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
Well I must be a real catch because I got my wife (of 5 years) to sign up for match.com after bombarding her with messages until she signed up to reply…
I was on it for one month and she was on for one month.
Every set of circumstances people meet under are different. Online or not, people just find each others’ intellectual AND emotional equal sometime in their life.
ok you speak about match .com and eharmany what about sites like rsvp ,from what i have read here today i believe rsvp is the same , I get next to no hits , and when i paid to reply or contact i get no replys back ????
Great article! It’s funny, b/c my dad talked to me today and suggested I join a “better” dating site like Match.com or Eharmony. I said that I’d take his advice into consideration.
The truth is that I tried Match.com a while ago and got the same results you showed. From what I can remember, I could see photos and brief descriptions, but when I went to actually look at the profile, some or all of it was blocked or it directly took me to a link that said something like “Want to contact them? Sign up now!”
eharmony was even worse. After going through their “patented questionnaire” and spending over an hour carefully thinking over questions and giving detailed and truthful responses, I got directed the wonderful page that declared that I was in their 20% demographic of people they did not want on their site. Great. Now the SITE is telling you that you won’t get matches from their members.
OKcupid is, at the very least, fun and chances you’ll meet some very interesting people. I’ve met probably 10 people or so on here and am still friends with many of them. I’d really like someone I can connect with, but I feel I have a far better chance here than with pay sites.
Regarding the final image and statement under The Desperate Feedback Loop: “In no time, the average woman on the same site has been bombarded with impersonal messages from a random cross-section of men. Then: She stops checking her email.”
In contrast to the rest of the article, doesn’t this quote stand out as being particularly misogynistic? Like every woman is waiting for her superhero to send her a message, or else she perishes…. Yeah, men stop checking their messages, too. It filters down to a group of men and women who don’t care who is sending the first message or what the first message says, which is a quality that some people might want in a match….
OKC knows that men aren’t the sole aggressor in the dating world. Women try to make contact, also. It seems like this blog post is really targeting men when it caters to this slippery slope delusion a lot of men hold onto: ‘Women need me to speak well. If I don’t speak well, they’ll suffer.’
Could you please consider what I’ve said and think about rewording or expanding on that section?
Thank you.
Hysterical! I knew that these pay sites (even the free sites) are pretty much a scam. I tried Yahoo and actually (gasp) paid to talk to no one. It was pretty awesome. I joined eHarmony during their free weekends and figured out how to put my email in so that I could still get responses. Half the “men” that I was matched with were not looking for anything long term (they even said so in their profile). Even during their free weekends no one responds so why would I shell out that much cash to not talk to anyone? I’d rather waste money on diet products that don’t work! I’ve tried POF and this site and haven’t had much luck. However, I’ve learned that you have to put effort even for the free sites because no one is going to find you the love of your life, that’s your job.
I met my fiancé on Match.com 6 years ago, and have had several girlfriends and numerous dates thanks to Yahoo Personals. I do have to say the last time I was on Yahoo Personals, I got SO many emails from guys I had to cancel my account to make it stop.
Eharmony sucked because they wouldn’t let me see pictures until I had gone back and forth with someone a couple of times… so I waste my time engaging back and forth with someone whose profile I like only to find out he has ears the size of Dumbo.
OkCupid has been fun for browsing profiles and light communicating. I don’t know how great it could be for a dating site because I haven’t looked for that here but I have had quite a bit of back and forth messaging.
I am blown away by the women who’ve replied that they message first and / or reply frequently. My average reply rate, paid or not, is about 1 in 50 and I take to the time to read and personalize every message. It’s truly frustrating to be involved in such a thing but, like some others have said, I’m interested in trying any approach to meeting my mate. I do go out, meet people, engage in activities and look for singles, etc. I also have been on Match and eHarmony. OKC is my favorite so far but I’d argue the reply rate is no better. At least I’m not paying to be ignored
To all the women out there, if a guy takes the time to write you a personal message, do him the courtesy of writing back…even if you aren’t interested, tell him so. It’s just downright rude the way “most” women are on this site. To date I have sent ~400 messages, received about 10 replies, and gone on 3 dates. I’ve never received an unsolicited message on a dating site, ever. And no, I am a decent looking, intelligent, young, and successful guy. Off my soapbox…
I’m 99% certain that Dating Direct uses plants – people who are actually employees of DD posing as dates. I once chatted to one woman and gave her my email address. We chatted via email but lo and behold…when my subscription ran out, the messages stopped! The contact didn’t, however -she kept winking at me on DD, as if expecting me to renew my subscription.
