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 - 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
Excellent detective work!
That is an incredible article. Thank you!
I’m interested in OkC’s pay features, but I don’t want to be branded for it. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to give OkC money without everybody knowing about it (e.g. being branded “A-list”) and as you’ve determined there’s a stigma involved with users that pay for dating sites.
Always knew that these paysites were not quite kosher.
However, does this damning analysis also carry an implicit promise that OKC will never be a pay site (I do not mean the A-list – I am on it myself) ?
However, there are things that OKC could improve and they are mostly overdue:
1. Include additional filters – for those that are single and want to have kids. Right now, one needs to choose between “doesn’t have kids” and “likes kids”. If you think about it, these are orthogonal characteristics. A single guy / girl may not have kids, but wants them (or does not want them). Or wants kids but does not want to get involved with a single parent. Of course, “dislikes kids” implies that he / she does not want kids, but the converse is not true.
2. Include a way for users to filter out people not interested in their race / ethnicity. I have a vested interest in this because Indians (as well as Asians and AAs) have much lower reply rates than the match percentage would indicate (you covered this extensively in your now-famous October blog entry last year).
3. Include a match test tracking system. Say I have a matching test (and I do). The only way I know that someone took that test is if I go to the stats page and see the counter go up. I do not get to know who took that test (all I can do is to go through the stalker / visitor list). That obviously does not work for invisible users. Many people (and this is my experience) assume that the creator of the test gets notified. He does not. Add in the fact that girls usually do not message guys, and you have a pretty suboptimal situation.
4. Add more religious identities to the religion tab. Some pretty large religious denominations are left out – like Mormons and Sikhs. You may also consider adopting my comments in 2 above to this (since many people have a strong religious preference).
I have more ideas, but I think that these four will be the ones with the best support among other users.
I totally agree for the average user that dating sites must be very frustrating. I use Match.com and I’ve tried sites like eHarmony for a month but with eHarmony type sites you don’t have any control of searches plus they want what I would consider an unreasonable amount of money for a dataing service.
The value in Match.com is that you do get more users to choose from, but you have to search by New Users and Activity Date. Out of my experience I get roughly the same rate of reply from both OKCupid and Match, but I get more users to choose from on Match (which for me is worth the price they charge (plus they have a ton of discount options). So in my opinion both sites are of equal value. OKcupid is one of the few free dating sites that I consider a quality experience. Most free dating sites are like the wild west.
i frickin’ love this website. they analysis you guys do is amazing.
Well I get fuck all hits on this free one anyhow… mos of the guys are freaks, geeks, or just want a barbie substitute.
Really naff how all your ‘pictures of attractive women look like they’re around 25 yrs old and that they all fit the stereotypical waif with long hair mold.
to be honest all dating sites suck if you ask me….
They are but an expansion of the consumerist rubbish we’re sold by big business, advertising and the media….
” Hey you too can windowshop for love n lust like you do for sweatshop clothing! Oh HURRAH! NOT!!!
I have been saying this for years. eHarmony and Match.com prey on the weak and lonely. They abuse the users with the hope that the entire membership may respond. It is a scam. They might as well be sending emails from the Finance Minister from the New Republic of Congo.
I think Match.com has an opportunity to scam more money from people in having an account that lets you identify paying account, or being able to ‘gift’ credits.
Biggest addition to OkCupid was the reply meter. I personally don’t want to waste my time sending a mail if the person can’t even take the time to respond back.
Great insightful article as always with plenty of thoughtful analysis, keep up the good work.
Though I was somewhat disappointed the article didn’t cover the behavioral economics behind pay sites and free sites. And Why ultimately Pay sites are more successful.
If Someone has to Invest Money, then they feel pressured into trying to find a “match”, with free sites there is no pressure to find a match, thus the lower success rates.
There is much less than a “93% chance of flirting into a void” for anyone with a bit of e-street sense (because it’s easy to immediately tell if an account has been recently active.)
That being said, I agree that pay sites are no better than okc for meeting someone.
