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 squeezing 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
Great number crunching. But that’s what you guys do, isn’t it?
I have two meetings set up on pay sites and zero set up here. And I’ve been here longer than either of the other sites. So randomness plays a huge role in determining which site will actually get you a date. My hypothesis is that people who’ve paid money for dates will actually meet people, whereas people who enjoy taking free tests will take more free tests.
A very good stat to have in its pure form would be OKCer’s within x miles of me. My town is way too small to have a large number of active people from OKC.
Could you do some analysis on profile length for males and females. From my experience, it makes no difference the length of female’s profile, but I’m not certain on male’s side.
Yup. I agree that the paid dating websites are not worth your time and are no better than the ‘free’ online dating websites. eHarmony likes to promote itself as a ‘relationship website’ and imply that you basically pay them to find the love of your life for you. Poppycock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The whole idea of online dating websites seemed completely absurd to me until I tried it for myself in the winter of 2008. Today I am happily engaged to be married to someone I met through Okcupid.com, my personal favorite dating website in the Universe.
Bottom line is: Okcupid.com WORKS — if you approach it with sincerity and a little smidge of hope that there is someone out there who wants to meet you, and all you need is a little help contacting them.
Although I’m not a statistician, I think there is one missing variable in this analysis. I believe the match.com data is based on user exit surveys that attribute a serious relationship or marriage as a reason for churning. This means that effectively someone fell in serious love in a 6 month timeframe of actively looking (if you assume an average 6 month subscriber lifetime). The non-match.com real world sample might present a higher percentage of marriages at a given point in time (x marriages on a given day) as your math indicates, but it doesn’t account for the length of the search process leading to those marriages. The effectiveness of non-match.com or non-eHarmony searching in a same-time-period sample may in fact be lower. To make this an apples to apples comparison, you would need to limit the search timeframes to the same amount of time in both instances (i.e. one group starts today looking for a serious relationship/marriage in all non-online-dating channels, versus another research cell starting today using those means plus using online dating). People using online dating sites also enjoy all of the other (X )channels open to everyone else for meeting someone (bars, friends, work, etc), plus get the extra efficiency of (Y) online dating. Under a controlled study, it would be hard to imagine that X > X+Y. I wasn’t a math major and am not a statistician, but I believe your logic is specious. You may say that this time factor can accounted for by the 50% that you have netted out who are single but not actively looking, but that 50% fudge factor is a finger in the air estimate which would then draw the conclusions into question.
You know, I was so close to paying for eHarmony or Match while I was single and I’m so glad that I didn’t. I decided to just stick it out with OkCupid, since it’s free and there are equally attractive people and potential mates on here than the pay sites. :>
This article is 100% true, though, I’ve had basically the same experience on every dating site: bad.
90% of the time, you waste your time never getting a response because the other person can’t respond, or the match is simply bad.
The other 8% of the time you spend searching (my net is 150 mi radius) for someone who you not only are interested in but also will engage you and reply back.
The last 2% you spend talking to those who can/will talk back before realizing they do internet dating sites ‘just for fun’ or are ‘too scared’ to meet people on the internet.
You could also say it stems from living in a rural area, but, whatever.
eHarmony sucks and Match isn’t much better.
What about Jdate? I’d love to know their statistics. Honestly I’d rather spend my money on the date itself than to pay for the dating site. I’ve had quite a bit of success on OKC. several 6 month long relationships. and many short term ones.
Well how do these number compare to the success rate of OkCupid? How many marriages a day compared to the “subscriber” base?
I have known many people that have paid for places like Eharmony and Match that never got a single reply. It really is a complete waste of time and money. Okcupid does a very good job at comparing people and matching them based on similar interests, beliefs, and views on life. I have managed to get several dates and even an almost year relationship out of this site (granted that one ended). However, out of all of the dating sites I have ever used, this one would have to be the best and I will continue to be a faithful user and supporter of this site until I no longer need it.
