Science Dating Sites

I randomly came across this site today, and it looks fully functional with features such as instant messenger and a chat room.

Their home page has the following quote:

Is Carl Sagan a hero to you? Is E=mc² more than just some obscure formula you forgot in school? Yell "cool" when lightning flashes close by? Strange and unfathomable implements populating your basement? Yep, you've got it bad and need someone to play with.

I wish them luck, but they have no idea the huge amount of investment in advertising required to bring members to their site. So far I have spent close to $50,000 to bring around 16,500 members
to my site Brainiac Dating. My goal is 100,000 members, so there is still a long way to go.

SciCafe at the Museum of Natural History

I am blogging everywhere I can about this exciting event at the Museum of Natural History in New York City:


Valentine's Day 101:
Why Humans Have Sex
Wednesday, February 3 | 7 PM

I am taking my two meetup groups to the event, which could be 20-30 people.

New York Brainiac Singles

and

Matchmakers




Mix science with romance and join evolutionary psychologist
David M. Buss, author of Why Women Have Sex, for a special
Valentine’s Day edition of SciCafe. Learn about mating strategies
and discuss why sex is used for more than just reproduction
and pleasure.





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scientists study it in yeast.
Love's Labors and Costs : "Spent" looks at why, when scientific
research shows that more stuff doesn’t lead to more happiness,
humans are driven to endlessly acquire.
Love at 1,200 Hz : An irritating, disease-laden species of mosquito
proves that it can also be sophisticated, sensual, and even romantic.

Read More

Why does Plenty of Fish care about your money?

Is Plenty of Fish's management insane?



This was a new message I saw when I recently logged into the website.

This is definitely going to hurt POF, and may even result in a legal action.
Why do they need it for matching people. I don't care about that. I just use the search to find matches.
I think they need it for improving their advertising targeting. Thus it looks like just another money grab.

Their policy for kicking people off the site is also very questionable.
I know several people on my site - Brainiac Dating who have been kicked out of POF without valid reasons.

Another Good Idea Gone Bad

I came across this site quite randomly, and one of the profile icons on the home page was this
shirtless guy who apparently doesn't have any favorite books:



So my question is: is this guy for real? What did he think he would find on the site? He's not a spammer, because a spammer would at least have taken the time to use a picture of a good looking guy and put favorite books as "shakespear". That's what I used to see on my site -
Brainiac Dating until I blocked access from most of Africa.

Match Not Targeting a Smart Singles

I just got this email recently in my inbox:

They really need to target me better, or anyone else with a brain. Do I really expect that this young woman is falling for me already. I can't imagine how this kind of ad works. And what does "communicate freely" mean? I doubt that it means I can send and respond to other members for free. I'm sure that it's just a trick to get me to sign up and pay their membership fee.

Google Rank Not Showing My Site!!

My site BrainiacDating.com should come up #1 in the search for smart singles because it is the biggest dating site for smart singles with nearly 15,000 members. But not so! A Google search on the term "smart singles" brings me to esmartsingles.com - but this is a tiny site with almost no traffic except for the strays that wonder here through Google. (alexa.com shows a ranking of above 14 million.)



The reason for their high ranking is the way Google analyzes the site's HTML. On their home page I see:



TITLE: e Smart Singles online intelligent people personals for men and women.

META NAME="description" content="e Smart Singles has online intelligent personals for dating romantic men and women."

META NAME="keywords" content="e Smart Singles, free personal ads, affair, romantic men, intelligent personals, casual, fantasy, adult, sex, love, romance, secret, encounters, unfaithful, dating, erotic, chat, friendship girl, usa, american personals, internet friends, love, matchmaking"

It could be that Google reserves the term "smart singles" for paid advertisers if their is significant traffic, then Google knows that I can make money by selling this term. Aha... I can see that match.com has purchased this term as they come up at the top left of the page!

Smart Celebrities

I've been compiling a list of my favorites, do you agree?

1. Danica McKellar - actress from the Wonder Years who has a degree in math from UCLA and published a math paper and two best selling books on why math is cool. How come I never had any math teachers who looked like that.

2. World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Vitali Klitschko - has a PhD in sports science. Better to refer to him as "doctor" or he will pummel you! [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="175" caption="Wladimir Klitschko"][/caption]

3. Geena Davis - is a multi-talented actress, former model, producer, athlete and is member of MENSA.
She speaks several languages and can play a few different musical instruments.

