Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize.
For one thing, their business model exacerbates a problem found on every dating site:


For another thing, as I'll explain, pay sites have a unique incentive to profit from their customers' disappointment.
As a founder of OkCupid I'm of course motivated to point out our competitors' flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt. But I intend to show, just by doing some simple calculations, that pay dating is a bad idea; actually, I won't be showing this so much as the pay sites themselves, because most of the data I'll use is from Match and eHarmony's own public statements. I'll list my sources at the bottom of the post, in case you want to check.
eHarmony claims over 20 million members on their homepage, and their CEO, Greg Waldorf, reiterates that number regularly in interviews1. If your goal is to find someone special, 20 million people is a lot of options—roughly a quarter of all singles in the U.S. This sounds awesome until you realize that most of these people can’t reply, because only paying customers are allowed to message.
So let's now ask the real question: of these 20 million people eHarmony claims you can flirt with, how many are actually able to flirt back? They closely guard their number of paid subscribers, with good reason. Nonetheless, we are able to deduce their base from known information. We'll give eHarmony the highest subscribership possible.
- We'll start with their yearly revenue: $250M in 2009 as reported by the industry analysts at Piper Jaffray and CNBC2.
- Since eHarmony charges users by the month, we'll divide that big number by 12 and, rounding up, get $21M.
- Now all we need to know is how much the average user pays per month. If we divide that into the $21M they make, we know how many subscribers they have. Their rates run this gamut:
$19.95 per month, for a 12-month subscriptionFrom those numbers, we can see that they have somewhere between about 350,000 and 1,050,000 subscribers (the lower number supposes everyone is month-to-month, the higher supposes everyone is yearly).
$29.95 per month, for a 6-month subscription
$59.95 per month, for 1 month at a time
- What's the exact number? Well, I found this helpful nugget in eHarmony's advertising materials3:
The most charitable way to interpret this last sentence is to assume their average account life is 6.5 months.
- We're almost there. To get eHarmony’s total subscribers, we divide their $21 million in revenue by the average subscription price. Therefore maximizing total subscribers is just a question of minimizing the average monthly fee. First off, let's do them the favor of assuming no one pays month-to-month.
- Our remaining dilemma can be expressed mathematically like this:
- After some dickery with a legal pad we discover, in the best case for eHarmony, 1/13 of their users are on the yearly plan, and the rest subscribe 6 months at a time. Thus the minimum average monthly fee is $29.18. They have at most 719,652 subscribers.
- For the sake of argument, let's round that up to an even 750,000.
So, having given eHarmony the benefit of the doubt at every turn, let's look at where that leaves their site:

Yes, only 1/30th of the "20 million users" they advertise is someone you can actually talk to. That's the paradox: the more they pump up their membership totals to convince you to sign up, the worse they look.
And the ironic thing is that although they basically admit their sites are filled with chaff, pay sites have little interest in telling you who's paying and who isn't. In fact, it's better for them to show you people who haven't paid, even if it means they're wasting your time. We'll show that in the next section.
First I want to show you what 29 to 1, advertised people to real, feels like. Here are some single, attractive OkCupid users.
And here are those same people behind a subscriber wall. That's pay dating in a nutshell.
Match.com's numbers are just as grim. They're a public company, so we can get their exact subscriber info from the shareholder report they file each quarter. Here's what we have from Q4 20094:

Remember, sites like Match and eHarmony are in business to get you to buy a monthly subscription. There's nothing wrong with profit motive, but the particular way these sites have chosen to make money creates strange incentives for them. Let's look at how the pay sites acquire new subscribers:

As you can see from the flow chart, the only way they don't make money is to show subscribers to other subscribers. It's the worst thing they can do for their business, because there's no potential for new profit growth there. Remember: the average account length is just six months, and people join for big blocks of time at once, so getting a new customer on board is better for them than eking another month or two out of a current subscriber. To get sign-ups, they need to pull in new people, and they do this by getting you to message their prospects.
