O’REILLY RADAR – By Ciara Byrne
OkCupid is a free dating site with seven million users. The site’s blog, OkTrends, mines data from those users to tackle important subjects like “The case for an older woman” and “The REAL ‘stuff white people like’.”
Beyond clever headlines, OkCupid also uses an unusual pedigree to separate itself from the dating site pack: The business was founded by four Harvard-educated mathematicians.
“It probably scared people when they first heard that four math majors were starting a dating site,” said CEO Sam Yagan during a recent interview. But the founders’ backgrounds greatly influenced how they approached the problem of dating.
“A lot of other dating sites are based on psychology,” Yagan said. “The fundamental premise of a site like eHarmony is that they know the answer. Our approach to dating isn’t that there’s some psychological theory that will be the answer to all your problems. We think that dating is a problem to be solved using data and analytics. There is no magic formula that can help everyone to find love. Instead, we bring value by building a decent-sized platform that allows people to provide information that helps us to customize a match algorithm to each person’s needs.”
OkCupid works by having users state basic preferences and answering questions like “Is it wrong to spank a child who’s been bad?” Users are matched based on the overlap of their answers and how important each question is to both users.
Yagan said data was built into the business model from the beginning. “We knew from the time we started the company that the data we were generating would have three purposes: helping us match people up, attracting advertisers since that was the core of our revenue model, and that the data would also be interesting socially.” [Read more…]