Okcupid Company

OkCupid (often abbreviated as OKC, but officially OkC) is a U.S.-based, internationally operating online dating, friendship, and formerly also a social networking website and application. It features multiple-choice questions to match members. Company profile page for OkCupid including stock price, company news, press releases, executives, board members, and contact information. OkCupid was the first major dating site to offer unlimited messaging free of charge, citation needed although this was limited in late 2017 when OkCupid's official blog announced the site is 'getting rid of open-messaging' and making sent messages invisible to the recipient until they in turn interact with the sender. OKCupid's customer service leaves much to be desired. If you check out OKCupid's page on the Better Business Bureau (BBB) website (which is always a good idea when checking out any company's credibility), you'll find that OKCupid has been slapped with a big, nasty 'F'. Company profile page for OkCupid including stock price, company news, press releases, executives, board members, and contact information.

Okcupid Company

It’s been an interesting month for online social science experiments, between Facebook’s research into emotional contagion and now OkCupid’s study of perceived compatibility. The two experiments had very different objectives, but both companies learned the same lesson: People get really upset about studies like this.

Problem is, that’s the wrong lesson.

According to a multitude of critics, the companies stepped over an ethical line by playing with emotions without asking users’ permission. The Facebook study showed that users who see more negative content are more likely to produce negative posts of their own. And OkCupid found that telling people — falsely — that they’re compatible is a good way to get them to converse more online.

Why was there such an outcry? True, both companies were manipulating users’ emotions, but people don’t seem to mind the daily emotional manipulation that companies engage in every day through marketing and product design. It’s hard to imagine a world in which companies didn’t try to influence our emotions.

What bothers people is the experimentation. To many people, experiments conjure images of twisted scientists. Businesses even shy away from the word “experiment.” In a recent conversation with a group of managers, I was told, “We don’t run experiments; we run A/B tests” — so named because customers are tested on their preferences for option A or B. The word “experiment” apparently needed a euphemism.

People fear that corporations have free rein to test whatever mad idea strikes them. Let’s make vegans fall in love with steak lovers! Let’s tell people they’ve been unfriended by their mothers! Where does it end? Will Facebook and OkCupid be in the next season of Orphan Black?

While Facebook and OkCupid won’t be creating clones anytime soon, there is a legitimate concern here. In academia, research involving human subjects is severely limited and carefully monitored. Each institution, in the U.S. at least, has an Institutional Review Board for just that purpose. Social science experiments typically must adhere to the following protocol: In lab settings, where subjects are recruited and brought into a room, research participants are informed that they’re taking part in an experiment (though in some fields, such as psychology, they’re routinely deceived about the experiment’s purpose).

Outside the lab, in what we call field experiments, it’s fairly common practice for research subjects not to be informed that they’re in an experiment. For example, my colleagues and I recently hired hundreds of employees of the online work platform oDesk and experimentally varied how much pay we offered in order to better understand the impact of wages on effort. We were able to show the IRB that the research presented no more than minimal risk to the subjects, that it wouldn’t infringe their rights or harm their welfare, and that we weren’t deceiving participants about the work involved. We also showed that if the participants knew it was an experiment, we wouldn’t be able to interpret the results. Hence, the IRB waived the informed-consent requirement.

Facebook’s experiment probably would have been approved by most IRBs, because the possible harm was minor and — importantly — because it wasn’t deceptive (all the posts shown to users were real). OkCupid’s is another story. Because the experiment involved telling users that their compatibility scores were high when they actually weren’t, it probably wouldn’t have gotten through many schools’ IRBs unless participants were asked for their consent.

Despite the element of deception, OkCupid cofounder Christian Rudder was refreshingly open and unapologetic about the dating site’s experiment. He described the company’s past experiments and practically dared users to take offense: “Guess what, everybody,” he wrote. “If you use the internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.”

He’s right, of course: Every website experiments on its users in one way or another.

Regardless of IRB considerations, companies should certainly adhere to the core principles of ethical research. But the real problem in corporate America isn’t too many experiments — it’s too few. Although the value of experimentation is self-evident, companies aren’t doing enough well-designed experiments. Not only are companies unwilling to conduct experiments that are aimed at increasing scientific knowledge, they’re reluctant even to pursue the narrower goal of understanding how customers react to their products.

The reason for the dearth of experimentation in corporations is the excruciating number of internal obstacles, many of which are based on knee-jerk reactions rather than careful deliberation. In most companies, you have to get approval from various operational functions, as well as legal and public relations teams, especially if the results are going to be made public. Often there’s a good deal of pushback: Will the public misinterpret the results? Will competitors learn too much about our secret sauce? Don’t we already know this without doing an experiment? Is this going to get in the way of my lunch plans? In addition to these kinds of barriers, there’s a pure know-how issue that makes real research difficult to pull off in corporate settings: Most people never learn how to run experiments.

