Case Study
Case Study Online Dating Site
How the PIXRAY Filter™ boosts a major Online Dating Network’s profile picture quality
In many cases pictures were only released more than 24 hours after they were uploaded
An Online Dating Network’s main asset is a well-kept base of user profiles that creates a feeling of security and trust amongst its customers. The pictures users upload to their profiles are the single feature of the user base which is predominantly recognized when browsing the site. They are placed prominently in search results, in match making suggestions and play a major role in teasers promoting the conversion to premium accounts. Profile pictures that do not show real people in a well-recognizable way have strong negative effects on the usability of the site. Profile pictures that show alienating content (e.g. nudity or pornography) are likely to deeply affect the level of trust users have in the platform. When a major European player in the online dating industry approached PIXRAY they had long realized the direct and indirect positive effects of enforcing strict criteria on the profile pictures uploaded by users. Each image uploaded was assessed by a moderator before it eventually got published on the site. The image moderation process was handled by a team of 40 full time content moderators working in shifts. Manual moderation is expensive due to high labour costs for the moderators and the management overhead for the team. During usage peaks that occurred particularly in the evening and night hours on Fridays and Saturdays, the moderation team was only able to release pictures with huge delays. In many cases pictures were only released more than 24 hours after they were uploaded. Those delays particularly affected the site’s usability for newly signed up users that now had to use the site without a profile photo, thus having a sharp impact on the premium conversion rates for new users. Together with the customer the PIXRAY team analysed the current moderation approach. The human image moderators assessed each image by the following criteria: there has to be exactly one well recognizable face in the image (i.e. the image must show at least one person but must not show a group of people), the depicted face has to have a minimum size and must be sufficiently sharp and well exposed. Furthermore there must not be any text (e.g. email or web addresses, phone numbers) in the image and the image must be a real photo and not a drawing or a comic. Finally the human moderators ensured that the images do not depict inappropriate nudity.
83% of all uploaded images are immediately released during the users upload process
After analysing the customers moderation requirements the PIXRAY experts created a custom configuration for the PIXRAY Filter™ to match the customer’s demands. The Online Dating Network’s technology department supplied a week’s collection of profile picture uploads on which a sample classification run was performed using the PIXRAY Filter™. The resulting statistics were then presented to the customer’s executive team, which thus was able to evaluate the quality of the automated classification by the PIXRAY Filter™ without having to allocate any internal developer resources or having to touch the moderation process in place. In the next step the PIXRAY consultants worked with the customer’s product management to develop a strategy for how to integrate the PIXRAY Filter™ into the customer’s moderation process. The customer opted for a semi-automated moderation process, meaning that each uploaded image is analysed in real time and each image that is classified to clearly fit the customer’s moderation criteria is immediately released. When the automatic classification rejects the picture the user is prompted, whether he wants to keep the picture and move it to manual moderation or whether he wants to upload a new, more suitable picture. Only those images where the user actively opted to move the image to manual moderation will be processed by the human moderation workforce. One month after the client had integrated the PIXRAY Filter™ the statistics proved the positive effects: 83% of all uploaded images are immediately released during the users upload process. Of the remaining 17% of all image uploads 11% of the users opt to move the image to manual moderation while 6% resubmit another, more suitable image or quit the upload process. Virtually all users that quit the upload process upon first rejection of their image tried to upload evidently abusive content in first place. Those images that are moved to manual moderation are typically processed within minutes, because the workload of the moderation team has sharply declined. The impressive net effect of the integration of the PIXRAY Filter™ is that the vast majority of users that upload suitable images now see their images being published without any delay while the image volumes that have to be moderated by the manual moderation workforce have dropped by 88%. At the same time the conversion of new users to paid accounts has seen an increase while the churn rate on the overall user base dropped slightly thanks to increase usability of the site.
