It’s time for Chinese dating sites to level up

China’s young adults are, like young adults everywhere, big consumers of internet services. And one of the biggest problems for many of them that the internet might be able to help with is finding a spouse. Many Chinese (women especially) are expected to get married before they turn 30, and the pressure to find a good match from family and friends can be immense.

China has plenty of dating and matchmaking sites, of course, but the Chinese online-to-offline-focused blog Pintu360 recently ran an interesting op-ed piece about how the country’s dating sites should take things to the next level.

In the piece, the author argues that most of China’s dating sites right now offer what he calls a 1.0 experience. Users sign up, write descriptions of themselves and upload photos, then browse other people’s descriptions and photos, and message the people they’re interested in. It’s all pretty standard fare, and the sites make money by doing things like charging for messages, selling virtual items that can be gifted to potential dates, and offering professional matchmaker services. The focus is on collecting and comparing user information.

But this model has problems. Ultimately, you’ve got to meet up with dates in the real world, and when they’re random strangers being matched with you, it’s tough to weed out the bad eggs. People occasionally get scammed. A bigger problem is just that people don’t turn out to be much like their online profiles. Everyone wants their profile to reflect the best possible version of themselves, and as a result, sometimes people’s profiles are a bit, ahem, unrealistic.

Plus, the selling-messages-and-virtual-items model doesn’t make for a great user experience. It works, but nobody really likes seeing that message pop up that says “This girl is a perfect match for you. Now cough up $5 to be able to actually contact her.”

Instead, Pintu360 says Chinese dating sites should move toward what it calls dating 2.0 sites. 2.0 sites should be focused on building a dating social network. Users would still be matched with other users with compatible interests, but ideally dating 2.0 sites would be able to, through their own data and data mined from other social media sites, show users the places in which their own social network interconnects with that of their potential matches. Maybe, for example, your new match happens to have gone to school with a friend of your cousin. Maybe she’s a friend of a friend.

Showing these social links, the Pintu360 author asserts, would make dating sites seem much more trustworthy and reliable. And personally, I think he’s right. Anyone who’s even thought about doing business in China knows how important personal relationships – guanxi – are in Chinese society. Making business connections with new people in China gets much easier if you have a mutual acquaintance of some kind that can vouch for you, and that’s just as true (if not more so) with dating.

A dating site shows you these connections could really alleviate user concerns about getting tricked by scammers or by a misleading profile picture, because they’d be able to double-check anything they wanted through their own social circles. If a friend-of-a-friend comes up as a match but looks too good to be true, for example, the user could simply call up their friend and ask if that person’s friend really looked like that. There’s always a trusted middle-man – not someone who works for the site but someone you actually know – that users can verify information with.

The Pintu360 op-ed also argues that monetization should be approached different, and again I agree. As a happily married man I don’t really have any experience with dating sites, but having to pay just to send a message to another user on a social platform isn’t a good user experience in any context. Instead, dating 2.0 sites could monetize through deep data mining: data from these platforms could be used to create cool value-added services for users or sold to third parties. They could also embrace the transition to an O2O business model that some “1.0” dating sites have already begun by offering wedding-related services.

After all, if the ultimate point of using a dating site is to meet someone, fall in love, and get married, then a dating 2.0 site should be try to be a part of that entire process from meeting to marriage. And a dating 2.0 site could afford to offer many more services to new users for free if it was earning revenue in the highly-profitable wedding services sector from its older users as they married. It could sell them offline services like hotel bookings, flowers, cakes, and more. And although the Pintu360 article doesn’t go this far, I don’t see why it would have to end at marriage. A dating site that stayed connected to its users could profit for years after marriage by capitalizing on things like anniversaries to remind users how they met and use the O2O model to sell them anniversary gifts.