Video Personals: What's the Hold Up?

Filed in archive Trends on April 12, 2010

Why aren't there more video personals?

Dating Insider took a look at video personals recently. The first hold up seems editorial in nature. How would dating sites monitor what you put in your videos? They don't really trust you (and that's probably a good thing). When you type content and publish it in words, the computer can do the editing. Some crowd sourcing takes place ("flag this article as obnoxiously inappropriate..."). Of course, eventually it will become cost effective for dating sites to use speech-to-text software to simply convert what you say in a video into text. Then the same software that scans what you write for offensive language can scan your videos for offensive language. They'll start out simply deleting your whole video, but then they'll move to cutting the unacceptable parts of it.

The question then becomes, how comfortable are users themselves with video. My guess is that many people are, and many people aren't. But time will change that balance...