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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

- Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13cupid.html - The Big Business Of Online Dating
http://www.cnbc.com/id/35370922 - eHarmony.com's Advertising Splash Page
http://www.eharmony.com/advertising/singles - Match.com's Q4 2009 Report
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/IACI/871220273x0x349618/6d370897-220b-409b-a86e-e02801b3eed5/Gridsand MetricsQ42009.pdf. Match.com's 20 million membership claim is here: http://www.consumer-rankings.com/Dating/#table - Ibid.
- Centers For Disease Control
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm. Not sure why they care. - The U.S. Census "Unmarried and Singles Week"
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/007285.html
Wow, OKCupid thinks I’m an attractive single. Guys, I have officially arrived.
“It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don’t subscribe to Match.com.”
Great article, but the above quote misrepresents the statistics. Those who are likely to get married in the next year are unlikely to subscribe to a dating site as they are currently in relationships. You should compare the marriage rates over a year of single people to those who join match.com.
Is this OKC’s response to the internet dating is bigger than porn news story? It’s an interesting add-on to that assertion. Shows how both internet porn and internet dating have weird business models.
I’m a 58 year old computer professional. My wife (who is a mental health professional) and I met on match.com. When I decided to start dating in my early fifties (my wife of 21 years had passed away) I tried to figure out how to meet women of my generation.
I signed up for Yahoo personals, the Onion personals, and Match.com. I actually had quite a few really nice dates from all three.
Over six months of dating from the three sites I used I probably had a bit over fifty dates.
My observation is that dating online is not a whole lot different from meeting partners by other means. The advantage is that the pool of potential mates is larger, and you get a chance to email back and forth to determine compatability.
Christian,
This article was really just surprising. I don’t mean that it was surprising that those other big dating sites are so deceitful, but the quality of this post was outstanding. This was very well written and extremely informative. I enjoyed reading it- thanks for the effort you put into this, it really shows.
Wait, so paying to find dates ISN’T a good idea? Gee, who would have ever thought?
A couple of slight skews here in that some places allow free ‘replies’ to emails that are sent. Essentially they know that with the overload of interest the ladies suffer under they will never pay anyway, so they let them reply (often to some small number only) for nothing. All the sites know that with the skew in ratio of male to female members (typically 4 or 5 to 1 and in some places as high as 10 to 1… I’d love to know okc’s number here by the way) that getting women onboard is the name of the game, so they can then sell the service of facilitating access to them to men. (Doesn’t that sound unsavoury!) This skewed payment model means the women are often much less involved too. The guy is paying by the minute, the woman is just browsing while her nails dry. Another recipe for disaster.
The other skew is that many of the so-called singles sites are little more than scams. The name of the game is the monthly charge (and beware of places where you can’t cancel the automated re-billing easily and transparently), the mechanism is to look attractive to the people looking for love, a companion or whatever else the site is hawking. But, once again, the women won’t pay simply because their is no need to do so. Lots of places online to go where men will deluge them with interest (sadly quantity is still not quality but that’s also just life in a sense…) so no need to pay for it. Men will pay as has been shown, so build a good stable of fake profiles (skewing the number of profile stats) and start sending “come-on” emails. I know a couple where I’ll get 2-4 emails a week from women expressing interest… until I pay to reply when the stream that knocks at my door suddenly stills. Some places insist you email only through their system. Sometimes it “filters” content, i.e. your emails… And if you don’t get a response, well you’ll just have to sign up for a bit longer won’t you. (Its often handy on a paysite to keep two profiles, so you can test your emails to see if they get through. That of course further skews the stats above! Even fewer ‘real’ people you can talk to if everyone does that.)
All in all, its getting ugly out there.
I love what you do with this little blog of yours.
BEST.
READING.
EVER.
JeremyOMGWTFBBQ
I read an article a while back about how some scam companies would promise interviews, jobs, and better resumes to unemployed people in exchange for a fee. Match and eHarmony do the exact same thing: prey on the weak.