I sent her a message, just in case she’d lost my email address,but there was no reply.
Caveat Emptor.
As someone who’s (currently) paying for a Match.com subscription, I do find these numbers interesting. I can say this though. I’ve sent out a few messages, and not a single reply, save for one negative reply. However, of all the messages I sent out, only one of them was unread. Every single other one was read. I think you have to be a subscriber to even read e-mails on it.
Yet again, your blog is heteronormative. Don’t you realize that there are queer people that use your website and ignoring our existence is alienating a large portion of the people that use your site?
i have read it all and am still up in the air. i have never received a reply.
Interesting demonstration.
while I found the first part convincing, I don’t buy the “pudding” part where you attempt to prove that match or eharmony don’t work through their announced marriage numbers.
that’s because
a) marriage isn’t the only possible finality of an online relationship. that shouldn’t be the criteria of success of the experience. Speaking for myself, I’m in a happy, long-term relationship, but I’m not married and don’t want to be. So although the indicator of user fees per wedding is impressive, it’s not very telling.
b) for your demonstration you are comparing two populations, those who cannot find a match online, and those who can find a match without going online. Your demonstration assumes that both of these populations have the same odds of success in their quest for love, but this hypothesis is very far fetched. that really undermines the idea that someone could be 12x more likely to marry if they don’t subscribe to a service. Although, I agree that presenting things like that is very striking and it serves your point.
I’ve checked your service, and came to the conclusion that single these days are really lucky to have you guys help them.
cheers,
jerome
@Jeremy Botto’s “In contrast to the rest of the article, doesn’t this quote stand out as being particularly misogynistic? Like every woman is waiting for her superhero to send her a message, or else she perishes…. Yeah, men stop checking their messages, too.”
No, it’s not misogynistic. It’s simply stating that women (generally) get bombarded with ridiculous, impersonal sexist or bland garbage. It doesn’t mean women are waiting around for a guy to message them. It means that when a woman gets bombarded with poorly written messages all day there’s a large put-off to this site and less incentive/time to send their own messages. I have stopped coming on here numerous times due to that.
I’m a person who signed up to message someone. I have messaged -a few- people, it does not matter to me who messages who first. However, I’m usually stuck with a full inbox and thus filtering through garbage messages and it’s a huge turn off. My profile is specifically designed to put people off from sending me shitty messages now. It’s uber bitchy, but at least I don’t have to filter through as much trash (people asking me to draw them naked, people asking for nude photos, people asking me to marry their bro so they can come here, people telling me i’m hawt n we shuld hang out sum time, people asking me if i like music).
Perhaps you just want it to say “that is not to say that there are not guys who experience the -joy- of mass, bland/offensive messages too and ragequit okc as result.”
I’m sure in the 300+ comments someone has pointed this out, but just in case…
There’s an important mistake in the “desperation feedback loop” analysis. According to your data, the reply rate drops off with the average number of messages per session, but that rate has a better than linear decay. In other words, as the number of messages per session goes up, the reply RATE goes down, but the total number of replies still increases. If I send out 2 messages per session and get an 18% reply rate (~.36 replies per session), I’m doing worse than if I send out 4 messages per session and get a 20% reply rate (~.8 replies per session). The feedback loop therefore doesn’t happen, at least not as described in the post. As someone gets desperate, he may send out more messages, but he in fact gets more replies.
Correction to the above, but the point still remains. At 2 messages per session, you get an 18% reply rate and get .36 replies per session. If you sent out 4 messages per session, the reply rate is 10%, and you get .4 replies per session. You still do better in terms of number of replies by sending out more messages.
I wanted to address why many women (such as myself) don’t reply back to men that we aren’t interested in. When I first joined, I was bombarded by over 20 messages in the first week, none of them really promising. I decided to be courteous and have a ‘Thank you, but I’m just not interested” letter I sent out. Many responses were courteous and thanked me for being honest. Several were threatening and a few of the men I had to block due to more unwanted emails badgering me. I decided it was best to just ignore the ones I’m not interested, and many men I’ve written to do also ignore. I’ve learned to not take it personally.