Too much math here. I suck at math. However, I knew all this even before reading the blog without doing any math. It’s all about cause, effect and logic. There is no mystery here. It’s all pretty obvious. Realizing this all too well, I have mostly given up on dating sites a very long time ago, and the only reason why I still keep a profile here and there, is because I don’t have the balls to come up to girls in RL.
I think OKCupid is innovative. I still pay for online dating sites. OKCupid does not have a way to filter searches for people who do not want to be parents. OKCupid uses rather ambiguous terms for that issue too. I “like children” but that is not the same as being a parent.
I like the choices on match.com:
wants kids
not sure
someday
doesn’t want children
RE: It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don’t subscribe to Match.com.
Disagree. The calculation has the faulty assumption that people on match.com do not have marrages that were initiated off of match.com.
The rest of the blog post is excellent though, nice work.
The problem with “free” online dating is that there is no incentive for users to actually reply or to take some initiative of finding a partner.
So for guys that means that they might be just looking for some random hookup and for girls it means that they are just using it as some sort of entertainment. Since no money is involved, (mostly) women are too picky and hardly reply back since there is always tomorrow with tons of more guys sending messages. And guys are just sending tons of messages even though they might be in a relationship. Because it’s free.
How many women here on okcupid delete their accounts within 7 days ???
I think the perfect model is a pay site (males and females pay) and only paying members will show up in the search results. This provides an equal incentive to send and reply messages and meet with some people, because the longer you linger around the more expensive it gets.
Nice work. They say there are “Lies, damn lies and statistics”. They also say that “86% of all statistics are made up on the spot”. I believe every word of it.
Some of the pay sites were OK 10 to 15 years ago, but over the last decade they have just been collecting more and more dead (or worse, fake!) profiles. As time goes on they just diminish in value. OK Cupid has been a revalation and breath of fresh air in this stale and shady industry.
I see the same trends on OKCupid.. you send out personalized and thoughtful messages and get very few replies, you still start to get into that funk of sending impersonal messages because the rate of response is just as low regardless of the fact you arn’t paying anything.. if anything people are less likely to give people they don’t see as perfect a chance as they would if they felt like they needed to get their moneys worth. I think it’s a double edged sword when it comes to online dating sites free or not.
eHARMony is a cheater’s playground.
There is no way to search to see if a guy or girl is cheating on their SO.
I’m one of those dead ones on Match, I added to my profile that I’m not a paying member, bet they remove that after reviewing it.
They want your money, but they don’t want you to tell people how to find you eles were, or that you aren’t paying to play.
Pay for play? or to get played? An interesting article and I believe it is closer to the truth, and the other sites mentioned in it. I have never been on their sites, I am looking but I am not desperate.
For me this site is great, just the overall set up of it. There is some entertainment provided, games, tests, forums, and you can get your profile and pics into the mix, for free.
I have met a couple ladies on this site, and like in real life it is an experience. Nice ladies, one was not what I had in mind, one is a friend and a maybe. We all are maybes, why rush? If you pay to be on a site you may feel rushed?
Granted that I am older and a younger person may feel a sense of urgency. I realize my past mistakes in my choices and a slower pace is a preventative measure to keep from repeating them.
I don`t contact many people, not looking for numbers, taking time to find the right lady.
A great site!
Hmmm… I love OKC, and am no fan of Match (it WAS depressing) but I think the post was unnecessarily unkind to match.
First of all the 29 to 1 ratio is misleading: just like on OKC, on Match dating site (actually FastCupid network) you can sort by “last activity” and usually users that have been inactive for a while do not even show up.
Secondly, in most searches paid users show up FIRST meaning you are able to send a message to someone who CAN respond
Finally, responding to a message is ALWAYS possible on Match, whether you are paid or not. You pay for the right to send a FIRST message (you get other “perks”) as well.
Therefore I think this post is unfair to Match network. I know nothing about eHarmony, so I can’t speak to that.
