Online dating services Essay Example for Free

Online dating services Essay Online Dating Services, once a haven for the desperate and lonely are starting to attract a significant user and revenue base and are growing at an increasing rate. These services now attract over 30 million users a year in the U. S. and soon will be the highest revenue subscription content service on the Internet. The growth of online personals and many of the industrys characteristics are similar to those of products such as fax machines, DVD players, and the Internet itself. The main similarity is that the value of these services for each user increases with each additional user. However, many other characteristics hold true as well. It has significant economies of scale, requires highly complimentary products, and displays some semblance of standards and compatibility between its competitors. Since online dating services have proven to be so similar to other networked goods, much of the knowledge gained by examining these other services can be applied. This means that one can expect these services to continue to grow rapidly, gain mainstream acceptance and that subscription prices will remain low as long as the major services remain incompatible. Further, they likely will remain incompatible for a variety of technical and strategic reasons. Online dating services have been around since 19951. Computer dating services date (no pun intended) back as far as the 1960s2. However over the last three years these services have seen explosive growth. While other dotcoms reached their peak in 2000 and have since crashed, dating sites have seen explosive growth since 1999 both in users and revenue. The industry generated over $50 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2002, 550% year over year growth3. This growth has been so fast and successful that many of the Internet companies that survived the crash have turned to dating services for additional revenue and profitability4. This explosive growth and several of the industrys other characteristics are reminiscent of other technologies or innovations. The fax machine, VCR, and the Internet itself have all followed similar growth curves5. What online dating has in common with these sites is that they are all examples of networked products or services where each additional user increases the overall value of the good to all the other users. The following report provides an overview of the online dating industry and its recent growth. It then examines the characteristics of networks and whether these apply to the online dating. Based on these characteristics, it models an explanation for its recent growth and attempts to explain any potential shift in attitudes towards online dating. Finally, this report looks at the competition between services and the likely affect this will have on consumers utility, prices, the services themselves and societal welfare as a whole. The following section provides an overview of what online dating sites are, the major players, industry size and business models to establish a basis for comparing this industry to the characteristics of networked industries. Online dating services are simply websites that carry a database of singles for other singles to search. Typically users can visit the site and search based on sex, age and often certain characteristics of their profile, for example: I am a male seeking a female aged 18 to 24 in Toronto, ON. Only show ads with pictures. [insert screen shots here] From here visitors view a list of matching profiles and can click through on any of these to view the full profile. The full profile can contain one or multiple pictures, various stats on the user (age, sex, body type, sexual or religious orientation) as well as an opening headline, description and clever answers to profile questions. Registered users can then make contact with the user, usually through a messaging or chat system within the site and if the match is successful the relationship moves off of the site into the real world. Online dating services are big business. The online personals industry generated $53. 1 million in revenue in the first quarter of this year. That number is over 5 1/2 times the $8. 1 million total for that period in 2001. That number will likely continue to grow substantially this year once industry wide figures are available. Revenue at the leading service Match. com more than doubled in the third quarter of 2002 to $33. 4 million and this is a company with less than one third of the market. Nearly 34 million people visit personals sites each year6. The industry is dominated by two major players. Match. com is the biggest site with nearly 6 million visitors per month while Yahoo, at 3. 4 million, is the second most popular site, leveraging its large population of web directory and email users7. Following well behind these two are a dozen or so fairly evenly trafficked sites (see chart: Major Players in Online Dating). The business models for most of these sites are some combination of free and paid access. For all the sites browsing the ads is free. However users have to register and pay between $20 and $25 in order to post ads or respond to ads or both. Over 93% of online dating subscription prices are in the $5-50 range8. Both Match. com and Yahoo charge to post an ad and respond to ads. Lavalife (the 10th most trafficked site) is free to post ads but requires users buy credits in order to contact other users. Overall 98% of purchases at online dating sites are subscriptions. 54% of those subscriptions are monthly, 22% annual. The user population of online dating sites is about 60% male, 40% female9. The ages of users range from 18 to 80 with the largest percentage (32%) between 35 and 44 years of age. Followed by 24% for 25-35 year olds, 22% for 45-54 year olds and 11% each amongst 18 to 24 year olds and those 55 and over (see graph: age distribution)10. The fastest growing segment appears to be the 18-30 space. In the first quarter of 2002, fully half of the new users of Match. com have been under 3011. This suggests that dating sites are no longer just for the desperate, those over 35 and still single, but have become another source for those with time and looks on their side to accelerate their dating or improve their dating efficiency. 5 Online Dating Growth While spending on online content as a whole has increased, no category has increased more than online dating (see graph: Quarterly Growth of Consumer Spending by Category of Online Content). While the other categories such as business content and research have experienced steady linear growth, the growth curve for online dating is an exponential curve. Not only is it growing but the rate of growth quarter over quarter is also increasing. At its current rate by the time numbers are available for the rest of 2002 it will exceed business spending as the largest category of online spending. It is also the only category of online content that has significant consumption externalities. When purchasing any of business content, research, single player games, news, credit help, sports or online greeting cards, the number of other users of the product does not play more than a minor role in the purchasing decision. There is also plenty of room for the industry to grow in both revenue and users. Soon these services will have video chat capabilities12. People will overcome a lot of their negative perceptions of the practice as the number of users increase and many of these primarily US-based services will begin to expand internationally. Many products are not useful without a complementary product. Portable CD players are useless without headphones, and DVD players require DVDs to play. This is one of the factors that separate network goods from goods such as an apple which can be consumed by itself. Arguably online dating services could be the required complementary product to the Internet. With an Internet connection one needs content to look at, and certainly users of online dating services are required to have an Internet connection, so there is some complementarity here but this connection is somewhat weak. While CDs are needed for a CD player to be useful at all, dating services are not a requirement for the Internet to be useful. Further, even with the rapid growth in online personals, it still lags Internet growth and coverage so significantly that for at least the next little while the overall growth of the Internet will have a negligible effect on online dating when compared to the growth it will experience from existing Internet users. With the requirement many networked goods have for complementary products comes the need for compatibility and standards. The benefits of making goods compatible with others are clear. Consumers can benefit by being able to choose from a number of headphone choices knowing that for the most part (except on airplanes) these headphones will plug into their CD player, stereo, and computer. From a headphone manufacturers perspective it is far cheaper to build for a standard jack than specifically for every device. While there is not a single standard that all online dating services are based on to the point where a profile or other stored information from one service can be seamlessly transferred to any other, several competing platforms are starting to emerge. Nerve. com, after the rapid growth of the personals section of its website, spun the service off into a separate company, Springstreet Networks, which provides a standardized shared match making service for other content providers such as salon. com, bust, boston. com and others14. Match. coms database is shared with licensees including msn. com, nytimes. com and villagevoice. com to name a few. Relationship Exchange is another network that powers the personals services behind. cupidjunction. com, and personals. canada. com amongst others. Even some of the smaller dating sites like people2people. com are licensing their databases to online newspaper sites like sfgate. com. The competition is not necessarily amongst the dating sites themselves but the networks they supply and pull from. However, Yahoo Personals is independent and not licensed to other parties. It is banking on its existing position as the top website on the Internet15 and its large pool of users of its other tools to provide a large enough pool of users. Lavalife also has its own proprietary system and is banking on its unique features and credit based rather than subscription based system. While Yahoo and Lavalife are staunchly independent, the advantages to smaller sites are obvious. A personals site is only as valuable as its pool of profiles that match the user. If the user is unable to find people with the same interests, geography and whatever other characteristics determine a match, the user will not subscribe to the site for very long, nor be enticed to subscribe in order to contact a matching user. The larger the pool of people, the better the selection of people that may match, the more likely the user is to subscribe or purchase credits. 6. 3 Consumption Externalities The increase in value with an increase in users is the fourth characteristic of networked industries: consumption externalities. If there is one heterosexual person of each gender on one of these sites the possible number of connections is only one. However with five people of each gender the number of possible connections is 25. With 100 males and 100 females the number of possible connections is 10,000. Thus the total value of the network, as measured by the number of possible connections, increases by Vn = nm x nf where n is the number of users and m and f indicate male and female respectively.

