I don’t like gimmicks. Fancy graphics and an exotic location do not sway me. If anything, they indicate to me that you have nothing else to offer—all style and no substance. Just sit in front of a camera and tell me about your teaching style. Better yet, show me your teaching style. I don’t need a flag of Spain and flamenco music to tell me that you’re a Spanish teacher, or to convince me that I’m going to get an “authentic” experience with you.

I'd agree with all of those, except perhaps the teacher / student ratio, if the teacher is fairly new. I haven't myself seen any teachers mistaking italki for a dating site, but that would be bad.

Usually I'm more looking for - I'm going to use this phrase to mirror the original post, not in its idiomatic meaning - usually I'm looking more for "turn ons" - reasons to like a particular teacher, in the sense of thinking that that teacher might work for me.

Those include speaking the target language clearly and not too quickly in the promo video, seeming to have a good grasp of both formal and idiomatic usage and the discernment to mix these up appropriately, an awareness of us learners as people with individual quirks and different language-learning needs, and that quiet, watchful awareness in the profile video that suggests a calm inner confidence and a lack of focus on the profile as a money-generating selling tool ...

@ Michael

I agree with your remark concerning newcomers.

In fact, I am always very open to giving them a first chance, and using my guts feeling I often did so, too. OK, a few times I got disappointed, but often enough I found wonderful teachers teaching great lessons.

I usually skip those teachers whose promo video has low resolution and background noises. It can be a sign that there may be technical issues during the lesson.

@ Aura　オーラ

What you say about some Japanese tutoring rings a bell. Some teachers already disqualify themselves in the first sentence they utter in their video. For Japanese this is a typical "私の名前は...です。" Though grammatically there is nothing wrong about this sentence, I was told by many Japanese speakers that "No Japanese person ever speaks like this. It is only foreigners and Japanese teachers teaching Japanese to foreigners who use this sentence".

By the way, we have the same problem with several German teachers using "Mein Name ist..." with a first name only, which on a grammatical level is not wrong. Even though many of these teachers are "original" Germans, that formula is rather formal and should only be used with the last name or the full name. Interestingly, I recently had a discussion about this with a Chinese student of mine speaking (and writing) really excellent academic German. She told me: "I know that, we learn this during our first semester at university". So, it looks like these days Chinese universities are providing better teaching than many German highschools...