If you're a subscriber to a pay dating site, you are an important (though unwitting) part of that site's customer acquisition team. Of course, they don't want to show you too many ghosts, because you'll get frustrated and quit, but that doesn't change the fact that they're relying on you your messages are their marketing materials to reach out to non-payers and convince them, by way of your charming, heartfelt messages, to pull out their credit cards. If only a tiny fraction of your message gets a response, hey, that's okay, you're working for free. Wait a second…you're paying them.
Now let's look how this skewed incentive affects the dating cycle, especially on sites like Match.com, where it's possible to for users set their own search terms.
Even more so than in real life, where fluid social situations can allow either gender to take the "lead", men drive interactions in online dating. Our data suggest that men send nearly 4 times as many first messages as women and conduct about twice the match searches. Thus, to examine how the problem of ghost profiles affects the men on pay dating sites is to examine their effect on the whole system.
There are two facts in play:
- When emailing a real profile, a man can expect a reply about 30% of the time. We've conducted extensive research on this, and you can read more about it our other posts. Let's couple this 30% reply rate with the fact that only 1 in every 30 profiles on a pay site is a viable profile. We get:
3/10 × 1/30 = 1/100
That is, a man can expect a reply to 1 in every 100 messages he sends to a random profile on a pay site. The sites of course don't show you completely random profiles, but as we've seen they have an incentive to show you nonsubscribers. Even if they do heavy filtering and just 2 of 3 profiles they show you are ghosts, you're still looking at a paltry 10% reply rate. - There is a negative correlation between the number of messages a man sends per day to the reply rate he gets. The more messages you send, the worse response rate you get. It's not hard to see why this would be so. A rushed, unfocused message is bound to get a worse response than something you spend time on. Here's a plot of 12,000 male users who've sent 10 total messages or more.
The effect of the second fact is to magnify the effect of the first. For a user trying to meet someone under such constraints, a feedback loop develops. Here's what happens to the average guy:


Basically, because the likelihood of reply to each message starts so low, the average man is driven to expand his search to women he's less suited for and to put less thought (and emotional investment) into each message. Therefore, each new batch of messages he sends brings fewer replies. So he expands his criteria, cuts, pastes, and resends.
In no time, the average woman on the same site has been bombarded with impersonal messages from a random cross-section of men. Then:


Finally, in the spirit of "don't take my word for it", here's how eHarmony and Match.com themselves show that their sites don't work.
This is from Match's 2009 presskit:

Okay, Match is double counting to get "12 couples", since a couple that gets married also gets engaged. So we have 6 couples per day getting married on the site, or 4,380 people a year. Let's round up to 5,000, to keep things simple. My first observation is that Match.com made $342,600,000 last year5. That's $137,000 in user fees per marriage.
Now here's where the demographics get really ugly for them.
It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com.
I figured it out like so:

Remember this is the minimum ratio, because from Match's perspective, we've made a lot of very favorable assumptions along the way. And it also doesn't matter that some portion of Match's customer base is overseas, because however you account for that in their subscriber base, you also have to adjust their marriage total accordingly.
eHarmony seems to do quite a bit better than Match, claiming in their ads to marry off 236 people a day:

Their higher rate shouldn't be too surprising, because eHarmony's entire site philosophy centers around matrimony, and furthermore that's the primary reason people go there. It's explicitly not a place for casual daters.
As they've told us, their member base of 750,000 people turns over every 6.5 months, which means that nearly 1.39 million people go through eHarmony's "doors" each year. eHarmony fails at least 93.8% of the timeFrom the ad, we can see that just 86,140 of those subscribers get married, a mere 6.2% of the people who paid the company to find them a mate. And what of the other 93.8%, the 1,298,475 people who do not get married and then leave the site? Those people paid an average of $190 each for a personality quiz.