Nice breakdown. I buy the whole idea but the math looks pretty shaky. Your best element in your presentation is the profit motive flow chart. Hilarious.
Trying to find your mate in six months, because that is all the money you want to spend dose not sound like a good plan. I have friends on OK Cupid and every once in a while I take a look around and see if there are any new interesting people on here. But I never feel pressured to get a mate in six month or less. DATING IS A LIFESTYLE, NOT A JOB HUNT.
Absolutely right on! I enjoyed the analysis, and the correlation figure is interesting. As a previous subscriber to match.com, I can only agree with the desperation loop hypothesis. OkCupid is definitely the best dating site I have seen, as it functions more like a social networking site with a difference. Good features and functionality. I’m glad to see you are changing the online world for the better.
I dig it.
One thing not mentioned in this great article is that single people are not equally attractive or sociable. To say that someone is 12x as likely to succeed in their partner search by not using Match.com leaves out age, income, parent status, geography, physical attractiveness, and social skill differences between the types of people who would use Match.com and the types who would not.
Not to endorse stereotypes, but easily imagined differences between the populations may exist. People more likely to turn to Match.com may be on average uglier, poorer, more socially awkward, single parents, etc… Whatever reasons led them to become desperate enough to turn to Match.com; the reasons that they have been unsuccessful in the first place. Match.com is likely to attract a disproportionately large selection of unmarriable people, who do not realize that they are unmarriable. Any dating site or organization would.
Interesting article–thanks! In my search area I tend to see many of the same faces on all the dating sites–if most persons are like me, they don’t have the time, willingness, or resources to date much further away than about an hour drive at most, let alone nationwide. Though I haven’t tried eHarmony before, I do have my doubts that many persons really give a lot of thought and “work at it” to figure out “who they are”, or “what they want”…perhaps answering the personality test questions the way they believe will sound most attractive to the opposite sex, rather than a truely sincere response which might increase the chance of a good match.
When is some dating site going to take the initiative and create an online charm school for men?
They sorely need it. The fact that they stupidly send out obviously canned cut & paste message is clear evidence for that.
Wonderful! I absolutely love analysis like this
My older sister used eHarmony and got 20 dates “free” after paying $600 (USD). She went on all those 20 dates and said most of the people that the site hooked her up with were complete opposites of all the things she wanted/expected in a man. She did the stupid thing and bought another $600 worth of dates. This was a few years ago, though, so I’m not sure if they still offer to find all the dates for you, but regardless, how ridiculous is that…On 20 dates I could spend half of that and still enjoy myself.
I love you guys.
I subscribed to Match.com, but won’t after the time runs out. The two statements attached to photos at the top of this blog say it all: “Women get too many messages from bad matches” and “men get far too few replies.”
The two likely go hand in hand. If I were a woman getting inundated with garbage come-ons all day, I’d find it difficult to write back even to the guys who are sincere, but with whom I feel there’s really not a chance. Not even if the guy goes to great lengths — as I do — to personalize each communication and really make a connection.
Thus, almost nobody … EVER … writes me back at Match.com. I think I’ve received two legitimate replies (not auto-dismissals) in four months. Yet I’m obligated to send out at least five new contacts a month just to live up to the policies and qualify for their guarantee. (I’ve given up on that, actually.)
Here at OKC, I don’t send the first communication in most cases. Women are actually writing to ME. Same guy, same pictures, same profile info. I guess something about this site — the depth and volume of questions to be answered, the matching system, even the tests (goofy or serious) — attracts a different sort of person (though I’ve seen some of the same people in both places) or else makes your matches more convincing.
When I DO write-out here, I still don’t get a high volume of response. (Sometimes not even from women whose profiles are “green-lighted” as responding frequently.) But I’m two or three times as likely to receive a response as I am over at Match.com.
And with women writing to me first, I don’t bother to send out initial contacts unless the woman OKC has recommended really seems too amazing not to try and meet.