And the claims on e-harmofraud for the effectiveness of their “dimensions of compatibility” are simply ridiculous
i hated eharmony. i took their quiz and ended up with only 6 matches in a one hundred mile radius. none of the guys were even the slightest bit attractive, and at least 2 of them were well over the age limit i had specified. match also yielded nothing – i found one person who was mildly attractive on there and looked him up on myspace. we talked for free, we set up not 1 but 2 dates, both of which he backed out of at the last minute. then he got annoyed when i said i wasn’t interested in speaking with him anymore.
the biggest reason men get no responses from their initial emails is because they frequently come across as jackasses. the second biggest reason is because they email a woman who is completely out of their league, or just obviously not what she’s looking for. a woman who is into health and fitness doesn’t want a fat pot smoking slob. most men have no idea how to approach a woman with any kind of gentlemanly confidence, online or in real life, and that’s why they get ignored.
you have a wonderfull system as opposed to the other sites
While I agree with all of this deductive logic, and will never pay for a dating site; I don’t success has anything to do with paying or not paying. While someone may be inclined to put out more active energy to connect vis-a-vie their economic investment. The connection and success of a relationship is entirely dependent on the two parties ability to communicate and relate to one another. Whether they meet on match, eharmony, okc, pof, the bar, work, school… you get the picture. So while all these OKCtrends make lots of sense and are sometimes very helpful, they are not adequately addressing the problem. Ive met 30-50 women via the internet, and out of those experiences have had maybe 3-5 “Bad” experiences, yet every women I meet, has had nothing but bad experiences until she meets me
The desperation feedback loop is exactly the problem on okcupid. I’ve never gotten anywhere near a 30% reply rate. It’s more like 1%-10%. Maybe it’s because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is filled to the brim with okcupid users. According to your message response rate statistics, I should be doing a lot better. I wonder if you guys could do a breakdown of message response rates by geographic locations. Or if I can access the data, I can do that breakdown myself.
I have better luck actually meeting people by sending IMs saying “hi” to people online instead of carefully crafting a message to them. The IM response rate is similar, but it has exponentially less effort involved.
I love okcupid and I especially love the fact that it’s free, so you can actually talk to other users (even if the signal to noise ratio is quite low for nearly all the women in my match results). I’ve met several girlfriends on okcupid, surprisingly. so I must admit, the rate of false positives is startlingly low in my own case.
I’d like to be able to filter match search results by who has the attention span to read your blog.
Nice work.
OKC should also create some type of user rating system; Kind of like how ebay has a seller rating. That way people would be more socially inclined(just like booze in a bar) to have positive experiences with the people they come across, or who cross their path. If a guy is a dick because he doesn’t know how to approach a women, or a women is a bitch because she doesn’t know how to adequately communicate she isn’t interested, there could be a community policing system. This would make everyone more inclined to be “better humans” and ultimately be better “daters”; thus increasing their positive experiences inside and out of the interwebs. OKC should really give me a job!
So it means a completely paying site (from registration) with huge subscribers is the real deal. Because of the enough members and also because of the seriousness of the members, the result will be the best. Free site also has disadvantage that people are not serious enough anyway.
If OKC fouses on its match system, then it should require all members to fully complete profile and min. 100 questions. Because if it’s not done correctly, the match system actually deters the other party’s interest. Members on OKC tend to worship match scores and then neglect potential partners. Without it, they may at least try to talk if the profiles match. So the match system is good, but it should be implemented really carefully.
Attracting more members to OKC is also vital. All the match criteria limit possible matches and current member scale is not enough. It’s like seeing the same faces all the time but members have no desire to contact them simply they look like the match.
When members search, there should be sophisticated mutual match search as well.
Really hope OKC will improve well, because the IM, tests and forum are all good.
The first part of this analysis seems solid to me: most match.com profiles are dead, and their advertising tactics are a trick. The second part has some selection issues. It may not be that men who send out lots of messages are resorting to a desperation tactic, creating a negative feedback effect. Men who send out lots of messages may just be undesirable men–they are thoughtless in their messages because they are thoughtless in general, and their profiles make this obvious. The “cast a wide net” strategy may be their best bet.
Match.com couples may get married less often than the general public, but again, this might be because the types of people who join pay dating sites are either not very desirable or are more introverted / shy / etc. than the general public. That’s why they’re resorting to online dating to begin with. To show that it’s a bad deal for them, you need to show not that people who join Match don’t get married as often as the general public, but that, conditional on their current marriage prospects (which is not the average person’s marriage prospects), joining Match does not help their chances.
Heh, I was just being irritated at how I got *nothing* during the 3 months I was subbed to JDate, but now that I’ve dropped my subscription, I have two new messages.
One good way to hack the paid sites is by choosing a username that you also use elsewhere (my JDate username is also on my Flickr account). This assumes the other person thinks to try searching the internets for you, but I like resourceful boys, so it’s a good filter. The other thing I do is send messages to people who look interesting and tell them that I may very well not be subbed by the time they get the message, and that they should try me at the email address that I use for such things.
