Christmas. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. It is also ‘make or break’ for a lot of businesses… and a lot of relationships.
If you haven’t heard of them before, David McCandless and Lee Byron are researchers who ran a programme analysing the frequency of “break up” and “broken up” Facebook statuses. They also logged the most common times of the year that these changes occur.
They found that the year’s second highest time for break-ups was between mid-October and Christmas, second only to the spring break period spanning February to March. Is it any wonder that the post-Christmas period is one of the busiest times in the dating industry calendar?
Traditionally, the days that people are busy attending parties or spending time with their families over Christmas are the quietest days of the year, with the busiest generally taking place from New Years Eve onwards. This year was different.
Christmas Day is typically our quietest day of the year. True to form, this was the only truly quiet day across the festive period. However, unusually and surprisingly, it wasn’t our quietest day within the last twelve months. The traffic that the moderation team saw on Christmas Day was around 30% lower than our daily average. Yet on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, traffic untraditionally met near enough normal levels.
In contrast to this, six of the ten days that followed Christmas were ranked in our top ten busiest days of the year. Traffic that came through to the moderation team, and thus, also the levels of member engagement with our sites, increased by nearly 20% in the four weeks post-Christmas. In comparison to the same period last year, the volume rose by almost 70%!
One of the major differences in our ability to handle the volume of traffic this year was the introduction of 24/7 moderation team in late Spring. With their help, not only were we able to cope with the higher volume of items for approval, but this also meant that our average turnaround times for moderating pictures and profiles were three times faster than they were last year. Message moderations were also over four times quicker.
So, when Santa was sliding down chimneys, you were sitting down to carve up your Christmas turkey and quaffing champagne to see in the New Year, our moderators were still hard at work, helping all those freshly single faces fulfil their New Year resolutions to find the partner of their dreams.