A major selling point for the big for-pay dating sites Match and eHarmony is how many millions of members they have, and they drop massive numbers in their press releases and in talks with reporters. Of course, there's a solid rationale to wanting your dating site to seem gigantic. When people look for love, they want as many options as possible.
However, as I've shown above, the image these sites project is deceiving. So next time you hear Match or eHarmony talking about how huge they are, you should do like I do and think of Goliath—and how he probably bragged all the time about how much he could bench. Then you should go sign up for OkCupid.

- Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13cupid.html - The Big Business Of Online Dating
http://www.cnbc.com/id/35370922 - eHarmony.com's Advertising Splash Page
http://www.eharmony.com/advertising/singles - Match.com's Q4 2009 Report
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/IACI/871220273x0x349618/6d370897-220b-409b-a86e-e02801b3eed5/Gridsand MetricsQ42009.pdf. Match.com's 20 million membership claim is here: http://www.consumer-rankings.com/Dating/#table - Ibid.
- Centers For Disease Control
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm. Not sure why they care. - The U.S. Census "Unmarried and Singles Week"
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/007285.html
Addendum: eHarmony’s marriage rate vs. the national average
eHarmony’s 6.2% marriage rate is higher than the 4.5% U.S. average I calculated for comparison to Match.com, and several readers have asked whether that means joining eHarmony actually does help you get married. I believe it does not, and here’s why.
Remember, to get that 4.5%, I assumed that every person in the U.S. who’s not married or living with a partner is “single and looking”. That’s obviously false, but I did it to be as generous as possible to Match. In that section, the more people I assumed to be “single and looking”, the lower the nationwide marriage rate, thus the lower the ratio of U.S. marriages to Match.com marriages.
If we want to make the same comparison for eHarmony, since their site is so much more focused on matrimony, we really should get a more realistic marriage rate for the nation as a whole. I couldn’t find any hard data on this, but I will venture a guess that the nationwide marriage rate is around 9%.
The Census’s definition of “single” is anyone over 18 who’s not married or living with a romantic partner. That includes prisoners, senior citizens, college students, shut-ins, swinging bachelors, and your friend who’s been dating the same guy for a year but doesn’t live with him. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that half the 89.8 million people the census counts as “single” aren’t actually looking for a partner. That puts the nationwide marriage rate among people who actually are on the market at about 9%. Of course, nearly everyone on eHarmony is looking for a partner. So 9% to 6.2% is the apples-to-apples comparison, and it means that you’re about 50% more likely to be married if you’re not using eHarmony. Again, this is just an educated guess, but I believe it’s in the neighborhood of the truth.
Note also that this implies that the 12.4:1 ratio I calculated for Match is probably closer to 25:1. Again, this is just an educated guess. That’s why I left it out of the main article.
I made the mistake of paying for a subscription to YahooPersonals & only got two respectable replies. I’m estimating that 99% of activity I get out of there are those alleged “Russian brides” that really turn out to be con artists. It’s gotten to the point that I can spot them immediately by the “porn star” quality of their pictures & the grammer, syntax & spelling worse than anything we see from redneck Republicans. Some of them don’t even know as much about Russian culture & politics as I do.
One of the most annoying things I see are those profiles where a lady writes only a few superficial sentences about herself (really, who does not enjoy a sense of humor?) and then adds that she only wants to meet men who are intelligent & clever.
my fiance and I met on OKCupid.com. I would totally agree to it’s superiority and awesomeness compared to other dating site.
I’m surprised that the lawsuit against match.com for keeping dead profiles was not mentioned.
Met my boyfriend of 4 years on your site, AND I get to read nerdy articles about dating site user stats. OKCupid is the gift that keeps on giving!!
I got linked to this and didn’t realize it was an OKTrends blog post (awareness level goes down when you’re under the weather…). The whole time I was reading this article, I was thinking about how much this affirms my support for free dating sites like OKCupid, and how paying for dating sites just isn’t all that beneficial any longer.