Mustang Or Camero :: essays research papers

MUSTANG OR CAMERO? Ever since the General Motors company built the first vehicle to compete with Henry Ford and the ford motor company, consumers have argued over which was better. Back in those days the better car was the one that fell apart last and was the cheapest. Today consumer values have changed, and with that change comes a want for more options and a good value for those options. â€Å"Creature Comfort† as it’s called is a big priority for the consumer. The next biggest thing is performance; the consumer wants a good performing machine that’s going to give them â€Å"Creature comfort† and a great value. Early consumers got to look a one option windshield or no windshield. Today the consumer gets to ponder over options like power windows and door locks, Air conditioning, Leather interior, CD players, and keyless entry systems. With an evaluation of the sports car market, I will compare the 98 Ford Mustang and the 98 Chevrolet Camero. I have owned both of these vehicles and am very knowledgeable on both of them. The knowledge I have gained over the past five years as a consumer and as a driver of both of these cars will prove that the Mustang is a much better buy than the Camero. I will start things off in my evaluation with one of the main aspects of a car that almost all consumers look at, gas mileage. I will start things off with the Camero Z28. The Z28 is the top of the line Camero and the biggest performer. The Z28 gets eighteen miles to the gallon in the city and twenty-nine on the highway. The Mustang Cobra R is the top of the line Mustang put out by ford, and is its biggest performer. The Cobra R gets twenty-one miles per gallon in the city and thirty-one on the highway. This gives the Mustang an advantage in gas mileage. The next aspect will be performance. This puts the two cars very close in statistic likeness. The mustang will be the first to go. The mustang in its cheapest form gets 200hp @ 5200rpm, the Cobra R mustang is the mustang in its most expensive form gets 315hp @ 5200rpm. The mustang Cobra R will run the standing  ¼ mile in 13.8 seconds @ 102 miles per hour. The Camero in its base cheapest form has 200hp @ 5200rpm.