I also wanted to point out a non-scientific study I’ve done on my own stats- 95% of the men who message me I’m just not that attracted to or live too far away, and I just don’t write back. It has almost NOTHING to do with the initial message the send, I look their message as a way to say, “Hey, I like you, come visit my profile”, and If I’m attracted I will respond if I like their profile, not the message they send. I’ve sent out 14 messages (not cheap winks!), and 3 responded. Of the 3, they were very lukewarm towards me and all of them eventually stopped writing, I even gave them my number and got nothing. So it goes to show you that it goes both ways. I think most men want to do the chasing and get turned off when they are pursued.
On pay sires women are out numbered 10 to 1. They wait for a guy to contact them so they dont have to pay. Its only us poor male buggers that pay. Inderect discrimination as I would put it. Most gills who contact guys are from overseas or into cam scam trying to get something for nothing. Typical decietful women.
Well this is a very interesting debate. I am glad Christian you were honest enough to point out you were obligated/motivated to point out other sites flaws and who you were etc. Shame you didnt include any flaws your site has. I think I tried it once. I have tried various dating sites and also dating agencies. I think all of them are just after money and dont care about the end results. Lava life is another you can add to your list of bad sites. When I first joined lava life years ago, it was great. These days its like a baron waste land there. I wrote them and asked what was the idea of paying to contact someone and they never reply? I dont want to be paying just to ask someone to talk to me. I should only have my credits deducted once they reply back. Their answer wasnt the best. I was looking for the wrong type of girl or that the girls I was contacting just werent interested in me. I was like, whats that got to do with being charged for something I didnt get? Needless to say I left the site and promised I would let everyone know never to use it. Sounds like eharmony and match.com. Your paying to ask for contact. Not paying for the contact. I find the women I do get to talk to all say about being bombarded by males married or engaged looking for sex etc. It sucks ass for the genuine guys trying to find someone. But having said that, I view a lot of profiles as much as I can. I see todays morals and standards just arent what they used to be. Everyone says they want someone loyal and loving for long term. Yet at the same time they are saying how they are kinky or have a lot of stamina in bed. Like to tell dirty jokes and have fun. This is women saying this. What kind of guy do you expect to find with a profile like that? Honestly you are asking to have those begging guys come door knocking. And like the lady here with her msg “DRWright” What the hell are you doing on a dating site when you are engaged? Your lucky its not to me girl, you would be out the door in less than a heart beat. Get with your man or cut him lose so you dont break his faith in women. For us single guys, its already hard enough, let alone knowing some lady who’s engaged is on the site portraying to be single. Then you bag guys for being like they are. Its because of girls like you that guys behave the way they do. You give women a bad name. With todays standards, morals and ethics, all I can say is I wish I had been born in the early 1900’s. Thats when you knew, if you met someone, through good and bad times you would be together the rest of your life. Today women change guys almost as much as they do hair styles. Most of the women I see are divorced with kids. Never got to know growing up and just wanna go partying etc. Make up for lost time. Ruined pretty much. I look high and low for even just one genuine woman. One who had their fun as a teen and got the chance to grow up into a settled adult. One who doesnt need to flirt to feel good about them self with 10 other guys while talking to u or even dating or marrying you. One who doesnt need their cleavage hanging out in all directions so other guys will notice them or that they can feel they look more beautiful than the lady next to her down the street. I think society doesnt help either. All the single “independant” and “unhappy” people dictating how we should all be and what ethics we should really have. Helllooo!!! Causing chaos might give u temp satisfaction, but will never fill the emptiness of lost love.
Great analysis. If you guys need any more pros to come up with more compelling arguments and customer service, let this economist know!
my experience with paid dating sites (be2) is that the only females who messaged me first were scamers figuringthat if you are desperate enough to go on a paid dating site you would be willing to send money overseas to pay for them to come back home I haven’t had any of those issues with free sites
This article makes a lot of sense. Like others have already noted here, I found RSVP.com.au operates similarly to the Match.com model. I found only a small proportion of women there responded to me – to the extent where I sent a letter of complaint about this to RSVP management!
All in all, RSVP proved in my case at least, to be a waste of money.
Love, love, love this analysis (as well as all the other amazingly nerdy posts coming out of this blog). However, this does beg the question:
-How much less likely are OKC users to get married than the general population?
My guess is that while they may be more likely than Match.com or eHarmony users to get married or end up in a relationship, the rate still would be lower than if they weren’t on a dating site to begin with.
Also, this makes me wonder about paid sites with further eligibility limitations (e.g. Jdate). The chances of reaching an actual person on there (depending on the location) must be more like 1/1000!