I would like to see OKCupid’s success rate compared to those pay sites, though. Even if they’re lower, as long as there’s a decent amount of success, I would call it a win.
“On average, 236 eHarmony Members Marry Everyday.”
If they can’t even use the proper form of every day, how could I possible trust them with finding my life partner?
You forgot one other thing: OkC actively takes steps to get rid of problem users (like scammers, bots, etc.), those sites don’t. Three “dates” set up and two were really Nigerian scammers (not even in my COUNTRY), the other was a level 3 sex offender who’d forgotten to mention that “little detail”. Worst thing I’ve ever had happen through a free site – ANY OF THEM – was contact by my ex in violation of a protection order’s no contact clause and that was always handled swiftly. Not so the scams (or the sex offender) at the paid sites.
I’ve used EH off and on for the past couple of years and I have only met 3 people face to face. 3! That’s basically less than 1 person per year. What a crock of crap. I made the mistake of rejoining before I found out about Ok Cupid because it’s getting harder to meet men my age who is interested in dating or a have relationship. They kept sending me matches I did not want or what they deemed flexible matches. I guess to them, I was being a bit picky on what I am looking for. Better that I be picky than sloppy, right? Anyways during this current 3 month subscription promotion I would go weeks without getting a match. Now that my subscription is ending at the end of this month, NOW they start sending me a SLEW of 7+ matches a day in a way to entice me to renew. Heck no. Half of those profiles are big question marks. No pictures, a bunch of grammatical errors, half a** answers, etc. I will never pay for another dating site again if there are free sites to join.
Thanks OKC !
Just addressing the fact that women get too many messages and men get too few replies, I have an idea I think would be really help address the problem.
I love how OkCupid tags profiles with a little red, yellow, or green icon to show how often the user replies to first contact messages, but it misses the point a little bit, because it penalizes people (mostly women, I’m sure) who get more mail than they can respond to, and it does nothing to discourage the people who are really causing the problem: men who send a ton of emails that aren’t worth answering. What I’d like to see is a similar icon displayed next to each email’s subject line based on how many first-contact messages the sender has sent recently. Users who send a reasonable number of messages (like, say, less than the median amount) would get a green icon for their emails. Users who send a lot would get a yellow icon, and chronic spammers would get a red icon.
I think tagging emails this way would be very helpful to attractive women who are trying to sort through all the mail they get, and it would also be very helpful to men who put some thought into who they contact and what they say. The only people who would lose out would be the users who send way too many messages and make the site less useful for everyone.
““On average, 236 eHarmony Members Marry Everyday.”
If they can’t even use the proper form of every day, how could I possible trust them with finding my life partner?”
Maybe they meant that their members marry “everyday” (mundane) people. :p
I subscribed to eHarmony for a couple of months (got a month free trial, then paid for a month), and I was dreadfully disappointed by the selection. After taking their personality test, I went several weeks with their saccharine “we have no matches for you” message. When they did get me matches, only two of them replied–with one, I had no spark, and with another, he rejected me because I was “fat,” even though I was about average at the time.
I also tried Match.com for a month, and I discovered, to my dismay, that many of the people who use it lie about their status, as I nearly had to take out a restraining order against one potential date’s “ex.” After that whole ordeal, I thought to myself, “I pay money for this?!”
I’ve also paid for yahoo personals in the past, but that went nowhere I wanted to go as well.
I’ve been a member of OKCupid from the beginning (and beyond, when it was still called SparkMatch). The quality of the dates and relationships that I’ve gotten from being here have been considerably better than what I’ve encountered on other sites. I had paid for A-list for as long as I could afford it, since I liked being able to help support OKC in its efforts to continue being a site where one could find love without having to be a paid member (but the extra albums, being able to attach photos to messages, and lack of ads was pretty nice).
Okcupid is made of sunshine and rainbow and pay dating sites are made of poop and ground worms.
It’s funny cuz it’s true.
