Updated 08:21 AM EDT, Thu, Mar 28, 2024

OkCupid User Spent $1,800 Promoting Dating Profile Over 3 Months

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It's safe to assume that using a free online dating site will be, well, free. That assumption is not necessarily true. It's now possible to spend $1,800 on a free online dating website in three months in the hopes that the person of your dreams will find your profile. 

According to BuzzFeed, OkCupid introduced the Spotlight feature in July that allows users to pay $2 for 15-minute "bursts" of extra promotion on the site. Although the results of the feature are still coming in, one person spent $1,800 boosting their profile, making it more visible to crushes and strangers with the feature in three months. 

"There's a row of potential people of the gender you're interested in across the top of your screen when you log in - that row gets clicked on with much greater propensity than if you do a search," said Jeffrey Kip, chief financial officer of InterActiveCorp, which owns OkCupid.

"Now you can go in there and pay $2 to get piped into the Spotlight row of everybody you're interested in who's out there logged in right now, and it's instant gratification," Kip said.  "There's a panel that appears to the right that says you're now being looked at by six women, now being looked at 14 women, 42 women. It's worked well and we believe that kind of product can play across all of our products and a lot of our sites well in different ways, and I think there's other services we think of bringing it into."

Greg Blatt, Chief Executive Officer of IAC, spoke about the customer who spent $1,800 during a conference call in October. 

"Someone paid us $1,800 in three months on a so-called free site," Blatt said. "On Match, the king of so-called paid sites, the most someone can pay us over three months is around $150 or less than one-tenth of that even if they're willing to pay us more...the biggest indicator of who will pay for these dynamic features is the fact that they're already paying for subscription offerings."

The feature has become a way to monetize OkCupid, which gets revenue from "A-list" membership in addition to advertising. A-list members pay $5 to $10 a month to get better matches, browse profiles invisibly and be free from advertising. The site, which was bought by IAC in 2011, has 7 million users. IAC also owns DateHookup, Tinder and Match.com. Match alone brought in $713.4 million last year. 

Blatt said that this past February, there were 100 million American single people, with 50 percent saying they are open to online dating. He said that number could grow to 112 million, with 55 to 60 percent of people open to online dating by 2017. 

Most of the people paying for the new promo bump on OKCupid are already subscribers. IAC calls the venture "transactional monetization."

"We think there is a lot of upside," he said. "We've been working on this and thinking about this for a while, but we've just started to really show the traction in the results, and we think we can really talk about it affirmatively."

In July, OkCupid co-founder and President Christian Rudder told BuzzFeed that more than 2,500 people were using the new feature to promote themselves in the first 24 hours of its existence. 

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