4. Dolph Lundgren - action hero movie star has a masters Degree in Chemical Engineering and won a Fulbright scholarship to MIT. He is also a Karate champion, and was a member of Sweden's elite marines, so is a true
action man.


The rest of the list:
Natalie Portman - actress, has a degree from Harvard and has co-authored two science papers.
Jodie Foster - has a degree from Yale and has acted in French films.
James Woods - actor went to MIT and is a member of MENSA
Rachel Maddow - talk show host was a Rhodes Scholar and has a PhD from Oxford.
Sharon Stone - actress - is a member of MENSA
Matt Damon - actor went to Harvard, but dropped out shortly before graduating.
Kate Beckinsdale - studied at Oxford and has published poetry.
Elizabeth Shue, actress and director - graduated from Harvard.
Alicia Keys - singer - graduated high school at 16 and attended Columbia University.

Find non-celebrity single brainiacs at Brainiac Dating.com

Advertising Costs Going Up and Up!

The ad costs for my site - Brainiac Dating - on Facebook keeps going up and up, and is now on par with Google AdWords. It has been a linear progression starting at $1-$2 per conversion to $5-$10 now. All I have done is to optimize my
ads with better images, texts and targeting. So it is hard to understand how my costs have been going up. I saw the same trend on Google six months ago.

The graph below shows the daily clicks for the Brainiac Dating Fan page:

Either the bigger advertisers are jumping in, or a hypothetical initial leg up that we might have gotten from Facebook is now over. This is the invisible hand that helps the rookie advertisers.

Singles Ads on Facebook

I changed my status to "single" and "interested in women" just to see how I would be targeted on Facebook. Normally I would not divulge any information on Facebook, especially this - but it was interesting and eye-popping to see.

These are the ads that came up on my profile page:



These are all super-sexy ads, except for the Harvard one (maybe I should remove my schools as well). Anyway, how does Brainiac Dating even have a chance against these advertisers?
Maybe the brainiac dating ads should just show a sexy picture of a brain...

Intellidating - thinking dating events

I've noticed a new trend of dating activities that involve intelligent themes such as meeting at a library or attending a science night at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley:
Geek-out on October 31. I even saw ads for this on the SF Bart trains.

This is the description from their website:


You know who you are… You think Fantasy Football is even better than the real thing and that a spreadsheet is a perfectly reasonable way to keep track of past relationships. You’re already designing an art car for next year’s Burning Man, and you can’t stop talking about the endemic plants of the genus Ipomea that were recently put in to protect the coastal zone near your home.

Well, we’ve got some good news for you: Beginning Wednesday, October 21, it’s time to let your Geek flag fly!

Come to Lawrence Hall of Science, grab a drink and a friend, and get ready for some downright nerdy fun. All events include full access to exhibits, a cash bar, hors d’oeuvres, and of course the best view in the East Bay.

This seems like a cool event, and I wish I could do something like this in my NYC meetup group - Brainiac Singles.
I will contact the Museum of Natural History and see if they are interested.

There are other things like this such as nerd night in NY, and mindshare in LA.

Smart Friends Network

Most of my effort has been on singles with the BrainiacDating.com website, but I had tried to link them all together, the Brainiac singles meetup group, and a social network called the Brainiac Connection.  The meetup group has done very well, see the previous post, but the social network has remained in the background. My hope was that it would be a way for me to keep in touch with friends when I am no longer single.

So thinking to the future. Today I was even thinking of doing something for kids, but that is even further out.

So a few new ideas to try and grow the social network:

1) welcoming each new member and guiding them to the appropriate site

2) giving a higher placement of on the dating site

3) twittering it, but twitter is so full of spam.

4) examined it's SEO score on domain tools

There is also my new forum site: Brainiac Forum - each of these are connected.

Top dating site rankings falling

The past ninety days shows that many of the large dating sites have worse traffic rankings according to Alexa.com.
The most improved sites are OkCupid.com and Chemistry.com which show an 8% improvement in their rank. The most deteriorated sites are True.com and down2earth.com - which has shut down ( details...).
I have no idea what is going on at true, I guess it no longer is ;-)

My site - BrainiacDating.com has improved by 31% - which is great, but it has a long way to reach the upper echelons of dating sites rankings, and it's especially hard for a niche site.
But I have hope.