Hilarious!! Also, I’m not sure about other regional demographics for OKC but it seems that here in the NW, it caters to a, shall we say, anti-marriage culture. Namely, polyamory, sex positive culture, and gay and lesbian lifestyles. I met my soul mate on OKC, and even though we’re going to be together forever, we’re not going to marry. Take that Statistic!
RE: Christian
I recognize what you’re saying about the stats, but the statement still doesn’t really make sense. The way you write your analysis suggests that the single causative factor for marriage is membership or not. This isn’t clear! It’s possible that they wouldn’t be married out all without E-harmony or whatever pay to date site! I love OkCupid and I think they’re way better than any other site, but to suggest you’re more like;y to get married NOT using them is misleading and misrepresents what the statistics can tell you.
I’ve been paying for eharmony for several years and using OKCupid for just as long. I’ve meet a *few* more people through OKC, but I haven’t liked a single OKC match half as much as the average EH match. I was actually happily dating a EH match last year until she moved out of state. All my OKC matches have sent me running for the hills.
eharmony is a waste of money, but I’m starting to realize that so are the other sites. Including OKC. It seems that people use it as a ‘lazy’ form of dating. Women create a profile, post a cleavage picture, say something funny and then sit back and wait for guys to message them. Often times they are too busy to have a relationship. As this article points out, men fire off lazy messages. This is actually something that chemistry and eharmony help with. On those site you can fire off questions from a generic list. It takes about 10 seconds per match. So even if only 1-2 people respond to me a month on EH at a rate of 1% reply, then I’ve only spent about 2000 seconds on it per month. That’s about 30 minutes. That’s less time than it takes me to find 2 people on OKC and message them. Now remember, only 1/3 of the people on OKC are going to reply. So, in a way I’m better off with EH even though it costs me money.
Ultimately, I think need to get out and meet people in person. For example, at coffee shops. I see single women sitting around drinking coffee by themselves and they’re much more attractive than the lazy daters I see on EH and OKC. Better yet, I should join a co-ed club where I enjoy the activity and have fun. Meet a nice good looking girl there and I’d already know we have some shared interests.
Usually I like to get to know the person through a lot of emails. Add that to the numbers…the tons of emails that you have to send to a whole bunch of guys just to find someone to go out with. With my last contact, I asked him to meet me in weopia, a new free virtual dating site that I read about in the LA times. We did some quizzes and played checkers and I got to know him pretty quick. Something needs to be done to make online dating more effective and not such a slog. I get a ton of emails, just like he says above and it takes me forever to get through them.
It’s articles such as this that remind me how superior OkCupid is to every other dating site on the web. OkCupid has looks and smarts!
Everything about the pay sites is true. I’m a slow learner and tried the majority of them.
Unfortunately the point about “too many emails from men to women” applies even more so here. I’ve had a profile on OKC on and off, and the response rate is surprisingly *worse* than the pay sites, despite the dismal statistics mentioned in this article!
The only online dating model that works (for men) is paid male membership, free female membership. It keeps the gender ratio more even, and keeps the female response rates higher.
Been on paying and non-paying sites for over a year and have had nothing but disappointments! Then I discovered OKCupid. I found this to be and excellent site. It has very useful tools and easy to use format. Found MR. RIGHT THROUGH A WINK! It is like winning a lottery. We have a distance hurdle to overcome but Cupid has given us a GREAT start and the future is looking great.
Thanks OKCupid!
Here a business is ripping its competitors apart (rightfully so – OkCupid clearly is smarter and better in every possible way), so I guess an important question would also be this: Are you doing better than them financially? Are you more profitable or are your revenues growing faster?
CHRISTIAN FTW!!!
I couldn’t stop laughing over the fact that the CDC is the one in charge of keeping track of marriage and divorce. Hilarious in so many ways…
Whoa,
Grand :”D
Thank you for confirming what my gut has always told me about pay dating sites. I lack the cranial capacity to break it down mathematically and intellectually as you did with this article. It’s no surprise you guys are Harvard grads!