This is great detective work which confirmed my suspicions for some time. I had paid for subscriptions to both eHarmony and Match in the past but once I started doing my own research, I drew the same conclusions as you have done here. I’d be curious to learn of the male/female breakdown here because I believe that men outnumber women by more than 2 to 1 on both sites. Throw that in, and the fact that the men initiate most of the email contact and of course you wind up in a situation where women just stop checking their mail. A while back, back in the day when I was a paying customer, I managed to strike up a chat with a very beautiful woman on match. She told me she received upwards of 100 emails a day and over 1000 hits on her profile a day. Clearly, she couldn’t keep up so just stopped checking her match mail altogether. It’s a numbers game and an exercise in futility.
Two items you did not mention in your article is the number of actual bogus profiles that exist on match and the former “relaxed match” criteria used by eHarmony. While not a paying member but being a match subscriber, I received notification that I had received messages on the site so I ponied up for another month to “check” my messages. When I did, I found the messages to be from Russian women in various locations in the U.S. including a few based locally. Of course, when I went to check the profiles, they had mysteriously disappeared. Match customer service did nothing to resolve my complaint and from that point forth, I refused to pay for a match subscription again. eHarmony, in my opinion, committed a worse offense by sending me matches that weren’t truly matches at all. This was their “relaxed match” criteria at work. No doubt this was in response to feedback indicating that people had been receiving too few matches. They violated their own standards to appease the user base. It may have been the right thing to do at the time but I believe they are no longer using relaxed match criteria to deliver matches. I do know a women who did meet her fiancee on eHarmony delivered via relaxed match criteria so she is happy. However, they couldn’t be more different at the core. This tells me that “relaxed match” was a sham and was used entirely to pump up the number of subscribers and keep existing subscribers.
The sound you just heard was hollyskincare’s profile blowing up.
Great rational, math, and logic.
But one thing not discussed is that the subscribers on pay sites are 1. More serious about dating and 2. Usually more educated and (for lack of a better term) classy. Free sites are okay, but if anyone can join, then anyone can have a profile, which means there are a lot of worthless profiles out there. Free dating sites are filled with people who were simply bored at work one day and created a half hearted profile. Although Match and eHarmony certainly have “dead profiles” too, the subscribers take dating more seriously. Of the smaller number f actual subscribers, you have a smaller dating pool than compared to OKC, but you also have a more serious dating pool.
It would be interesting to learn the % of males/females in the non dead profiles for Match and Eharmony. Although I’m sure we could all take a good guess at what direction the scale tips.
Now I’m off to go find my old Match profile…I’m sure it’s still there…
Way to defeat your competitors with facts, data, and thoughtful logic! But to be honest, it seems all dating sites including unfortunately OKC doesn’t work… at least for me or perhaps most guys. There’s just way too many guys for one girl.
So what you’re saying, essentially, is that we *also* shouldn’t pay money for OKC’s “A-list.”
I can live with that.
Although this is a great analysis, I think your discussion of whether you’re more or less likely to get married based on whether or not you’re on a dating site is misleading. It’s possible that every person who gets married from an online dating site might not have ended up married otherwise. Maybe not likely, but you can’t really draw the conclusion you’re implying from the data you have at hand.
I do love these articles. Fascinating, and confirming a number of my unconfirmed theories about the pay sites.
I agree with Swimmy, your analysis isn’t flawed, but it is also not completely conclusive.
When you show that people sending out a lot of messages get fewer replies. You aren’t proving causality. I would also say that the people who spam girls (no doubt with, “wow. u hot” messages), get few replies because of the type of person they are. Number of messages sent per session is indicator of personality type which is the causal link to lower response rate.
To prove what you are saying you’d have to find a person who usually sends a few messages per session. Take that response rate, then compare that response rate to that same user’s response rate on days they sent tons of messages.
Also a similar issue exists with the number of people getting married. The kind of people who are signing up for a match.com or eharmony might be doing it because they aren’t good at finding dates. OR because they have very difficult requirements for their mate. So it’d be difficult to prove with certainty what their percentage of success without these sites would be.
Christian, do you have any sense of how many marriages (or measure “objective of joining the site met” in some other way) OKC has put together? I understand it’s not a central purpose of the site, but I’m curious. My husband and I met through OkCupid, and we’ve always joked about doing our own parody of the eHarmony commercials for your site. It’d be interesting to know how you guys stack up.
eHarmony’s monthly payment rates are so ridiculous. They are trying too ridiculous hard to get you to pay for long term that it becomes double inexpensive to upgrade to a 6 month or a 12 month.