Factors Affecting Psychological Pressures on High School Students

The many pressures of high school can have various effects on students. Depending on the student and their lifestyle, the effects can be either positive or negative. There are many aspects that have an affect on a student†s performance in school. Some of the factors include home life, social life, academic life and after school life. The entirety of their time management and decisions has the most affect on their performance (Katz 11). At home, a student goes through many different circumstances that their peers and teachers may be unaware of. For example, if a student has divorced parents, this will play a key role in determining how they perform in school. Alcoholic and abusive parents are also sometimes a factor. Often, students with a rough home life will perform at a lower level in school due to the other things they are going through at home. On the other hand, often an abused teen will put more effort into their schoolwork in order to fulfill needs of self-satisfaction that are not being met at home (Pickett 14). Often teens with older siblings perform better in school. Studies show that the younger children do better in high school. This is most often attributed to the fact that they have seen what high school students go through and have learned from their siblings mistakes as well as achievements. Though the criteria for graduating high school and the individual courses are becoming more difficult each year, younger siblings seem to improve over their older brothers and sisters (Katz 11). The social life plays a big role in high school life. It is often difficult for a student to balance the many aspects of high school life and often they go overboard with either social or academic obligations (Childress 618). The friends that a teen keeps will play a major role in determining how the student will perform in school. Their friends will determine how much and what type of peer pressure the student is submitted to. There are two types of peer pressure. The first type, and most common is negative peer pressure. With this type of peer pressure, the teen will be pressured to participate in many negative acts. This may include, but not be limited to, drugs, alcohol, skipping school, cheating and putting down other students (Kate 11). The second type of peer pressure is positive peer pressure. With this type of peer pressure the teen is influenced to do things such as strive for good grades and participate in other positive activities (Katz 12). Parties are a common part of the teen life today. Often, teenage parties will include negative influences, however it is not difficult for a student to avoid such situations if they just have strong morals (Katz 11). A teen†s social life may also include a job. Working teens are becoming more and more common. The need to feel accepted by peers and have the â€Å"right† clothes and car are major influences in this. Teens may also elect to keep a job to help with family financial difficulties or just to keep them busy (Katz 12). Academic life is the most crucial part of the high school experience. How they perform in high school will dictate what kind of college they will attend. It is important for students to have a well-rounded social life while still performing well in their academics. The last two years of high school are the most important. This is when the teen should be preparing to enter college and take things more seriously. However, this is usually opposite of what happens (Childress 617). If a teen can balance a healthy social life while still performing well academically, they usually will be able to do the same in college and life. Extra-curricular activities occupy much of a teen†s life. What they do to participate in other school-sponsored activities will take up a lot of their time. This can be solved by only selecting activities that will add to their learning experience (Childress 616). The life a teen takes on after school each day is very important in understanding their life in general. They may participate in sports and clubs that will use up much of their time (Kruse 6). Football is a major sport that is taken very seriously in high school (Wahl 92). The competition in high school sports is enough to take some athlete†s minds off their schoolwork. Rival schools games against each other often will tear the entire school away from academics the week prior to the game (Guss 10). Clubs are also a big part of teen†s life. Often they participate for fun and other times just for looks of it on college applications. However, if a student overloads on clubs and other after school activities, their academics may suffer. In its entirety, a teenager†s life is very hectic. They have many stresses and pressures to deal with each day. It is in it†s own, a major accomplishment just to make it through high school and on to college. With the pressures being put on teens to succeed growing each day, each goal met in school, is a victory in itself. The different aspects of the teen†s life all have an effect on the outcome of their performance in school. To some, high school is like a big game. Each move made is a crucial decision towards the outcome of life. When one focuses on only one part of the teen†s life, it is impossible to make any conclusion about their lifestyle. In the game of a teen†s life, maybe Maurice Freeman put it best when saying, â€Å"We†ve got to win. † (Person 12)

Employee Motivation - 886 Words

This is a dissertation abstract on Employee Motivation: Why study motivation? To state it simple you need to know motivation to be a better leader to accomplish your business goals. Employees are like sheep you need to lead them to accomplish the mission. It is much easier to lead a group of individuals when they have a vested interest to accomplish it. You create that interest through motivation. The key to a successful organization in many ways is motivation. It is one of the most difficult tasks that a manager faces because everyone is different. The methods that are used to motivate employees must be tailored to fit each one. Every organization should have motivation plans in placed to show how they value employees. Some of the most†¦show more content†¦One of the first things that must be done is an assessment of the motivation issue. Management must assess how to motivate the staff and to determine if there are signs of de-motivation. If the assessment shows serious/critical signs of de-motivation, an action plan needs to be implemented. The question that is probably most often asked by managers is â€Å"How do I motivate people at work?† To answer that question discusses with the staff on what their work goals are and how they feel it should be accomplished. Constantly provide feedback on what staff has done well and where improvement is needed. Always encourage the staff to express their views on their performance. Continually evaluate the staff’s performance throughout the appraisal period rather than focusing on periods where their performance was particularly good or bad. Provide all the tools necessary and consider the training and/or development needs of staff. Individual basis motivation can be achieved using worthwhile work, power of acknowledgement, and personal credibility. People need to know that what they are doing has a meaning. 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