All of your posts about dating are insightful and amazing. I love hearing counterintuitve data.
I didn’t come here to find a partner, but I’ve made good friends and had lots of fun! I like this place and I’ve already recommended it to my near friends ^_^
Greetings from Mexico City! =D
As much as I love OkTrends, it kinda sucks that the feed is now truncated. Also, the “match.com” in this image: http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/never-pay-for-dating/3/Match-Breakdown-Highlight.png probably ought to be revised to eHarmony? Since it seems a tad out of place (not to mention up to this point, there has yet to be a claim of 20MM for match.com.)
The main problem with online dating that is that are many, many more men than women on every site in existence pretty much. That’s potentially great if you’re a woman, not so much if you’re a man. That leads to the women on said sites getting 100s of messages a day if they are even remotely attractive at all, and some get that many even w/o being so. Thus the women respond say maybe 1-2% of those messages and the men not getting a response message more women and the cycle repeats itself over and over. I wouldn’t know (from personal experience) how it goes in the offline dating world as I am not comfortable meeting people at bars, clubs, etc. My main problem is that I tend to either come on too strong, or not strongly enough (and thus they see me as just a friend). I’ve yet to find that happy medium, perhaps one day…
This is so sad in a funny way but oh so true, hahaha
I’ve tried a few other dating sites in the past and OKC is BY FAR the best… fun, interactive, super sophisticated programming, big pictures that I can see, and it’s free. I still haven’t met that special someone, but I have had quite a few meetings.
The 12.4 : 1 marriage statistic is likely confounded by other variables. Chiefly, in general, people on dating sites are not already successful at finding a mate. You follow? This could mean that they are less desirable or much more picky or difficult to match. Also, giving a person many more options for potential mates actually decreases his/her likelihood of making a decision that she’s satisfied with.
“you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don’t subscribe to Match.com” oh, man, I couldn’t stop laughing at that one.
I did a little test of my own. Match.com (ostensibly) tells you the last time someone logged in. If I recall correctly it says, “within the last {24 hours / week / month / 3 months}.”
Anyway, they’re lying. I verified by checking both a friend’s profile and my own (with Google Incognito from another IP). In both cases Match.com blatantly lied about how long it had been since the last login. “within the last three months,” probably means the user moved to a new city, died, and was buried five years ago…
Brilliant Analysis!
Bravo.
You didn’t even mention the fact that OkCupid’s matching system is actually more in-depth and, in my experience, more accurate, than those of the paid sites.
I was on eHarmony for awhile, and it was incredibly disappointing. Although they boast a really accurate matching system that gets at the deep stuff, this was never my experience. What people can post on their profiles is incredibly limited, and there are a bunch of fill-in-the-blank statements, to which almost everyone gives the same answer. It was incredibly hard to get creativity to shine through on the profile, and you usually can’t even write people open messages, but instead have to jump through a bunch of inane hoops.
What I love about OkCupid is how much effect the users have on the matching – we generate the questions, and you can infinitely make the system more accurate by answering more questions. Besides this, getting to know people is totally open and you can get a sense of who someone is by how much effort they put into their profile.
It’s genius, and I actually somewhat trust the match percentages through repeated experience. (Though I wouldn’t write someone off instantly for having a low match percentage if they seemed intelligent).
Anyway, thanks for a great and wonderfully intelligent dating site!
love. this. blog.
dating info + pretty mathematics? win.
I’m not sure I buy this. I enjoy the OkTrends articles, they are certainly interesting. But They are one sided as hell and give no credit to the opposing viewpoint. Any article that does not at least consider the alternative viewpoint is PROPAGANDA. What gets me is that, literally, every single comment below this article is in support of / in agreement with the article. Uh, we live in America, you will never find a group of people who are in total agreement on an issue. Which makes me think that some fraud is involved.
