The Future Of Online Dating

How our kids will meet online in 2030

Even though online dating still carries to some extent a bad reputation, it has brought our societies many positive developments. Online dating services have tremendously helped women to emancipate.Today still, it is not well perceived for a woman, in comparison to men, to have multiple relationships and live her life the way she truly wants, without constantly being judged. With the democratization of online dating services women can run their own private life without the need to justify anything to anybody. This has been a true positive development for our societies and online dating has much more to bring.

While the number of children born from couples who met online will skyrocket over the next decade, this is also a good time to question what could be the next development wave of this rather young industry and how technology will help people to connect differently. Augmented/virtual reality, artificial intelligence, chat bots, machine learning, etc.? How will our kids meet online in the future? And how could this contribute to making a better society?

Internet has radically changed the way we meet new people and find our partners. People meet more through online channels and outside of their friends, family and work networks, but unlike the usage of internet and social networks, people are still embarrassed to mention they are using (if they even are) an online dating platform. Worse, once they register on an online dating platform, users tend to behave in a schizophrenic manner alternating between binge-like usage, profile deletion, testing of new platforms, reregister and so on.
In this article I will try to explain this awkward relationship we have with online dating platforms and try to understand how they could evolve into something different than dating apps as we know them today.

My name is Daniel Cheaib, I have worked and continue to advise companies as a Senior Advisor at Arthur D. Little where was in charge of the transaction competence center globally. I have accompanied more than 30 telecom, media and technology companies in as many different countries, to define their strategies facing disruptive business models.

Overview

1. Inception And Development Of Online Dating
2. The Pain Point
3. The End Of The “Swipe And Match” Culture
4. Content Is King
5. How Can Technology Play a Role

Inception And Development Of Online Dating

Whoever has seen the inception of internet in the 90’s, has also seen the proliferation of online dating services. Dating was one of the first use cases of internet and has allowed people to suddenly be able to get out of their regular environment and connect with strangers online.

However at a time when the internet connection was an expensive service that you would pay by the minute, without any kind of regulation against fraud, these services were mostly scams and/or closely related to erotic services (erotic phone calls and chats).

This is how the relationship between people and online dating services started. An ambiguous relationship, between (1) a real curiosity and willingness (probably something genetically anchored in our subconscious as Humans) to get to know new people from new horizons, and (2) the social pressure due to the fact that online dating has mostly been a paid service and hence seen as a last resort option to meet new people. Who needs to pay for that, right? 🙄

There is no surprise that the uptake of online dating services and its democratization to a younger generation has happened with the appearance of services like Tinder that were mostly free to use. As I showed in the article “Why Investors Should Fund Dating”, the industry has gone through 2 main eras.

(1) 2000’s: Inception of the online dating business. With the democratization of internet, online dating services have started to appear, with Match.com in 1993 in the US, Meetic in 2001 in France. These online services have professionalized the service and made online dating more accessible. They have digitized the matchmaker agencies by allowing people to upload their “CV” online and get in touch with anybody on the platform (against a fee to actually get in touch with somebody). It has mostly attracted adults (35+).

(2) 2010’s: The supermarket of dating. When online dating was still taboo for the younger generation, Tinder managed to democratize its utilization by introducing a service both extremely simple to use and most importantly free of charge. 7 years after its launch, a whole generation is now used to downloading a dating app when they are single.

The third era is yet to come, you only need to picture yourself 10 years ahead from now to be convinced that this (“supermarket”) way of dating online is not sustainable and for two main reasons: (1) people are unsatisfied with the existing experience, it has dehumanized our interactions. Hence the topic remains to some extent taboo and the willingness to try new products is very high in comparison to any other industry (dating app users have in average 3.8 dating apps on their phone in the US), and (2) you simply need renewal in terms of media, as the picture format is outdated and static. Each generation lives with its own kind of social networks where video and stories are the most consumed media (the online social networks have paved the way with Facebook, then Instagram, and Snapchat each of them corresponding to a usage dedicated to a different generation).

The Pain Point

For any industry, there is to my mind a clear path for a disruptive innovation when there is a clear customer pain point to be solved.

When I started my own venture, I candidly asked 500 people aged between 18 and 25 years old what they thought about their experience on existing dating apps. We were not expecting such a high rate of dissatisfaction and rude words from this new generation: two third of the respondents said they were unhappy with the existing services. Words like “supermarket”, “meat”, “superficial”, “unrespectful”, “dehumanization”, “object”, “impersonal”, popped up the most.

In order to be as objective as possible to best interpret these results, we met a sociologist specialized in this field and asked what could be driving these harsh comments. We came up to two conclusions:

1. Expectations need to be better managed: finding your better half is probably one of the thing that matters the most in your entire life, and existing online dating services have been using a lot of the marketing tricks to hook you up onto their service, with promises they could not fulfill
2. Reality is too harsh: the concept of the UX introduced by Tinder based on one picture and a short description completely ignores the traits of personality, and what actually makes every one of us unique. The whole experience is focus on the physical appearance. At first, it can be nice to feel appreciated by random people. But the reality is quickly unpleasant. The ease of rapidly creating its profile actually goes against the possibility to really get to know people, which makes any kind of discussion “superficial”, “impersonal”, etc. and creates an unsecure atmosphere because we never know what kind of people we might end up meeting.

