An OkCupid user paid $1,800 in three months to promote their profile.
According to BuzzFeed, this member paid for the Spotlight feature of OkCupid, launched this July, which gives 15 minutes of extra promotion to user profiles for $2.
Jeffrey Kip, Chief Financial Officer of IAC, which owns OkCupid, said: “There’s a row of potential people of the gender you’re interested in across the top of your screen when you log in – that row gets clicked on with much greater propensity than if you do a search.”
Spotlight also includes a panel which says how many people are viewing your profile.
Kip says that the feature is working well and it will be used on IAC sites.
Greg Blatt, Chief Executive Officer of IAC said: “Someone paid us $1,800 in three months on a so-called free site.
“On Match, the king of so-called paid sites, the most someone can pay us over three months is around $150 or less than one-tenth of that even if they’re willing to pay us more… the biggest indicator of who will pay for these dynamic features is the fact that they’re already paying for subscription offerings.”
The feature has become a way to monetize OkCupid, which gets revenue from “A-list” membership and advertising.
Most of the people paying for the new promo bump on OkCupid are already subscribers.
IAC calls the venture “transactional monetization”.
OkCupid co-founder and President Christian Rudder told BuzzFeed that more than 2,500 people were using Spotlight to promote themselves in the first 24 hours of its existence.