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Article about steve harvey online dating service:
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?













Steve harvey online dating service