The raw data for this graph can be found on my site here.

Intellectual Dating

Once a month or so I do a google search on intellectual and intelligent dating, and today I found several new sites: datemymind and intellectualdating. At first I thought, wow I might actually have competition, but then I looked at these sites, and they don't even seem to have any real profiles yet. They're just getting started - but alas they have no chance of making it.

Here is a typical failed example: joedate.com - I only know about them because they hired someone to do their online marketing and I was contacted about doing a link exchange. Course I didn't exchange links with them because they didn't have anything to offer me at the time. But they obviously paid several thousand to a marketing agent who blasted the *world* with online ads and in doing so only created a spam filled site. Check it out, nothing but spam. It is a dead site, and thousands of dollars wasted. A sorry story, because the idea of coffee dating is good. I'd like to see something like that succeed. Maybe they should have just emailed the money to Africa for a save the children fund, than wasting time of the Nigerian internet cafes.



I'd like to warn the newbies to give up now, since they have zero chance, and I mean zero, not one in a million chance of making it. I am just about ready to throw in the towel myself. It costs a minimum of$5 to $10 to recruit each a new member, and that's after a year of experimenting with different ads and placements, and even worse, I have not been able to get a significant number of members to help out with recruiting new members.

I am going to keep watching these to see if they have any breakthroughs, and then maybe ask them if they want to pool forces. It's a tough niche to crack, and I know that I can use whatever help I can get.

New York Smart Singles Meetup

The meetup group that I started in New York is starting to have a life of it’s own. I posted up three new events last night, and one of them filled up in less than 12 hours and now has a long waiting list. In just over a year there are over 1750 members, and we can start doing more than one event per day. The only limit is the amount of time that I and the other organizers have for leading events.

Link: New York Brainiac Meetup Group


It is not easy to find other who can lead events, otherwise the group would have grown much faster. Luckily, Carrie who is doing most of the events now is fabulous, and many people have joined because of her. I have seen other organizers come and go, andwould love to get more help with this. Maybe at some point, I’ll start charging a small membership fee, like $30/year and that would enable me to spend more time on it. We have had several articles written about the group, and was even contacted by a NBC news reporter, but they unfortunately did not follow up with a story.

Brainiac Dating Member Blogs

On Brainiac Dating there are many interesting blogs posted by the members.



TaylorX posted a poem, sexy_rightbrain posted some troubling thoughts on her mind, Ireadpeople posted humor about cats.
Maxheadroom Membposted a popular post about a nutty email conversation .

Read blogs here...

If I only had a million dollars ...

the ads for my site - BrainiacDating.com would be all over the TV show "The Big Bang Theory". This is the 21st century version of "Friends" - it is a place for smart young single people to congregate.



There was one episode in which a Nobel prize winning physicist guest stars, and Sheldon is going to a conference. It is a show which really makes intelligence count, as opposed to friends in which dumb and pretty were fashionable, except for Ross - who was the brains of the group. Jokes played on their dumbness, now the jokes
mostly focus on social awkwardness of smart geeks - also not perfect. Being nerdy is funny. I know a very smart guy, well educated, but can't find his way walking around the New York without his GPS, and not just town, but even around the block.

Brainiac Dating Facebook Fan Page

Yippee, the Facebook fans page for BrainiacDating.com finally has 50 fans! Initially only a few of my friends had joined, and I could not get much momentum going especially since I am very careful who I call a friend. So in order to get the fan page going I created a Facebook ad campaign to direct Facebook members to the specific fan page, and viola they began coming in droves. The click through rate is 20% which is amazing and the cost per click is under $0.20 so this page should be able to grow fast.

Click here for the fans page.



There are only two problems with this fan page:
1) not everyone who becomes a fan also goes to brainiac dating and joins.
2) mostly men are becoming fans.

For the first problem, I have been able to customize the appearance of the page, and hopefully put some interesting links to keep the fans reading, and then occasionally remind them that there is a whole other site to check out.
For the second problem, I have been working on different ads for women, trying different keywords, images and bids.
Unfortunately the ads targeted to single women cost almost double than those directed at men, and the join rate is not
as high with women and men, but once women find out that the site is 62% men - hopefully the will be more eager to jump aboard.