The flowchart was very accurate though. Sites like Match.com and eHarmony are definitely taking money from people by arguing that it’s worth 100$+ to find your soul mate. Since most people are overly romantic and unrealistic they are willing to make that trade.
Another good point. If you drop the cash for a 12 month and find a relationship, your time gets wasted until it’s up.
I’ve definitely observed the Desperation Feedback loop, but honestly it exists as much on OKC as it does on the pay sites. That’s what’s universally driving membership churn. What’s the difference between getting indigestion at home or at a fancy restaurant, other than a convenient source of blame?
My God man, I can’t believe I even used to subscribe to E-Harmony, or should i say e-shitty. I payed way too much, and got very few replies. my biggest complaint about e-harmony has to be the matching its self. Ok, I’m a religious man, practicing Catholic for the record. when i said i wanted someone who’s religious, i meant believes in God and attends church on a fairly consistent basis. what did I get…OVERLY RELIGIOUS GIRLS. Like the ones who only care about God and nobody else, not to put down the man I worship and go to for guidance. Second, the communication process sucks! I;d rather go straight to the messaging for free!
OK Cupid, thats where you guys come in. I’ve gone on FAR more dates with users from this site,a nd they’re also much more attractive than the ones on E-Harmony. Plus, I still talk to every user with whom I’ve exchanged dozens of messages. I also love how much you get on this site for free: a complete profile, the ability to contact a user A-list or normal, the instant messaging system (though it lags every now and then), and the ability to filter who can message me and what im looking for.
It would be great if OKC could figure out a way to incentivize people through behavior economics (like paying sites) while still keeping the base site free. This would force women and men to take the finding a match a bit more seriously.
Also I do agree with SeekAdventure that paying sites do seem to have more serious members.
I get about the same number of replies and first contacts on paying and free sites, but by far all my longterm relationships have come from paid sites.
So like, I already knew this. Congrats to OKC for proving it and making it to hard to ignore as truth. But now then I am faced with a dilemma. The same truth to reply function that is true of other sites does not stop just because it is on OKC. The only real difference is that neither of us have to consult our wallet before deciding to reply. This is good, but it does not change the Cause/Effect relationship in messaging. Women still get to many emails and the men send to many. Address this and we might have the perfect system. Knowledge is Power, only when you have the Wisdom to use it correctly.
Excellent work Holmes.
You spend some time knocking those services. As for OKCupid, you guys should come up with a way to help both men and women with the messaging system. You have stated that the system kills the for-pay systems, “The Desperation Feedback Loop” I would say that it also applies to OKCupid. Despite being free, a person can also send too many generic, formulaic messages to many other people. The same situation applies although on a much larger percentage. How does a person receiving messages separate the signal from the noise?
Make messages cost time and effort. Like spam emails, OKCupid messages are nearly costless, thus it’s easy to overwhelm and spam a person.
Create a limit on how many messages can be sent out by a person. Maybe 1 per hour, 1-3 per day or 1 per person sent unless they reply, then release the limit for that person if they do. Reduce the number of messages a person can receive to 3 per day. Inform them they have more coming but they have to come back later (1hr to a day?) This will increase your return rate and cut down the noise.
Increase the quality of the message by making it clear you can write them again unless they reply or rate you 4 stars or higher. Give them the ability to block the author.
Give some stats to the message writer and message receiver. Like, average number of words written per message, number of keywords in the message that trigger an emotional response and intimacy, number of keywords that appear in the reference the message receiver’s profile, average time read per message, average time taken to write a message, average reply rate, number of visits and time spent on the site, etc. Give suggestions based on those stats.
Which people are the flakes and those who make an honest effort? How can you quantify the person’s level of participation and gauge their sincerity?
I think the point is not that paying site is not good, but that paying site should advertise how many paying members they have but not how many members including free members they have, then the paying site with the most paying members will always be the most successful one.
I think the ideal approach will be: Members have a testing period. After that they have to pay. As for how much they pay, the competitive price can be winner.
As for finding marriage online, no one can ensure. Love can happen anywhere, anytime. But if love doesn’t happen elsewhere, then you can at least find someone online.
This is a good post, getting lots of feedback eh.
I’m one step ahead of you:
http://www.okcupid.com/profile/crabrangoon/journal/15790386676220984069/Online-Dating’s-Gender-Bias
Online dating altogether is a waste of time for most straight men.