I agree with everything stated in this article. I signed up for a 2 month subscription to eharmony a few years back and didn’t even get to the stage where I could email any of my matches. I suspect most of them only uploaded their profile and picture and then didn’t even pay for two months like I did. Interestingly enough, my best friend paid for a whole year and is actually hearing from many men. I suspect the longer you subscribe for the more profiles of paying customers you actually get to see. On a side note: Why did Christian only use pictures of attractive female okcupid users for this article? Makes me wonder…
The study fails to mention one key factor when showing that users are more likely to be married when not signed up. eHarmony and Match and other such pay dating sites only track marriages achieved through the site, not generally achieved by site subscribers.
I feel like a lot of what people do on dating sites is simply see what’s out there, figure out what they want, harden their will, think about who they are, etc. A dating site can be a valuable facet of the entire process that needs to occur when moving into a new relationship. Some people find a new person through the dating site, some don’t, but for those that don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean they got no value out of the site.
Whether a pay dating site is more valuable to that extent would be an interesting discussion. Perhaps there’s more access with free sites, but perhaps a pay site makes the commitment of being “out there” more real, since things that cost money are approached more seriously.
Interesting stuff!
yes you are correct,i good loking,and on most sites,rsvp and alot are just scammers,they send fake porfiles to you ,you pay and anwer and then persons profile disapears,
this is evil and lieing,and cheating,
ive been russia and sent lady from over seas,many bad people,
in russia there are many ladys honest and looking for love,
go russia dont send money,
but hard many dont speak english,but many want love,but russia is great country,poor,but have better way of life than how our life is going,i think as a man,we are lossing the lady,
they have money and dont seek men like they use to,
we are just a toy now,if we dont obey they move on,,,thats my thoughts,thats 70%
Being somewhat of a statistician myself I have analysed the active profiles and such of some sites. A lot of what I have found is reitterated within this blog. For women any site will work although the quality of people messaging her isnt always great. For men, well good luck.
I’ve been on dozens of dating sites over the last 10 years of both types. I’ve only ever paid for one but have had more success with others so go figure. There are other free sites out there, Plenty of Fish is a good one and Oasis I have used more this year with some success. I have also used RSVP, Red Hot Pie, Adult Matchmaker, EHarmony, Match.com. Adult Friendfinder, Lavalife, etc etc etc…so many some which no longer operate.
All sites will have dead profiles that they keep to have extra numbers. Most sites tell you when they were last logged in so any profile that says they haven’t been in within the last month assume it is dead.
Overall good article and I will check out OkQ. Be interesting to see how that one is.
i have joined match.com when i signed up i got no replys so i am not interested in any paying site again
Another factor not considered here is that ‘once upon a time’ no-one had to sign up and pay to meet people until laws were changed to protect privacy and databases and thus making this a lucrative industry.
What most ‘consumers’ are not aware of is that these paysite ‘generate fake profiles’ to lure you in and increase your ‘potential’ matches.
No one can prove the fraud and fraud it is because of the privacy laws that protect the companies abusing our needs for companionship. I would make an uneducated guess that 70% of more of the profiles viewed on adult sites and companionship sites are ‘bots’ and not real people but automatic conversations run by smart programming or employees of said companies. The question remains when and who is going to expose this ‘industry’ for what it truly is, lecherous.
Great read! Thoroughly enjoyed it. I have been successful in my match pursuits, and I see why based on the information here regarding the “feedback loop”. I treated each email I sent with as much personal attention as I could, and that has made all the difference. To side with OKCupid, that policy still applies, so whichever online dating site you use, treat it like a job, and you will stand out from those who don’t have the fortitude.
Additionally, regarding the marriage numbers, I would LOVE to see a follow-up of the divorce rates 5 years down the line, comparing those who met online (be it on a pay-site or OKCupid) versus those who met in the real world. This could potentially be another strong argument for (or against) online dating in general!
Thanks for the detailed article!
I tell you one website you really need to look out for Speeddater, I paid for a ticket for a speeddater event and they gave me a 1 month free membeship. What they didn’t make clear was you get automatically signed up for Autorenewal and end up on a £19 a month membershtip scam.
I was outraged when I saw my bank account, they reallyu dont make this clear when you par for their parties and also make it difficult to be taken off auto reneawl.
I feel like speaking to a watchdog about this scam, not sure who to talk to .
Be warned…
Other that I do like speeddating and seem to have made some contacts.
Great report on the dating sites. I find this site great because it is free, however there is still one dilemma.. guys outnumber girls on dating sites so even the most unattractive girls can be picky.