Yahoo! Personals

» see personals.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

yahoo personals was the kind of thing american adults used. i was not in that demographic. when it launched in 1997 i was thirteen, dialing 14.4k modems into ttnet to download winamp skins, and the whole question of an online dating service in english felt as far away as a tax form for a country i did not live in. by the time i was old enough for the product to even be relevant, yahoo personals was already a thing other people were on. dating online in turkey in the mid two thousands had its own track, with siberalem and a small set of local sites, and yahoo's product never really localized hard into that market.

so this is an obit written from across an ocean. yahoo personals was a major piece of the early online dating economy, and when it finally got handed off to match.com in july 2010, it took thirteen years of subscriber data with it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

launched in 1997 as an extension of the yahoo portal, the service started free. by 2001 yahoo had switched to a paid model where contacting other members required a subscription, and the product became one of the early successful examples of the freemium dating funnel that match.com had pioneered two years earlier. localized editions opened in english and spanish, with french and a few others following. by 2003, online personals as a category had around forty million monthly us visitors, and yahoo personals was a serious slice of that.

the product had the standard yahoo of the era styling. a big yahoo header bar at the top with a search form below that asked age range and zip code, profile photos that loaded slowly one at a time on dsl. it sat in the same portal that gave you yahoo mail and yahoo messenger, so for a certain kind of american single in the 2002 to 2008 window, yahoo personals was the obvious starting point because it was already on the same homepage you opened every morning.

~ the match handoff ~

by 2010 the dating space had hardened. match.com had the paid mainstream and okcupid was eating into the bottom of the funnel with a free-by-default model that yahoo had no answer for. yahoo's own portal model was dying as a category and personals was no longer something the company actually wanted to operate. on may 24, 2010 match announced a partnership where it would be the exclusive dating provider on yahoo. on july 21, 2010 yahoo personals as a separate product shut down. existing accounts migrated and the brand was retired.

this is one of the cleanest examples of a portal slowly eating itself by handing off everything that was actually a business to specialists who could run it better. yahoo did the same with travel and with maps later. each handoff was reasonable on its own and taken together they were yahoo's whole story.

~ the long tail ~

match.com on yahoo continued for a few more years as a co-branded product before that arrangement also wound down. the personals data, what survived of it, lives somewhere inside match group's larger user base now. there is no archive of the original yahoo personals interface that i can find. it was a product designed for use, not memory, and when it left there was nothing to return to.

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