at filling out questions. And photos? Forget it.
PD was a way for dating sites to provide a simple, cost-effective way to increase the quality of profiles in their database, making members happy which you would think would lead to an increase in revenue.
We convinced (paid) one major dating site to try an early version of the system. Long story short was an expensive lesson that didn’t return anticipated results. Things didn’t go as well with our 40+affiliates either, never amounting to much business. Affiliates simply didn’t know how to market our services to their members. Throwing up a banner ad is enough, members need to be educated, and this just wasn’t happening.
Now, with the rise of the semantic web, I find myself thinking more about ProfileDoctor. Maybe it’s time to dust off the url and make a go of it again, this time with a lot of lessons learned under our belts, a more sophisticated online dating industry and a huge explosions in usage of dating sites that’s evened off (dating sites are hungry for visitors, even more so for revenue they have lost to social networks.) It’s going to take some time to get the engines fired up, right now I’m in exploratory mode, talking with dating sites about their needs, finding out how we can help, and ultimately using this information to build the next version of ProfileDoctor.
This is an ongoing story, I’ll add more information and stories over time.