How about we mention that the free dating sites are full of people who are simply procrastinating before doing their homework, or otherwise wasting their and our time? Why don’t we pull up the statistic for messaging-conversations that end up going nowhere because the other party had no intention on doing anything about it in the first place? At least with a pay site you know that the people who are subscribers are serious about what they are doing and looking for.
I have been with OKC for about two years now. I have tried trials at many different pay sights. One thing you missed is the fact that allot of these pay sites sucks as E-Harmony have messages sent by fake accounts that are already dead with the same generic message. Granted my track record here has not been great taking into consideration that one girl I met was just nuts ( trust me this girl was ) and the other just wanted sex ( that is by far not what I am looking for ) but I can not complain about the experience. I would and have recommended you guys to several people and still stand by the choice of joining in the first place. Keep up the good work and also good job on keeping people informed!
Not hating on OKC at all, cause I’m a huge fan of what you guys do.
However, being “… bombarded with impersonal messages from a random cross-section of men” is not exactly a world away from what happens in this very online dating utopia. Still, ‘A’ for effort, guys. And thanks for the dates.
I love you guys for your statistical analysis. I have often remarked to my friends that after college I would love to get involved with social networking. “Like Facebook?”, they ask. “Well sure”, I reply. “But maybe a dating site, and then I’d run stats to figure out why certain things are the way they are, because I bet that outside of pay sites’ marketing departments, no one is bothering.”
And then I found okTrends… Part of me died, while another part went “HECK YEAH!”
If I might selfishly propose a topic for a future statistical dissection… How about some sort of an analysis on the age of a profile versus the number of messages that it gets. In my personal experience, over a two or so year period of time, messages have decreased exponentially (even approaching zero!). I assume this is due to the number of local profiles who have seen my mug so many times that they now pass over it or have hidden it (a tactic I use to remove from view those whom I would not consider an outing with). The really curious thing is that not only have messages stopped, but -page views- are nearly dead.
Is the solution to wait for more new users? Move to a new area? Re-create your aging profile? Sign up for Matc-, er… Well, I guess we’ve covered that last point. Thanks for saving me some cash! Even if dates have stopped coming, I’ll still read the blog posts.
This is a really great article. Another pay site I ended up on once was Chemistry.com – but they rejected my picture because they thought it was of a child. ugh.
The only thing I could ask of OKC is to have broader gender options… I’m trans and genderqueer and looking for other trans or genderqueer people to date, and I’d really, really like to be able to search for that.
There’s only one model for dating sites that isn’t self-defeating, and that’s pay-per-message (or, rather, one person pays once to open communication with another specific user). A small fee per messaging connection, and the site has income and the correct incentive (to give people targets to message), men are writing messages for a reason, and women don’t have to sift through mountains of completely frivolous dreck (and so, actually might care about their messages).
This is so obvious, it’s frustrating seeing OKCupid’s “message anything — we don’t care” attitude, but then OKC won’t even fix the matching algorithm to give people real information anymore.
The EHarmony ad doesn’t say that the members who married, married each other. In other words, they might have married someone they didn’t find on EHarmony.
Someone should tell Randy that if you are going to criticise (sic – I am a Brit) spelling he should look up the word “grammar”.
He may even have more success dating.
Hey OkCupid,
Do you have any stats on your own user population? What percentage of your online population ends up married/engaged?
This site is great!
You missed a rather large flaw in the eharmony statement. “236 Eharmony members marry every day”. That sounds like 236 eharmony members marry other eharmony members every day.
But that is NOT what it says at all! It merely states that out of all the 20,000,000 members, there are 236 marriages every day. Eharmony does not make any claim whatsoever that those 236 people MET ON EHARMONY! Since they don’t spell it out, I will assume those 236 people met each other in a variety of ways: coffee shops, singles events, the supermarket, at work, etc. I’m sure a few met through eharmony, but I have no way of knowing how many.