Here is one of my preferred mathematical formula: Satisfaction = reality (-) expectations, and it has never been so true! If we want to change the face of the online dating industry we need to both deliver a highly appreciated experience, and better manage the expectations, which in turn will lower churn levels.

The End Of The “Swipe And Match” Culture

The “swipe and match” UX secret sauce to democratize the online dating was to allow users to “secretly” like somebody until this person likes you back. The app is used as a 3rd party, keeping the secrets “unrevealed” until it recognizes that the crush was actually reciprocal.

Every one can relate to this problem that Tinder has solved. This person you always wanted to declare your undying love to in real life, is finally only a swipe-right away from you. Right?

Actually this use case, even though very compelling is very niche, because the chances you can encounter a specific person on the app are very limited. As clear as I can see the use case of the “swipe and match” UX for a person I know in real life, I cannot really see it for a person I have never seen, talked to or even crossed path with. Worse, I can see four negative aspects to it:

• Consumerist society: it encourages people to make a decision in a very short time, sometimes less than a second to judge the “likeability” of a person
• Superficiality: it takes for granted that any first discussion you can have with a person, happens only if there is a reciprocal physical attraction based on a carefully selected profile picture
• Judgmental society: it puts people under high pressure of being liked and unliked by random people on the basis of physical aspects only, giving no relevance at all to any other aspects of your personality
• Deviant behaviors: users and especially men, have started to use dedicated strategies. A common approach to existing dating apps for men is to like all profiles and based on who like them back to run a second level of selection. The match concept becomes meaningless

Content Is King

To improve further the experience and attract more people to use dating apps, the overall experience has to evolve into something more respectful of people’s identity and what makes each person truly unique (a selfie or a simple profile pic is not enough).

A person’s identity is very difficult to define in simple words, or profile pictures. To overcome this issue, content is the answer:

• Nothing else than content can tell a story and convey feelings about a person
• How the content is presented also matters because nobody wants or has the time to spend more than 20 seconds per profile

Multiple indicators show that people are more and more inclined to share content online to meet new people:

• with the proliferation of social networks encouraging to share any moments of our lives, the improvement of smartphones’ storage capacity, and cloud storage services, people have never had so much content about themselves at their fingertips.
• with the normalization of online dating, it becomes less and less of a psychological barrier to share content for new generations.

Content will bring another dimension to online dating and this is precisely where technology can play a role.

How Can Technology Play A Role

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

While the tech industry is full of buzzwords the online dating industry has not cracked the video yet. Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, voice recognition, virtual reality, chatbots, blockchain, how could that apply to online dating?

Besides some security features that apps like Badoo and Bumble have implemented to ensure the identity of their users, all fundamental technology shifts have not been applied to the online dating industry yet. This can be explained by:

• love and algorithms, it’s not a match, as I explained in the article Stop talking algorithm when it comes to relationships, I have not been able to find any scientific studies that could derive data correlation to predict that two specific people could match in real life.
  Algorithms and machine learning can however help showing you people you think you would be interested in based on your social category, your hobbies, studies, etc. (purely endogamy) but it turns out that the reality and human chemistry is more complex than that.
• the limited amount of content shared on dating platforms, thus no need for content analysis and curation of videos, pictures, text and sounds.
• the reticence in the context of dating to be directly exposed to somebody you do not know in a “live” situation that could open use cases for augmented and virtual reality.

There are two different aspects to which technology could bring a real added value to online dating:

1. Data security and privacy with artificial intelligence and / or blockchain
   With the proliferation of personal content that users share online, identity theft becomes a serious issue. To guarantee the experience of users online and when they meet in real life, technologies that can scan through a large data base of existing published content from multiple sources could preempt any potential risks.
   In a different way, blockchain could also play an important role if a global player manages to successfully introduce a decentralized and reliable identity platform. We would then stop relying on Facebook, national telecom operators, or any other third party) .
2. Content analysis with artificial intelligence and machine learning for labeling of image, videos, sounds and texts.
   From a consumer standpoint what you want is to quickly be able to tell whether this personality could be a fit or not. The same feeling you can tell, 20 seconds after you have met and talked to somebody in real life.
   With more and more content to be shared by users, and the constraints to quickly be able to grasp the personality of another person, technologies that would be able to properly curate the content could be a true added value.

Innovation in dating will not come from disruptive new technologies. Online dating will evolve into an experience closer to what we do on social networks. It will definitely enhance the experience, make it more authentic, closer to the experience in real life. The next decade will see apps emerge with more content, more curation, and new ways of presenting this content as the existing apps, based on simple images, are still very static for a generation that swears by the video.