As a former user of Match.com, I can testify that the narrative and statistical odds from this article described my experience to the ‘t’. It was frustrating, and as a first experience or attempt at the online scene, just about ruined it completely for me.
Eventually I ran into this site after it was mentioned by a friend. The quality of this site in comparison to Match.com in terms of features, community, upkeep, value and response… it was no contest. I shortly thereafter abandoned my Match account and stopped shelling out dough to a system that doesn’t work.
Thank you OKCupid for providing such a quality service to the public at such great value (free!). I’ve since experienced much greater success, and have renewed my faith in online dating.
Cheers!
Christian!
Another excellent article! It just confirms the suspicions I already had about E-Harmony and Match, and whether the matches they display are actually active members.
I told a friend about the 190.00 dollars I threw away on E-HARM-MONEY. (Did not meet a single person) He said to me “Do you realize, you could have took that money payed for a weekend trip to Chicago and had better results? At least you would have had fun.” It’s true.
The only argument I can make against OKC is that there seem to be many people on the site who send messages out of boredom and are not serious about meeting someone special or taking things “offline”.
Some may feel that people who pay are more serious about dating, and that’s why they turn to sites like Match.
Paying 190.00 didn’t get me any closer to meeting that special someone, so I’ll stick with the free route
)
I’ll admit that I was an eHarmony subscriber for a while. And I probably have more than a few dead profiles on other sites. I also have a profile here. So far, none of them have gotten me married (yet). eHarmony netted me a few more dates per time spent, but it dried up pretty quickly.
Then, you have sites like AveMariaSingles (Catholic dating FWIW) where they run a model where you put down a large up-front payment ($170 the last time I checked) but don’t pay another cent ever as long as you log on every 30 days (There’s a $15 fee to get back on if you “time out”). That means that the people on there have not only made a commitment, but are also pretty much guaranteed to be active. No idea as to whether they show the non-active users to the active ones…
I am a paid member of 11 dating sites ! I guess I am desperate,below average looks way above average income!Match.com 1 date out of 1000 plus emails .I did get 2 responses though(pause to pat myself on the back then resume typing) .Eharmony 2 years and 0 dates or calls . I do get about 15 matches a day though,no one replies however(i’ll forgo the pat on the back here) .Okcupid 2 years 0 dates,I blame it on only sending out 5 or 6 hundred emails though.Chinalove.com .100 percent response to emails plus about 10 women emailing me everyday! Maybe white/caucasion women are just shallow entities looking for brad pitt!!!!! Just an observation
As a woman I find that I am often annoyed with guys who don’t even try. I am more likely to answer a guy I find attractive and is a good match if he would try and leave me a message. But the thing is that often I just don’t find them attractive and the ones that send me messages just don’t seem to make sense for me. I am not looking for perfection but I am looking for compatiblity. Being far right to my very far left won’t work.
I met my current guy online and not through either of those sites. So whoever says you have to pay is an idiot.
Too much true. But I must add that some dating paysites administrators are starting to understand that people may not be so easy to dupe.
Some of them allow subscribers to contact all users and to BE CONTACTED by ALL users, as long as they subscribe. They have other ways to cheat, of course, like showing all users as last connected “today”, to make people believe there are not ghost users (!).
In my opinion OKCupid is far more better structured and working than any other dating site, but… alas, it doesn’t work so well for people who live in my city(I am from Florence, Italy, BTW).
Maybe it’s because of the interface language… but… too few OkCupid subscribers and most of them “ghost” subscribers or just not answering.
I remember that some time ago there was a project to make OkCupid multilanguage, but I think it has been put aside.
If yu are smart about those sites, you can leave a clever message directing them to ok cupid, you cant put in symbols or usernmes exactly, but, for example, I put ” find me at ok cupid under five oh one blues it’s a free site…” I know it works, people have crossed over and found me! (it made it onto the first line of my profile on match…)just an idea!!!