What gets me is how those companies have no reservations about messing with their users’ hopes, expectations,and FEELINGS… Yeah, yeah, I know; it’s business. Still kinda pisses me off…
Anyway, good post.
i have signed up for eharmony and match they were both useless. i owuld message somebody or flirt to no avail what they do is almost criminal. they are taking advantage of people and what worse is a reate hike in the recession its insane. since i have been on ok cupid i have talked to 2 or so women about half of them i knew before i got on this site and the other half have become good friends
Love these articles so much. Thought I’d give you a heads up, because I know you’ll appreciate this being pointed out and getting it fixed, that there’s a missing word or two in one sentence: “We’ve conducted extensive research on this, and you can read more about it our other posts.” It’s in the first “fact” of the Feedback Loop section.
Very interesting article. Reminds me a lot of Freakonomics, where you bring to light some blatantly obvious data that everyone else overlooks. I think there are a couple flaws though, the second of which is key. Here’s the first:
1. Desperation Feedback Loop shows correlation, but not causation. It can’t be assumed that guys who send 10 messages per session did so because they got legitimately frustrated by a lack of female replies. They could just be below average in appearance, or strange, or desperate, or all of the above. Obviously anyone who sends 10 messages per session is not going to invest as much time into it – but have you been able to plot the trend over time (e.g., number of days on the site by number of emails sent out) and show that men send more messages over time to women they are less suited for and receive fewer replies? We should look at a single set of men over time, rather than a random sample of guys based on their average message frequency, as you did. This isn’t nearly as important as…
2. You can’t assume that all of the 89.8 million single Americans are “single and looking.” I interpret from the link you provided (http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/007285.html) that the US Census considers “single” anyone who is not currently married. This includes people who are in a relationship. The vast majority of Match.com subscribers are not in a relationship (which is why they join the site), and even those that get into one while subscribers are not with their partners long enough to get married in the same year. So the NON-Match population is of course, automatically more likely to get married because some of them (if not most) are already in relationships! It would be virtually impossible for all 4 million of these marriages to happen among people who met and decided to get married within a year of meeting. If I’m missing something here, please let me know.
3. Now where’s the okcupid marriage data?! Would be curious.
Everything you’ve said in this posting is true. I’ve tried Match and got 1 date out of it with a girl who was… well… huge. Even searching for matches based on the “last account activity” criteria did not yield very many results.
Cupid isn’t perfect, either. in fact, I pay a [small] monthly fee so that I can filter my searches by last login and ensure that my messages are delivered to overflowing mailboxes. Has it increased the number of responses I get? Nope. There is one other thing that even OKC has a problem with: the shoe-shopping mentality! Do I need to explain?
I took a look at cougarlife.com. It’s a doggone paysite too, but it does mark their subscribers with a profile badge. I suppose to make the user feel special. Not all paysites hide their subscribed users, and I’ve seen the other users find clever ways to hide their outside contact info in the body of their general profile.
I have never been fond of the pay sites. I was on yahoo personals several years ago and I didnt like the results I had which would probably be about the same. I paid around $29 a month. I found OKC and I love the site. I am mostly on here checking out profiles and forums. I have met a couple people on here and talked to a few. I would recomend a free site over a pay site anyday
I created a profile for Match.com, but never attached a picture. All of the best pictures of me have someone else in the picture. This can be a problem if the other person is a niece or nephew that looks like it could be my kid! I got a bunch of auto matches based on my likes and dislikes. I could not find the cost listed anywhere obvious so I never responded or did my own searching. Thanks for sharing this information.
Actually, okcupid’s strength is that it teaches people *how* to date and *how* to communicate by exposing and correcting their ideas. I doubt any other dating site does that.
It also has a zillion neato quizzes and a matching algorithm which is neat (though it no longer factors in the plus-or-minus X% ….:(
Okcupid also generates a massive amount of data which allows extremely precise marketing. E.g. I can expect ads to reflect my age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, consumption habits, income and most anything else.
So okcupid, like the open source movement, is also an implicit critique of property based social relations. Open source everything digital is the future; proprietary models are appealing to old men in suits but they don’t generate better anything, even from data security viewpoints.
