Steve harvey online dating service

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Dating Is a Numbers Game. Sam Yagan, CEO of Match and a founder of OkCupid, explains the proliferation of dating sites and why he thinks everyone should be looking for love online. It sometimes seems like there are as many online dating sites as there are fish in the sea.

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But actually, most of the services are owned by just two big companies. The users of JDate, Christian Mingle, LDS Single, and Catholic Single may all follow different faiths, but the sites all bow to the same corporate overlord: Spark Networks. Another company, IAC/InterActiveCorp, owns not only the older, more established Match.com and Chemistry.com, but also OkCupid, its more free-wheeling (and free) sibling*, as well as that digital Pleasure Island, Tinder. Last week, IAC announced the launch of yet another site, Delightful, aimed at people who seek love and relationships, rather than just hookups. It will be headed in part by the comedian Steve Harvey, who will serve as the brand’s “Chief Love Officer.” “This is our first brand focused on the L word as opposed to other brands that focus on dates,” said Sam Yagan, the Match.com CEO who will run Delighful with Harvey. “Steve Harvey developed authentic views on finding and keeping love. That appeal, combined with our know-how in this space is going to make Delightful a powerful offering in the dating category.” Before joining Match, Yagan helped found OkCupid with two college buddies. In a time when there’s a specific dating site for almost every micro-demographic (Farmers! Redheads!), I interviewed Yagan about what it’s like to manage so many distinct dating portals at once—and why he thinks everyone should be dating online. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. Olga Khazan: What exactly is your role at Match? Sam Yagan: We sold OkCupid to Match in January of 2011. In September of 2012, I became CEO of all of Match, which is the operating segment of IAC that contains all of the dating properties. In terms of how I think about it in my head, all of our businesses compete in the marketplace. We haven’t slowed OkCupid down. I run all the brands like cousins. You want your cousins to do well, but you want to do better. All of our brands want to win, but we certainly want to fight fair and coordinate as much as we can behind the scenes. But to the consumer we want to offer the broadest, most competitive set of products that we can. There are things I want to do that don’t make sense for OkCupid to do because of their brand or their positioning that I can do on Chemistry or on Match. Having that flexibility is awesome. Khazan: It’s been written about you that you’ve always had an entrepreneurial streak. Can you tell me a bit about that? Yagan: I started my first company when I was in my college dorm as a senior with two of my really good friends. We started a company that became SparkNotes.com. You know CliffsNotes? SparkNotes is a modern-day version of that. What CliffsNotes was when I was growing up was basically what SparkNotes is now. Then I started a company called Edonkey, which was basically Napster for video. We consumed 30 percent of all the Internet traffic in Europe in 2002. Then I started OkCupid in 2004. Those are the startups that I started. I do a lot of investing. I’m on a lot of boards. And that’s why I love Tinder so much is because that scratches my entrepreneurial itch. It’s awesome that in one gig, I can both work on my original baby, work on Match, which is by far the biggest brand, and still get that entrepreneurial passion with Tinder. Khazan: Was there anything in your childhood or early adulthood that encouraged you to be more inclined toward entrepreneurship? Yagan: I’ve given this a lot of thought as I’ve gotten older. I never had a lemonade stand, I never had a paper route. The biggest thing that I’ve come to is my parents are immigrants, and I really think that immigration is the ultimate entrepreneurship. Risking everything that you have for some future, speculative uncertainty. They left their family and their comfortable lives overseas and came here for very uncertain hopes and dreams. I grew up in that culture. The willingness to take risks, the willingness to think differently about your career, those were all things that were ingrained in me. Khazan: Why did you decide to pursue dating? It seems very different from SparkNotes. Yagan: What we learned from SparkNotes in particular—everyone knew CliffsNotes, everyone used CliffsNotes. So CliffsNotes wasn’t so different from Match, CliffsNotes was sort of the Match of study guides. What really made it work is that SparkNotes was a better product than CliffsNotes, and it was free, whereas CliffsNotes was paid. So we said, “What other products on the web can we both make better quality and free?” And dating, because it was one of the things people pay for, that made it a prime candidate for something to make free. Back in 2003, the state of the art in online dating was psychologists. Dr. Phil was the Match psychologist. Neil Clark Warren was the eHarmony psychologist. We were all math majors, and we all thought dating was a data game and a numbers game. I’d rather just watch a bunch of people date and observe their behaviors rather than ask a bunch of psychological questions and try to figure out their personality profiles. We didn’t believe that relationships could be simplified into a formula. Khazan: Why did you decide to make OkCupid free? Yagan: When you compete against an incumbent, you have to change the rules of the game. If you play the incumbent’s game, you’re usually going to lose. The phrase I always said, you can’t out-Match.com Match.com. They have more money than you, they have more people than you, and they have a better brand than you. But if you can change the game—not make it about doing beautiful TV campaigns and charging people $20 a month for a subscription—and create a new game, that game being one of get customers to talk about you by word of mouth,” use viral tactics, make it free. All of a sudden you have an advantage. And that’s what we did with CliffsNotes versus SparkNotes. CliffsNotes didn’t know what to do. All of a sudden there was a competitor giving away their product for free. You see that in lots of industries. When someone comes in and changes the rules of the game, the incumbents can be put on their heels. Khazan: You became part of the incumbent, though, when you joined Match. Is that a different mindset? Why would I sign up for Match if I could do OKCupid for free? Yagan: My worldview about how competition works is still the same. The reason OkCupid took its approach is that Match was very good at its approach. What we have going on in the Match group is we have a bunch of different games that we’re playing. There are people who can be reached best through a bunch of compelling TV commercials or really integrated online partnerships, like our partnership with Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL that give us mass distribution to people who don’t have dating top of mind. OkCupid is great if you are someone who wants to go out and look for an online dating site. OkCupid is not going to find you. We have different marketing programs, we have different pricing programs, the products are different. There are features that Match has that OkCupid doesn’t have, and vice-versa. Unlike a lot of businesses where it’s winner-take-all, dating is an emotional and intimate product. People care which app or what site they use to meet their significant other. JDate is a good example. We don’t own JDate, but there are people who really want to be in a culturally specific area.

Steve harvey online dating service