OkCupid is "special". It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky. It might not get a massive amount of use, but it will get them some PR (well, it already has) within communities that are already more likely to sign up with them than the mainstream that are more appreciative in general of stuff like this even if they won't use it.
> It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky.
I really wish they would start OkTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com/) back up; it was really fascinating reading, the kind of analysis that's impossible to come by unless you have free-rein map-reduce access to some company's Big Data. Given their userbase I'm surprised they don't think it was a bigger PR source; I think every article from it has been hot on HN.
Funny things happen when companies get acquired. They stop acting like a startup and they start acting like large, slow companies, which is unfortunate. That blog was single-handedly what drove their traffic more than anything. Everyone I talk to said they found out about OkCupid through that blog. OkCupid knows this. The founders said they almost quit and that blog was their saving grace.
Is it any coincidence that the blog stopped around the same time they were acquired? It served its purpose and ran its course. They're done innovating in the space. We'll have to let startups lead the next wave of innovation in online dating.
The quizzes, posted on livejournal, were what actually drove their early users. The blog came way later. Quizzes are non-dating/non-sexual, back in the early 2000s where among <25 year olds online dating was still something nerdy losers did (or old people who were desperate to get married, using sites like eHarm and Match). So, it brought a lot of girls.
I honestly had no idea OKC was actually a dating site until I'd had an account for a year or two. I just had it to answer quizzes.
Very interesting. I recall watching an interview with Sam Yagan and he said they were about to give up, but that blog was the one thing that saved the company. The guy writing the blogs had a math background, and it worked tremendously well.
I wish I had that link, but I'll have to look it up.
I think quizzes/etc. on LJ got them early users, but then there was a big decline in LJ around the time MySpace got popular (2005-2006?), which probably hurt OKC. FB becoming popular essentially killed it. The blog, IIRC, was around that time -- so for a while the "dating" site had a bunch of accounts of people who were originally there for quizzes, many of whom were no longer active.
> Is it any coincidence that the blog stopped around the same time they were acquired? It served its purpose and ran its course. They're done innovating in the space. We'll have to let startups lead the next wave of innovation in online dating.
First, I used to work on the OkTrends team, but I'm speaking for myself, not on behalf of OkCupid.
OkTrends didn't shut down after the acquisition - in fact, they made two posts afterwards (one several months afterwards). The fact that they haven't posted much recently has more to do with the available staff.
It takes a LOT of work to make those posts. The research for "The Real Stuff White People Like" took me a month and a half of working full-time on that and not much else. (Remember that it's "easy" to solve a problem when you define the problem at the start, but with OkTrends, we weren't always starting with a specific problem - each post began as one idea, and then went through multiple iterations before we hit on the "real" question we wanted to answer.).
Around that time, there were three of us working on OkTrends, two of us full-time and the third more-or-less full-time. Once the two full-timers left (for reasons unrelated to the acquisition - I went back to school to finish my degree), you can see why it became much harder to work on those posts.
And before someone says that they could just hire someone else - yes, perhaps, but that's harder than it looks. Data scientist positions are already one of the most difficult to hire for (from a startup perspective), and OkCupid also sets the bar incredibly high. To date, I think that was probably my most intensive and comprehensive interview experience.
Trust me, I give the OkCupid folks crap about this every time I see them (particularly my old boss), because I'd love to see more posts too. But don't think the timing of the hiatus has anything to do with the acquisition; it's truly coincidental. Many startups stop innovating after they're acquired - OkCupid is definitely not one of them.
Thanks for the detailed comment. It's interesting to hear from someone who worked on the OkTrends team. I'm still unconvinced that the reason they didn't start OKT back up is because they can't find some people like Chris Rudder or Chris Coyne to help. I found this excerpt interesting from a Quora article:
We had Christian Rudder writing the blog. Yes, he studied math at Harvard, but the math on OkTrends was high school level. And with a lot of statistical hand-waving and over-simplification. His posts were great because he's such an amazing writer, not because he's awesome at math. (He's certainly the best writer I know.)
Many startups stop innovating after they're acquired - OkCupid is definitely not one of them.
Can you elaborate on this? What innovation have they done since they were acquired by IAC, discounting Crazy Blind Date? I've used better mobile apps for dating than CBD, that app didn't work for me.
To be fair, from what I recall while I was there, the blog was also instead of paying for a PR firm and having Sam going on morning talk shows that didn't really hit our demographic or help our growth much. So once we got bought the need for it did decrease a lot.
I heard there is a book containing a lot of similar information coming out though.
Perhaps, instead of bringing someone in to crunch their numbers and look for interesting correlations--they might rather be willing to license their data out to some think-tank or newspaper/magazine or something, who would do that analysis for its own (readership's) sake?
There was a site, I can't find it now, that had the anonymized question data for sale but I think it was $20K or in that ballpark. Also I think they do license the data to universities upon request. E.g. siepr.stanford.edu/system/files/shared/Piskorski-SIEPR.pdf
Comments
OkCupid is "special". It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky. It might not get a massive amount of use, but it will get them some PR (well, it already has) within communities that are already more likely to sign up with them than the mainstream that are more appreciative in general of stuff like this even if they won't use it.