So let’s apply a bit of math: Dividing the 20 million by 365 gives us about 54,000 people per day. 236 is roughly 0.5 percent of that. So basically, the marriage rate among eharmony members is 0.5 percent. Since the national average is 4.5 percent, that means eharmony members are 9 TIMES LESS LIKELY TO GET MARRIED than the rest of the population.
That is not very encouraging. It is kinda scary, in fact. Maybe they spend so much time on eharmony (taking tests, emailing, coffee dates, Doogling, etc) that they miss out on all the other opportunities around.
Enough of this. I have work to do and a business networking event to attend. You see, there’s this really nice single woman I met at the last event and I’m hoping she will be at this one as well.
I have joined so many dating sites, it’s ridiculous. I’m 41, single female, and I’ve been dating online (mostly unsuccessfully) for about 10 years. Here’s my two cents:
Winking, instant messengers, and labyrinthine personality “quizzes” kill the potential for face to face dating. Men hate taking long tests, or writing essays about themselves, and the people who utilize the instant messengers are just bored at work and have no intention of ever meeting anyone face to face (hint hint plentyoffish.com!!).
The hands down best site for generating face to face dates is Craigslist, notwithstanding the bots and spammers (which are fewer now that CL has implemented a phone verification system that limits spammy multiple postings). It is simple, straightforward, and if you write a good ad, you will attract the type of person you want to go out with. I’ve met several extremely nice guys that way (and yes, an occasional flake, but hey, at least I got a real live date!). Put your minimum requirement in the subject line of your ad (i.e. “seeking SM under 50 for LTR” and then in your ad, be cute, chatty, positive, and to the point – don’t write a book. You’ll get loads of responses. Use common sense sorting them out.
The only drawback with CL is the lack of background checks, but even eH and Match.com don’t do those. The only sites that do a good job with background checks are those that award a special seal on profiles of users who voluntarily pay for their own background checks to be done, as a gesture of good faith and to make members of the opposite sex more comfortable contacting them – and the only sites I’ve seen that do that are very ethnic matrimonial sites like Shaadi.com and IndianMatrimonials.com – I have yet to see a non-niche/mainstream dating site offer any features like that.
Plentyoffish has message boards and local groups that organize “mixers” at local watering holes. I have a friend of a friend who met her boyfriend at a POF mixer, so those do actually work, if you like the rabble that dominates POF. There are a lot of “losers” on POF, but there are also a lot of nice guys with potential.
My impression of OKCupid is that it is too urban/20something and not serious enough for anyone over 30 and finished wasting time with dead-end relationships anyway. It’s very much a dating site for casual daters who are, if not anti-marriage, then just too self-centered and superficial to be marriage material anyway. It’s casual dating for the children of the “me” generation. I would be very surprised if anyone who actually married someone they met on OKCupid wouldn’t end up divorced shortly thereafter. It’s “OKCupid”, not “SuperlativeCupid”.
For another estimate of the true marriage rate, try counting the number of married 35-40 year olds against the number of unmarried 35-40 year olds and then estimate a geometric rate of growth from zero over, say 15 years.
I really like OKC’s design (and the fact that it’s free), but I had a better experience on match.com and I think it’s because being a pay site addresses the issues mentioned at the top of this post: it’s less likely that you get guys who spam lame come-ons on a pay site, and it’s less likely that you get “casual” profiles with little interest in dating on a pay site.
It seems like OKC tried to fix this with the green, yellow, red response icon, but the problem with that is you don’t know if a girl with a red status isn’t that interested in dating or just gets lots of “show me yer tits” type messages.
My suggestion is that if someone gives a message a very low rating, even without responding, then it won’t count toward their response rate. So then someone who gets lots of lame messages can still get a “green” response icon to show they’re still receptive to quality messages.
Interesting article although it’s missing one thing.
What are OKCupid’s numbers? How many subscribers
and ghost profiles do you have? How many marriages
are happening every day?
Would love to know this info.
and by the way I do support OKC!
That picture of the sad girl reminds me of that Travelocity commercial where the Gnome is being eaten by pirañas…