Even when companies do run experiments, they often balk at allowing the results to be published. So the studies don’t go through the valuable peer-review process, and the findings don’t see the light of day. That’s a loss for other companies, for research as a whole, and even for the company that ran the experiment.

The biggest risk from the Facebook and inevitable OkCupid blowback is that companies will conclude that experiments are too risky and will be even more reluctant to act on opportunities to learn about human behavior or understand products’ effects on society.

It’s hard to overstate how much companies can learn from even the simplest experiments. Which advertisements work? Will customers look elsewhere if we raise prices? How do users interact with and rely on social media? Questions like these are often critical for a company’s bottom line. And the smart use of data and experiments to answer them allows companies to look less like Don Draper and more like Nate Silver — which (fashion aside) is a change for the better. Within the bounds of ethical principles, companies should embrace the experimental method and feed more of their hunches into transparent, published experiments with generalizable insights.

When four math majors launched OkCupid in March 2004, they had a fundamental belief that data would be how the dating site would differentiate the company in the crowded online dating market.

“People think that people turn online for dating because they need someone to find their soul mate for them, but we think it’s because you want a bigger pool of people to choose from,” said Sam Yagan, CEO of OkCupid, who also founded TheSpark.com, maker of SparkNotes, a brand of educational study aids. “Data is key to sorting through all of these people.”

Unlike sites dating services like Match.com, OKCupid is free, relying instead on an advertising model. This helps give it a younger demographic for its 7 million users. When a user signs up, he or she is asked to think of some questions to ask a potential mate. Questions range from interests, to hobbies and lifestyle choices. On average, an OkCupid user answers about 250 different questions, giving the dating site an enormous amount of data and, therefore, insights into people’s preferences.

Using the survey answers, messaging habits, autobiographies on people’s profiles, and other data from OkCupid’s members, the dating site has been able to uncover certain trends and behaviors in online dating and about society in general. The OkCupid team has found that people’s traits and characteristics affect the types of interactions they are having with potential suitors. So, for example, race affects the messages users get, and the likelihood a woman has difficulty achieving an orgasm has to do with her age.

Based on the findings, OkCupid created OkTrends in 2009, a blog with original research and insights from OkCupid. The company compiled its observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions, all to explore the data side of the online dating world. The blog actually helped OkCupid increase its users, with the blog improving the dating site’s organic search ranking, per Yagan. The company actually brought a data scientist on board in 2009, and he overlooks the blog, mining through all of the data and reporting on the findings there.

This data focus had obvious marketing benefits. Unlike most corporate blogs that resemble ghost towns, the OKTrends is vibrant, with posts regularly receiving over 200 comments. The blog was being mentioned in the press a lot and got well over 2 million users just a year after it launched. All this was done without an advertising budget. OkCupid saw all this data crunching as an opportunity to make money, too.

A campaign for rum brand DonQ created a landing page where consumers could analyze the types of pick-up lines that people rely on. The brand did some social media outreach to drive fans to this page. Don Q got tons of insights into what people like and don’t like in terms of their first interaction with a potential suitor and was able to create another campaign based on that.

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Other advertiser campaigns on OkCupid have shown that targeting by marital status is undervalued. Yagan said he is perplexed by this because marital status really has a lot to do with how much people spend and what they spend on. If you think about what you spent your money on before you got married and then what you spend on now that you are married, you’ll see a big difference, he said.

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“Getting married and having kids are the most life-changing events in a person’s life and really do signal purchase intent,” Yagan said.

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A lot of the data that OkCupid has comes right from its users’ profile pages. Advertisers can target people by keywords on their own profiles. OkCupid did some work with a top 25 Internet Retailer. The retailer had many data sources. But for this particular effort, it looked at keywords on the profiles of OkCupid users. Specifically, the retailer analyzed the keywords that users used to describe themselves. Through this, the retailer (who was targeting females 24-45) was able to paint a picture of this target woman’s life. It found that her preferences differ by age. Another finding was that what is happening to a woman in her dating life plays out in other parts of their life. Through this effort, the retailer realized that its target of 24-45-year-old women was too broad and needed to be narrowed to an older group.

“Through this data, the retailer was able to paint a picture of the slightly older, retail shopper and what is important to her,” Yagan said. “We learned that share of wallet changes based on age. We also learned that the type of cell phone that a consumer uses says a lot about them as well.”

Using data to inform marketing isn’t anything new. Mint.com is another example of a brand that mines internal data for use of creative marketing. LinkedIn does the same for its advertisers. It uses internal data to help advertisers like Citigroup, for example, find the right target audience. As marketers become better at mining the data and then navigating through what’s important and what’s not, we’ll see more relevant ads, better results and bigger digital marketing budgets.

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For OkCupid, the payoff was big. IAC’s Match.com, the 800-pound gorilla in online dating, scooped up the site last year, paying $50 million plus earnouts.