> It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky.
I really wish they would start OkTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com/) back up; it was really fascinating reading, the kind of analysis that's impossible to come by unless you have free-rein map-reduce access to some company's Big Data. Given their userbase I'm surprised they don't think it was a bigger PR source; I think every article from it has been hot on HN.
Funny things happen when companies get acquired. They stop acting like a startup and they start acting like large, slow companies, which is unfortunate. That blog was single-handedly what drove their traffic more than anything. Everyone I talk to said they found out about OkCupid through that blog. OkCupid knows this. The founders said they almost quit and that blog was their saving grace.
Is it any coincidence that the blog stopped around the same time they were acquired? It served its purpose and ran its course. They're done innovating in the space. We'll have to let startups lead the next wave of innovation in online dating.
The quizzes, posted on livejournal, were what actually drove their early users. The blog came way later. Quizzes are non-dating/non-sexual, back in the early 2000s where among <25 year olds online dating was still something nerdy losers did (or old people who were desperate to get married, using sites like eHarm and Match). So, it brought a lot of girls.
I honestly had no idea OKC was actually a dating site until I'd had an account for a year or two. I just had it to answer quizzes.
Very interesting. I recall watching an interview with Sam Yagan and he said they were about to give up, but that blog was the one thing that saved the company. The guy writing the blogs had a math background, and it worked tremendously well.
I wish I had that link, but I'll have to look it up.
I think quizzes/etc. on LJ got them early users, but then there was a big decline in LJ around the time MySpace got popular (2005-2006?), which probably hurt OKC. FB becoming popular essentially killed it. The blog, IIRC, was around that time -- so for a while the "dating" site had a bunch of accounts of people who were originally there for quizzes, many of whom were no longer active.
> Is it any coincidence that the blog stopped around the same time they were acquired? It served its purpose and ran its course. They're done innovating in the space. We'll have to let startups lead the next wave of innovation in online dating.
First, I used to work on the OkTrends team, but I'm speaking for myself, not on behalf of OkCupid.
OkTrends didn't shut down after the acquisition - in fact, they made two posts afterwards (one several months afterwards). The fact that they haven't posted much recently has more to do with the available staff.
It takes a LOT of work to make those posts. The research for "The Real Stuff White People Like" took me a month and a half of working full-time on that and not much else. (Remember that it's "easy" to solve a problem when you define the problem at the start, but with OkTrends, we weren't always starting with a specific problem - each post began as one idea, and then went through multiple iterations before we hit on the "real" question we wanted to answer.).
Around that time, there were three of us working on OkTrends, two of us full-time and the third more-or-less full-time. Once the two full-timers left (for reasons unrelated to the acquisition - I went back to school to finish my degree), you can see why it became much harder to work on those posts.
And before someone says that they could just hire someone else - yes, perhaps, but that's harder than it looks. Data scientist positions are already one of the most difficult to hire for (from a startup perspective), and OkCupid also sets the bar incredibly high. To date, I think that was probably my most intensive and comprehensive interview experience.
Trust me, I give the OkCupid folks crap about this every time I see them (particularly my old boss), because I'd love to see more posts too. But don't think the timing of the hiatus has anything to do with the acquisition; it's truly coincidental. Many startups stop innovating after they're acquired - OkCupid is definitely not one of them.
Thanks for the detailed comment. It's interesting to hear from someone who worked on the OkTrends team. I'm still unconvinced that the reason they didn't start OKT back up is because they can't find some people like Chris Rudder or Chris Coyne to help. I found this excerpt interesting from a Quora article:
We had Christian Rudder writing the blog. Yes, he studied math at Harvard, but the math on OkTrends was high school level. And with a lot of statistical hand-waving and over-simplification. His posts were great because he's such an amazing writer, not because he's awesome at math. (He's certainly the best writer I know.)
Many startups stop innovating after they're acquired - OkCupid is definitely not one of them.
Can you elaborate on this? What innovation have they done since they were acquired by IAC, discounting Crazy Blind Date? I've used better mobile apps for dating than CBD, that app didn't work for me.
To be fair, from what I recall while I was there, the blog was also instead of paying for a PR firm and having Sam going on morning talk shows that didn't really hit our demographic or help our growth much. So once we got bought the need for it did decrease a lot.
I heard there is a book containing a lot of similar information coming out though.
Perhaps, instead of bringing someone in to crunch their numbers and look for interesting correlations--they might rather be willing to license their data out to some think-tank or newspaper/magazine or something, who would do that analysis for its own (readership's) sake?
There was a site, I can't find it now, that had the anonymized question data for sale but I think it was $20K or in that ballpark. Also I think they do license the data to universities upon request. E.g. siepr.stanford.edu/system/files/shared/Piskorski-SIEPR.pdf