Brilliant … and nice payback for EHarmony’s undisguised fear of OKCupid.
I think things may be somewhat different for *niche* pay sites — some of the so-called adult and/or special interest sites. Because people will pay for access to like-minded folk … *and* paying members are identified.
I didn’t need you to tell me that dating pay-sites suck, because their primal goal is to get people’s money. I already knew that, I never paid for a dating site, there are always other ones for free. What I need you to tell me is, if you say pay-sites are bad, why did you add this A-list crap? You know, that “pay for exta features” nonsense…. It’s even more horrible… At least have the decency to say that you’d like to be a pay-site too. Because that A-list thing shows you are set on this direction.
Well done, and who said you would never use algebra later in your life. Hell if I had known is was going to help me find love maybe I would of majored in that instead of biology…
I tried Match.com a few years ago. After three months on the site I had sent nearly 100 messages and received barely four responses. Then, I met a girl in a bar and we ended up dating for awhile. I changed my Match.com profile to read “to anyone who has failed to find anyone on this site, don’t worry. I felt pretty low after how easy they made it sound, and how hard it actually was. Then, I met someone in a completely non-Match.com related setting and we’re really happy. If you have problems here, it isn’t you.” The bastards deleted the message from my profile, citing “violations of their terms of service” for “sexually explicit material” and “commercial material” (all of which was bullshit.) I wrote them back, and told them that they were a bunch of dirty cowards. I never did receive a response from them.
So, OKC will be taking away the A-List and making its features available to us all now for free, right?
People are crazy to pay for online dating nowadays–there are several excellent all free sites, and OK Cupid is at the top of the list!
I agree with a lot of thoughts in here, but note that it’s pretty easy on Match at least (as it is here) to spot the “dead wood” as they tell you the last log-on date for the member. While its possible that the person who checked in the last week is no longer there – you have a pretty good chance they are still checking. By contrast, if they haven’t checked in 3+ weeks, they’re probably a zombie profile. I don’t remember if it told you before you signed up, but at minimum, the suggestion that 19 of 20 people these men are writing to no longer exist is false.
Frankly (as a guy speaking), I think the real problem is that many men send out so many emails because the anonymity of being online eases the sting of rejection and so they just send send send. I think this is a problem for OK Cupid as well as Match.
This is by far the funniest of the blog posts you guys have done.
By your analysis, I do better on OKC in a year than every single man on Match.com combined.
Only one thing I find confusing, nawmean, I send out one message a day, and I get a response, every time. Booyakasha.
hahaha. This is so funny and sadly true. Thanks for the tip 501!
Well to see I put I wasn’t a paying member in my Match.com info and the site said no go, so I closed my account.
Had the same thing happen with Zoosk or what ever the one on Face Book calls it self. they wouldn’t let me say I wasn’t paying so I closed that one as well.
The pay sites are scams.
Awesome and inspiring article… As someone who’s seen all of these sites’ evolutions over time, I definitely think the OKCupid model is the strongest of the sites mentioned… Though I’m not sure it’s much of a “social network”, it is still a very individually-oriented site.
This conversation reminded me of an excellent dating experience I had, initially finding someone at match.com, but then having her point me to her Nerve.com profile, and the “Nerve boards”, which were a lively place to discuss all manner of topics – and, in so doing, get a feel for someone over time in a way that direct messaging, quizzes, and personality tests couldn’t really match. Eventually, it imploded because the boards themselves were costing Nerve too much to run effectively (with really crappy software of some kind), and without general profitability, they started tearing down the best bits, putting the rest behind paywalls, and generally destroying their userbase.
It’s interesting how now, there are vibrant community sites, and a couple pretty solid dating sites, but there really isn’t a one stop shop anymore, the way there was with Nerve (for a year or two there, at least). I suppose that aspect of finding dates via online communities is still totally workable – I just wonder if there’s a way to automate/enable that somehow?