Welcome to our first HubPeople Masters.
This is a gathering of our strategic partners to share and grow.
- ✓Where the industry standsAffinity and Excite dating, and where the numbers are heading in 2026.
- ✓What's changing in digital marketingGoogle's updates, and what agentic search is doing to acquisition.
- ✓Where the opportunities areWhat we're building, and where partners can plug in.
Thanks for making the time. Let's get into it.
My new book is live, and free for everyone here.
Dating App
How to build, survive and thrive in the world's most human tech industry.
By Michael O'Sullivan, founder of HubPeople. Free copy for every HubPeople Masters attendee, today.
Every founder who pitches me their dating app idea will now get this book assigned first. It's the clearest, richest account I've read of what founders in this industry actually go through.
Leave a review
We've been heads-down since launch and haven't promoted it much. A few extra reviews would help a lot, thank you.
Scan to leave a review on Goodreads H2 2025 - bumpy. H1 2026 - strong growth.
H2 2025
Google PPC changes and SEO updates hit hard across the back half of last year.
H1 2026
+45%Core-geo registrations, Jan to July. Excite remains the larger part of the business overall, Affinity closing.
New registrations this July split 54% Excite and 46% Affinity.
Three things are driving the H1 recovery.
Registrations are up 95%, and ChatGPT is now part of the mix.
Organic / direct
+95%ChatGPT referral
0.5 › 20/wkChatGPT already drives one in six registrations here.
Organic / direct
+119%ChatGPT referral
1.5 › 11.5/wkWhere niche demand is moving, and where it converts.
January vs July 2026, across Affinity and Excite.
Where Affinity niche demand is moving, and where it converts.
Balanced winner
+47.3%BBW registrations. July upgrade 6.19%, efficiency +10.2%. Both volume and quality moved the right way.
Hidden opportunity
+96.1%Gamer upgrade-rate improvement. Registrations fell 26.6%, yet July upgrade reached 7.82%.
Scale opportunity
+346.4%Mature registrations. July upgrade fell to 2.16%, efficiency down 66.9%. Scale is real, traffic quality needs work.
Also worth watching: Christian (+55.5% registrations, +3.1% efficiency), Widows (+5.6%, +26.3%), Active (-2.6%, +58.0%) and Countryside (-24.0%, +20.9%).
Where Excite niche demand is moving, and where it converts.
Scale winner
+30.9%Couples registrations. July upgrade 5.39%, efficiency +15.4%. The strongest large-scale commercial signal.
Best quality growth
+49.4%BBW upgrade-rate improvement. Registrations also rose 25.9%, July upgrade 4.06%.
Breakout niche
+71.5%Spanish registrations, with upgrade efficiency up 36.0% at the same time. One of the cleanest growth signals in the report.
Also worth watching: Cuckold (+486.9% registrations, -23.3% efficiency), Dogging (+15.9%, +26.7%), Senior (+39.6%, +9.1%) and Transgender (-6.7%, +47.3%).
Google's August 2026 spam update.
Who was hit, who wasn't, and the behaviours that keep partner brands growing.
18–21 August 2026 · Global, all languages · Partner briefing
A short, global update, not a new SEO playbook.
Google's guidance stayed the same: create helpful, reliable, people-first content, and avoid anything designed mainly to manipulate rankings.
The pattern: scale without enough original value.
Google hasn't published a named list of affected sites. These are the patterns called out in Google's own spam policies and in public reporting on the update.
Source: Google's spam policies, and public reporting on the August 2026 update.
Useful, focused sites were not the obvious target.
The resilient pattern
- A clear audience and primary purpose
- Original experience, data or expertise
- Pages built around real user intent
- A useful answer without filler
- A coherent site, not a keyword factory
The headline
Slow and useful beat fast and thin.
Scale is fine when value scales with it. Scale becomes risky when originality and usefulness don't.
No August hit. Partner brands keep growing.
No ranking falls tied to the August rollout across partner brands, and growth has continued.
Google isn't banning AI content.
Good use
- Research and structure
- Turning original expertise into clearer content
- Working from your own brand knowledge and data
- Genuine examples, images and experience
- Human review for accuracy and usefulness
Risky use
- Thousands of near-identical pages
- Rewriting or stitching other sources
- Query variants with no distinct user need
- Content outside your genuine expertise
- Publishing because a keyword exists, not because a user needs it
The test isn't whether AI was used. It's whether the finished page adds real value for the visitor.
Ten behaviours to keep.
A practical content standard for HubPeople partners after the August update.
Write for a real niche audience
Know exactly who the page is for, and what they need.
Add something only you can add
First-hand experience, community insight, original data, a distinctive point of view.
Prefer fewer, stronger pages
Don't manufacture a URL for every keyword variation.
Keep each page genuinely distinct
Location, niche and intent pages need substantive differences, not token swaps.
Use AI to accelerate expertise
Feed it your knowledge. Don't outsource the reason the page exists.
Show who created the content
Clear authorship and credible expertise, where readers expect it.
Make the answer easy to reach
Fast pages, clear headings, no padding to hit a word count.
Build a browsable site
Logical hierarchy and internal links beat isolated doorway pages.
Audit before scaling
Prove usefulness and conversion before multiplying a template.
Measure satisfaction, not just rank
Watch engagement, registrations and downstream quality, not traffic alone.
Five questions before a page goes live.
If several answers make you wince, improve the page before asking Google to index it.
Don't chase the update. Keep building the right thing.
Keep growing without becoming a content factory.
What an example site structure looks like.
The proposal for CurvaliciousDating.com - from what actually works.
The AI toolkit: what's coming next.
And five more on the way.
Bringing more of the intelligence in-house.
Tuesday Workshop calls (2pm weekly).
- ✓Good to see everyone, regularlyGreat to see you all and touch base on a real cadence.
- ✓More starter content on the wayFor partners who haven't gotten off the ground with AI yet.
- ✓Partners are shaping the toolkitDelighted that partners are contributing ideas, code and suggestions we can action directly.
Keep it coming. This is better built together.
Questions?
And any feedback on the format, we'd love to hear it.
Thank you for being here. Now let's hear from you.
August 2026