Okcupid works: you get out of it just what you put into it.
This is really just blatant self-promotion. How many inactive profiles are on OKCupid for comparison? Showing how many dead profiles their are on eHarmony doesn’t even necessarily prove anything, because many of them could be dead because they found working matches.
Honestly, I like OKC. It’s a good, well laid out site.
BUT…
I’ve gotten a grand total of 2 dates through OKC in several years, neither of which worked out.
I’ve gotten at least 6 dates through OKC, one of which seems to be working out. I also have a couple more prospects for next week.
Considering OKC has a large number of “active” users who just do quizes and browse the forums, I think doing a calculation of eHarmony’s active profiles is disingenuous at best.
I too, have used many pay sites, thinking I’d pay for what I’d get….its totally false with pay sites. Pay sites are like the casinos of the dating world: all you hear about are winners and how many millions people have won, while you lay your money on the table and pray for a miracle. Do some hit it big?…sure, but the casino owners are laughing all the way to the bank.
Case in point: I’ve met a dozen or more girls from OKcupid over the last few years. Way more than I ever got from any pay site. Some of them became great friends, others became a lot more. For what pay sites charge I’d rather take that money and have better luck buying girls drinks! lol
Love your analysis! Really interesting observations and insights. Makes me appreciate the folks at OKC all the more — the developers (obviously!) as well as subscribers.
I consider most of the pay dating site a public health issue and a warning should appear on every site:
“WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT USING PAID DATING SITES MAY LEAD TO DEPRESSION, ANXIETY AND SUICIDE”.
I swear that all the discouragement has left me depressed and demoralized. I bet if someone conducted a study of singles on dating sites you would find a large portion of the single population is suffering from depression. Maybe people should send there
bills from their psychologist to Match.com and E-Harmony! They have created a public health issue!
I wonder how many hours the average single man or woman now wastes trying to meet someone on line. I know I must be past several thousand hours over the last 5 years. The results for all my effort – not one date, didn’t even come close! All that wasted time has to be effecting the gross national product!
You also forgot to mention how many of the other sites create false profiles to fill out the ranks. Even worse some actually send phony messages to their non paying subscribers to entice them. On one site I was on sent a dozen messages the first few day from “hot” looking women in my area. I made the mistake of paying the $29.99 to read those messages. Of course when I responded, none of these girls wrote back. I also received no more messages from any girls once I signed up.
When I started doing searches I found a ton of profiles all created on the same day with the same user descriptions. The final kicker came when I found several dozen “hot” girls in a nearby postal code for a rural town with less than 100 houses. The hottest single in that town was a 79 year old grandmother! I filed a complaint with my credit card company and after showing them all the duplicate phony profiles they agreed to refund my money.
I am also tired of the dating sites that keep advertising they have a ton of hot young girls looking for older men. It is false advertising and a deceptive business practice.
This site is the best, hands down. You always have great articles, statistics and tips. And it’s free, imagine that.
I think okcupid.com as a free dating and communication service is a great service to humanity.
Note also that there is a very careful difference in the wording of Match’s marriage claim and eHarmony’s. Match.com claims 12 marriages/engagements THANKS TO Match.com, while eHarmony says how many MEMBERS got married.
Thus, it’s even possible the first 4.5% of their 6.2% are folks who met outside of eHarmony, leaving them only a 1.7% success rate.
We’d have to read the Harris study to see what they counted (ref?)
On the flip side, to be fair to Match.com, their use of the term “THANKS TO” means that their 0.36% success rate doesn’t include people who found marriage partners outside the site… so your claim that you are 12.4x less likely to get married as a subscriber isn’t really founded. It’s really that your odds go up only by 8% ( [4.5+0.36]/4.5 = 1.08), assuming a member’s offline success rate is the same as the general public (which, of course, in no way has to be true but it’s not information we have).
Every single person should read this. Hell, EVERYONE should read it. Then we can all laugh together.
Nice analysis of the problem. But, it isn’t obvious that OKC will increase the success of your search any more than those other sites, nor that the problems of too much work in sending and sifting through messages are solved, nor that OKC’s business model really provides better incentives to help users be happy.