The biggest thing for me about Match.com is the whole 6 month guarantee. If you don’t meet anybody in the first 6 months you get the next 6 months free. To me that says they have no faith in their system.
I paid for 6 months of Match.com. I had the identical profile on there that I did on OKC. In 1 year (aka I got the next 6 months free) I received 0 replies on Match.com. While I got probably 20 or so replies on here, and I went on a date or two with about 8 different women.
Now what does that mean? If you look at the ends, neither were successful because I am not currently with anybody. However, the means were much more satisfying that I actually got to speak to people and meet people on OKC.
@Raymond,
This is quite true. However, A) OKC doesn’t claim otherwise, and B) This seems to be a phenomenon inherent to the interaction of the minds of the populous, rather than a flaw in the site itself. Cops would just prevent crime from happening, if they could. But people still commit crimes, and they just utilize their resources to best combat it.
The fact remains that OKC provides probably the best set of tools available (free of charge) for seeking love and/or simply interacting socially with others via the interwebs. Hell, they even provide us with blogs informing us of what kind of messages work best, and how users tend to think and react to things, with hard data to back them up! Who else does that? If you ask me, that’s like… the opposite of lying to make themselves look better, haha. If the pay sites are optimists, saying “Don’t worry, you WILL find someone, 8D!”, OKC is a realist, saying “Hey, you CAN find someone, and it’s free. Look if you’d like.”
What do you think of web sites like gaydar? If you don’t pay you can view a limited (but not too low) number of profiles per day and you have a limited (3? 5? I don’t remember) messages per day. The web site also tells you when somebody connected the last time and you can filter out people that didn’t connected recently.
If you are a paying member you get unlimited messages and profile views. Moreover you can store messages, have extra search features and some other additional things.
It’s like you just proved that 2+2=4; although it’s interesting to see just how MUCH it equals 4.
I do have a problem with the marriage statistic – even with match.com low marriage percentage, would these people even get married if they didn’t join the site? giving a slight chance seems like better than no chance to me. But then again, i could be wrong.
Other than that,, regarding SeekAdventure25’s reply, there is that point to consider that paying members are more likely to be willing to date (supposedly more serious). I do believe it has the added benefit of weeding out some of the frauds (assuming there are any – seems logical to me).
v. – good luck. I hope you fulfill the standard you set out for your matches…
I want to flirt with those thirty single attractive okcupid users!
One thing you didn’t mention is Match.com’s deceptive and unethical payment model. Back in the day I signed up for a one month membership. Buried somewhere deep, deep, deep in the fine print I was apparently informed that my membership would “auto renew” the next month, after I had given up on the site. This happened to me – I challenged the charge with my credit card company but their exploitative and deceptive fine print meant they won. Lesson learned – I don’t care if George Clooney and Sofia Vergara are on Match.com begging me for a threesome, I will never give those cheats my money again.
Oh, and they censor what you can say in your profile text (content not just profanity), so if you care about sexual compatibility at all, Match.com is not for you.
Very interesting about eharmony. I was on that site for about 5 months, and I always wondered why I got so many nonresponses. In the time I was on, I had maybe 3 dates, and more than 600 matches that led to nothing.
Plus for all the money you pay you don’t get facinating analyses like the ones you guys do. I always look forward to what you’re going to do next!
Well, after a lot of thought on this, I have to point out- the messaging dilemma will never change. Women will still get bombarded, men will still send too many.
Also, I agree with the thought of being able to block an author. There are some really creepy guys that have messaged me, and I don’t like not being able to block them.
As for pay sites? I don’t know, I feel like paying for an internet dating site is desperate. But that’s just me.
I signed up to this website back in 2004 for the analysis system only. I was very interested in knowing how it works and playing around with the matching, etc. However, after abandoning it around 2008, I recently joined up again with another account, made a profile and am using it for networking purposes.
I love the friend % feature and I still love the concrete, mathematical system that was put together in OkCupid.
AceTracer, I have the exact same complaint about their “A-list” service. I would buy it if it didn’t put a scarlett “A” next to my profile. I wish there was a way to be “secretly A-list”. I emailed OKCupid about this and they never wrote back.
You forgot one other important factor. Of those alleged 1.37 million Match.com subscribers, how many have simply forgotten to cancel their account, and no longer visit the site? I know a lot of people just forget to cancel. This is another profit-strategy for sites, which count on “automatic rebilling” being forgotten about by their users. If I had to guess, I’d bet that about 5% to 10% of their “paid subscribers” fall into this category.