To go along with Sunday’s mid-season premiere of The Walking Dead, Match.com is launching a new entertainment-driven platform targeted at bringing singles together over their love of a particular TV show.
“We realized that with singles in America today, one of the things that they connect on the most is the shows they watch and they love, and we wanted to figure out how to replicate what’s happening in the real world on the Match site and on the app,” explained Match.com CEO Mandy Ginsberg.
When AMC airs on TV, Match.com will invite their subscribers to talk about the how in a “live online viewing party” where users can connect with other singles interested in The Walking Dead.
After testing on previous episodes of The Walking Dead and Scandal, where 4 out of 5 people at the viewing party stayed for the entire hour-long broadcast. Also, Match found a demographic of people interested in the platform.
“We were a little nervous because we thought people might be inappropriate or say things that we’d have to monitor, but the fact of the matter is we didn’t need to because people were so into the show and were so funny in talking about what could happen, what they liked, what they didn’t like, it was so organic,” Ginsberg said. “It was like they were sitting at brunch with a bunch of friends and talking about what happened on ‘Scandal’ last night.”
The idea came after a study that Match.com conducted on singles in America, their dating habits, and viewing habits. The results of the survey found “millennials are 270% more likely than those of other generations to be turned on by someone who watches the same shows as they do.”
As a result of these findings, Ginsberg said Match.com is incorporating more TV shows into their platform to help singles make a new connection in the “entertainment-led society”.
“People didn’t used to talk about series, but now we all sit down and blow through them pretty quickly, so we think about shows in terms of series, and no one talked like that five years ago,” Ginsberg said. “If we can have people connect over series, that’s something we’re very excited about, I think it could change the game in terms of starting real conversations.”
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