Lets look at OKC’s incentives. Sites based on an advertising model, like OKC or Facebook benefit by making their site “sticky.” That means that the idea is to get people to sign up and then keep coming back and spending time on it so that they will see more ads.
If people join OKC and then soon find a good match they won’t stick around to see the ads. They’ll be offline spending time with their lover. So OKC has no more incentive to actually help its users find love than any other dating site.
On the other hand, suppose users see OKC as something they can use for social networking, so they stay on the site after finding love. Such people would effectively bloat the users, contributing to the noise to signal ratio for people still searching for love. If people find what they are looking for and go away OKC has to spend money on advertising to bring in more users to see ads.
The possibility remains that OKC could supply its users with matches good for short-term relationships and keep them coming back.
What do we see OKC actually doing? They seem to have started with a core idea based on a long Q&A matching system. This seems good, but not greatly effective compared to other matching systems. At the same time they seem to rely on tests and quizzes as a means of drawing in a lot of casual users. My opinions about psychology lead me to believe that these probably serve mostly to attract women to the site. So you have men attracted to the site and willing to answer questions to find matching women, and you have women coming for the quizzes and perhaps being open to relationships as well. Then you start adding all kinds of features in a scattershot approach, quickmatch is a way of incorporating the simplicity of HOT or NOT, a site that uses time-killing, visual attraction and a rate until you see someone you want to date gimmick. Then they added quiver, ice-breakers, and a bunch of ratings. They’ve added A-list as a discriminatory pricing system which enables fuller use of data from their large question base, as well as prominent placement, virtual gifts will probably be next.
OKC has a lot of incentive to add features for interactivity, fun and games, and to think of various ways to make small amounts of money here and there with optional features, but what incentive do they have to actually make it easier to find good matches, especially those that will lead to long-lasting relationships?
I absolutely love these blog posts – they’re the highlight of my day whenever they come out – please write more!
I posted this on my facebook because I thought it was so awesome. Thanks for debunking match.com.
Mad props for using the word ‘dickery’ in a company blog post
I hope you get tons of press for this post – you guys are right on the money and OkCupid has a fundamentally better business model.
I love these blogs, but okcupid left one HUGE statistic out…how many people are on this site? I know the paradigm is different, but was wondering throughout the blog, and was never pointed out
This is an amazing editorial. I wish you had done this one sooner, as there is at least one or two people I would LOOOOVE to show it to
. OKC power
.
It was a very interesting read. And I agree with a lot of what you say on a logic level. But I did subscribe to Yahoo personals for about a year myself, and had a pretty solid results there to be honest. As a matter of fact I believe I found the best woman for me there. The key is not to rush, take time… and don’t count every penny in way “Oh I paid for a month, let’s send messages to 50 people at once to make it money spent worth it”.
You also fail to point out problem with free dating sites. Like the fact that people take them less seriously, and many join for own reasons other than finding dates (which are numerous, from crime related to plain curiosity). Inactivity also curses free sites, in fact it probably is even worse. Since people often only join “just because”, they are quicker to just forget and leave the site as well.
I can see many flaws with both systems, and I think it’s all aimed at different markets. If money is an issue for you – try luck at free sites (and possibly get a job), if you can afford to spend $20/month and have patience – chances are paying sites can work quite well.
I do believe, from experience, though that paying sites attract more people who are serious about finding a match, rather than ones who join, lets say for quizzes and such.
Fantastic article, thank you.
You kinda lost me when you started doing math…
The answer is obviously grow a pair shut off the computer and talk to women in the real world and forget this ‘online dating’ nonsense.
What I really like is that OkCupid, while it probably has a bajillion registered members, only brags about the “active members” number of 1.2M.
While I’d like to know what an active member is considered to be, that’s much better truth in advertising than just giving all the “registered when they visited once, five years ago” profiles.
Before reading this, I ~felt~ in agreement with the premise, but wanted hard numbers. However, I was fully prepared to run into the usual ‘lies, damn lies, and statistics’ issues. Well, you hit it dead on! Excellent analysis, excellent writing.
Some have mentioned that the other dating sites’ actions are illegal. Well, it’s just advertising/marketing. Nothing illegal. HOWEVER, many do have another practice that IS illegal to watch out for: baiting. Here’s how that works… You sign up for the free account and check things out. Maybe send some winks and emails. Maybe even get a reply. One day, you get a message from someone and s/he is HOT, just who you were looking for. But there’s a catch- you gotta pay to play. So you pay up and get full access, only to never hear from that person again. These bait ‘hotties’ usually don’t even exist. One company lost a huge law suite over this practice.
In this field, free is better. and OkCupid is near the top. While I haven’t found ‘the one’ yet, and only had a couple dates, I’ve had more GOOD contacts here in the short time I’ve been a member than anywhere else. Not to sound like a cattleman at an auction, but the quality of the women I’ve seen here, whether we’ve shared communications or not, is superior to any other site! They seem to have a generally higher education and better outlook and they’re REAL.
And no, I wasn’t paid to write that.
It looks like you might have failed to take something into account when calculating the number of paying users for those sites. That is, the cost of running their sites, advertising, rack space, power, personnel, etc.
Given the cumulative amounts involved this probably means they’re making even more money from members before deduction of costs and bottom line published revenue than thought. Therefore the number of paying members is likely higher than calculated, but the rest of your maths stays the same. Therefore it’s likely there are fewer dead profiles. However the number of “success stories” remains the same which means – for slightly different reasons – it’s still not worth paying for online dating (-:
Ben (who had an awful lot of ‘fun’ on OKc, and is now engaged to someone from OKc with the wedding planned for November this year)
This is a very good and thought provoking article. And yes, I’m a member of this site, and have been bitten by the pay sites before. I still feel the need to play devil’s advocate though. I mean, sure, OkCupid users don’t have to pay, but the money has to come from somewhere to run the site and pay the “minions”, and that I’d guess is from advertising primarily, and the few people who choose to pay a subscription.
Now, I’m not complaining. I think it’s very generous of OkCupid to work under it’s present business model, and I’ve enjoyed meeting people. I think that in some ways though, the analysis is a little incomplete. First, it’s in OkCupid’s interest to have a much wider user base to drive it’s advertising revenue, and this is regardless of the success/fail rate of it’s subscribers. Second, the analysis doesn’t show comparative figures for OkCupid users VS the results presented. Lastly, the use of marriages as a gague to the success of the site’s ability to match users. Marriage statistics are readily available and therefore provide a useful data set, but don’t take into account the fact that there is a large percentage of users who do visit sites simply to hook up for a while.
The analysis also doesn’t factor in the state of mind of the average user, and I have observed that most people (myself at one time included) turned to a dating site because they had had a bad relationship experience in the past, and online dating seemed easier because it seems more impersonal to users who fear being hurt again.
So, now that I’ve kinda shot the article up – or at the very least singed it’s feathers a bit, there is one point I’ve missed. Using OkCupid is FUN! The questions and quizzes, the forums help to pass the time from time to time, and the way in which questions result in matches that mean something to the user, and to me it means that while it may take me some time to find someone, with any luck they really will be compatible, which IS very different to the other sites mentioned in the article.
Most importantly, your own success isn’t really about all these stats and figures, but about how well you interact with others when you do make contact with them.
Oh, and I mentioned earlier the thing about OkCupid wanting larger numbers regardless of success… more active users is a good thing, and better than the fake/dead users that other sites put up.
Hmmm… seems I Devil’s advocated my own Devil’s Advocate!
Dude, your analytical thinking is amazing. I love to have people on my team who can wrap their heads and use numbers to prove a concept. Bravo, please keep this up, and if there are any other things you are working on and need help, shoot me an email and I’ll try to help.
Cheers
This is a briliant article. Best line: “Those people paid an average of $190 each for a personality quiz.” Quality.
This is the best report (on any subject) I’ve read so far this year. I hope the person(s) behind this good work receive many accolades.
Please consistently make a difference between “men” and “heterosexual men”. They’re not the same, and it’s very sloppy (and insulting to non-heterosexuals).
You made a great post a while back about the differences between different orientations’ behavior patterns; you should stick with that.
RE: #2.
I agree with your first sentence. However, the assumption that everyone is “single and looking” actually helps match, so I went ahead and made it, just as throughout the piece I’ve tried to be as generous as possible to the pay sites. The more people assumed to be “single and looking” in the U.S., the lower the nationwide marriage rate, thus the lower the ratio of U.S. marriages/match marriages. If we’d actually tried to figure the number of singles in America actively looking for a partner, I’d bet we’d find that the 12.4:1 ratio I calculate in the post is actually closer to 50:1.
–Christian
Great article. Not an area I know anything about really, but still found your post very interesting. One thing I would say is that the models obviously work for Match and eHarmony from a purely financial view; I’m guessing they’ve ridden out the recession OK. Ultimately, revenue is all most e-businesses care about. If people keep subscribing they’ll keep the model, regardless of its flaws.
naghthere makes a good point about ‘baiting’. I was a subscriber on match.com for about 6 months, and got a wink back right near the end of my subscription. I sent a message to her but then my subs ran out. I signed up again and never got a reply from her.
Then guess what happened near the end of my 2nd subscription? Right, I got a wink from someone I had previously contacted. I almost got tricked again…
I wonder how many other people this has happened to. It surely has to be illegal, but very difficult to prove, so they get away with it.
Signed up to Match 3 weeks ago and have had 4 dates with 3 girls – just depends on how much you put into it – 1st a nutter, 2nd no spark number 3 seems to be going well.
I did a 6 month deal at match.com found one user that was real met her a few times……………turned out she was literally skitzo………..not to mention fell in love with me at first sight and when i told her i wasnt “into” her she threated to get drunk and drive her car off a bridge due to the fact that the CIA was watching her and she had to be married withen 12 months………………needless to say i changed my phone number and canceled with match.com
Your research is awesome. Please do analyze Okcupid’s numbers this way. Thank you.
I had always assumed that the actual available versus the boasted available were way off. However, I didn’t imaging that they were that far off. Well done report.
I have actually used both Match.com and eHarmony in the past. Something that I found of interest is a situation where I personally knew a female member of one of the sites and encountered what I refer to as a “Ghost in the Machine” anomaly.
She was over at my house hanging out. She hadn’t logged into the site itself for well over six months because she was in a relationship. I sent her a message on the dating site from my laptop as a joke because she still got email notifications on her phone when someone messaged her. Since the notification emails tell you the user contacting you and the first part of the message, I knew she’d see it and get a laugh. Anyways, she didn’t get a notification email and within about fifteen minutes, I got a two paragraph message response from her account. It was a message of interest. However, there was no indication of any response work with regards to anything I wrote. It would have been hard anyways because I sent only one line that related to an inside joke between us that anyone else would have taken as confusing unless they knew a lot about the internet geek culture.
As matter of curiosity, I called her over and showed her the response letter. She had me send a followup letter indicating a desire to know about her. Again, she received no email notification and a response came in about 15-20 minutes later that was still generic, but convincing.
I do a lot of program design work, so my first thought was that someone had somehow taken over her account. I had her log into her account and she had no messages from me in her inbox and no indication that she had sent me a reply.
I sent another message to her, but this time, her phone blows up a notification email and the message lands safely in her inbox.
Now, I know that sometimes doing maintenance on a site can mess things up, not to mention bad guys and strange things that can occur when packets are dropped over the interwebz, but this was down right suspicious and sneaky.
I honestly believe that her account was flagged as abandoned and was then used as a bot to foster account interactivity to curb the very model you mention above with the way that a typical guy will message and then get worse at messaging when they do so multiple times in a small time frame. What happens when you have matching set to local people only and you’ve successfully rejected every single account that has come your way that was a subscribing member? They wouldn’t exactly tell you that they don’t have anyone else available in your area and that they hope you stay on board anyway. How could they when they’re selling you by boasting large client numbers?
Regards,
AB (Happy OKC member)