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
well done. I thought this was well researched, i looked up some of the stuff independently. The logic is flawless
I think I’ve spent about as much time on OKCupid reading these statistics articles as I have talking to women. <3 OKTrends.
I enjoyed this article but you unfairly skewed your analysis by presenting the marriage percentage for match.com but not for eharmony. From your figures, eharmony users are ((6.2%/4.5%)-1)*100 = 37.78% more likely to get married during a year of subscription than the general population. Not that bad for 190 bucks if that’s what you’re looking for, and I’m guessing that rate is much higher than okcupid’s.
Bravo!
If this article were on facebook I would “like” it.
I’d like to see where I show up on Reply Rate vs. Send Rate. Any chance of an interactive graph?
That was a great article. I recently signed up to match.com out of curiosity (though I didn’t subscribe) and was aghast at how few features were available (but flaunted) to non-subscribers.
These articles are really very interesting. But what I really want to know is, did that poor guy EVER FIND TRUE LOVE?
I like OkCupid, but I simply *LOVE* OkTrends.
Before I say anything, I want to make it a point that I really love this site.
However, I think there’s been a fact left out. HotOrNot.com
The big issue with Match.com and Eharmony is the limit of only being able to message subscribers. Not the case with Hot or not. Instead, subscribers are the only ones allowed to make first contact, and responses can be made by anyone.
Another big difference between these two is hot or not relies on a match system, similar to the winking here on okcupid. So as this post shows a flow chart where frustration makes someone work harder to find a match, hot or not solves this problem by encouraging users to match by a single click, rather than by messages, BEFORE a conversation starts.
I’ve used it before, and my longest relationship started there. I’ve done a few runs on hot or not, my longest being 3 months, and each time I’ve been successful getting dates from it.
However recently there’s been a lot of cam-bots and spammers. As well as weird foreigners that message with things like “I want marriage with you so I can move to the USA”
So how does this relate to OkCupid? Frankly it’s still better. Hot or Not at this point feels like it’s just a running machine, that no one’s looking after, and there’s not much to it. Okcupid with its match percentages, personality tests, and blog posts designed to help users find what they’re looking for, makes it superior to hot or not.
but if you’re desperate for a date NOW! or like within the next month, hot or not can do that, but loose quality in the match you find (unless you’re lucky) Whereas with Ckcupid, it might take you some times, but it will be someone that’s a better quality match, OH and Ckcupid is free, hot or not is not.
Keep up that awesome blog posts, and thank you for all the great stuff you’ve got here!
Interesting post, but surprisingly selective use of your numbers to prove your point. You guys are too good for that. You can make a fair argument that a paid site will weed out the casual riff-raff, that it attracts a higher quality member, that it provides more security than having your profile viewed publicly, but you didn’t. You cherry picked your stats.
If anything, your statistical analysis only shows how ineffective people are at using online dating sites – not why OkCupid is better than Match. It doesn’t really matter whether Match claims to have 20 million profiles or not – since everyone who uses a site looks in their own region at the most active members, and will likely not write to the person who hasn’t been on in 5 years. Someone who abandons his/her OkCupid or PoF profile may still receive emails as well – and I’m assuming you don’t take down their profile because they’re not writing back to members.
Also, you can’t compare 88 million people who meet in real life vs the percentage of people who meet on Match.com. Bill meeting Jane in their small town does not reflect negatively on the efficacy of online dating. Match.com doesn’t give you a LESSER chance of finding love if you’re meeting NOBODY on a day to day basis. If it gives you a .36 chance of getting married, that’s better than nothing, and works IN ADDITION to any way you might meet in real life.
The truth is: online dating is just a medium. The real problem with online dating is not the dating site itself – it’s the people using the site. The same way no one should blame the gym for not losing weight, it’s time we stop blaming eHarmony or Match for not putting you in a relationship. Their job is simply to aggregate people. Our job is everything else that OkCupid blogs about – better photos, profiles, emails, understanding of the opposite sex.
OkCupid is fine. eHarmony is fine. Match is fine. What people really need to do is learn how to use these sites more effectively.
As a dating coach, that’s what I write about, and that’s why I value this blog – which uses metrics to teach. Maybe next time, you’ll go back to being objective instead of advancing this specious paid vs. free model. The dating site doesn’t really matter – the PEOPLE do…
Love your work
I’ve been on a bunch of dates through this website and I definitely find oktrends more interesting…I guess I’m biased because I love math and graphs and I’m going back to school for scoial psych. Keep up the good work.
I totally agree. A while ago i went on an online dating bender, signed up and tried out like 30 different paid dating sites. To me the stats felt something like this:
80% – no reply
15% – replied but ended up being a scam, either by the website itself, or someone trying to scam me out of cash or spam me.
4% – a few replies, of which half i still talk to over msn/facebook
1% – i actually met in rl, although there was no spark so no relationship, we still chat.
on okcupid i have met 3 ppl who i have online contact with but havnt met any of them (yet).
This blog is the logarithm (y) of base (b)= my soul, where (x)= true love.
In my case, it doesn’t matter how much time I spend writing messages. The chances of a reply is about 1% or less for me. Then, after I got the reply, there is a 80% chance that I won’tr see a second reply…. There is a 50% chance that I won’t get the third… beyond that, I don’t know, never got to the forth one
.
..and I’ve been here since Feb. 6, 2006
Don’t worry, its not Okcupid’s fault… it’s like that everywhere for me! in Real life? Much worse
You could also mention the vast amounts of attention from dirty old men that women have to fend off on those sites. In my brief time on Match.com, I got “winks” or messages from about 20 men. Two were in their thirties, one in his forties, and all the rest fifty or above.
I was 30 at the time.
I love OKCupid! I have recommended it to my friends and they love it as well. I have had many upon many reply’s on this sight and even met and dated a wonderful guy from this sight for 5 months. You can do so much on this site with out paying for it like you would have to do on others. Thanks for this site! It’s awesome! You just gotta have patience and keep your profile up-to-date!
On positive side the women on Match who do respond are interested in actually going on dates.
Online dating in general sucks – better to learn how to pick up women on the street.
That is a good article. My only criticism is the assumption that paying dating websites want you to be matched with inactive users. That is not true from the experience I have with a dating website. They allow us to check when the person you want to talk was last active, so it is my choice to talk to someone who hasn’t logged in recently.
Also, it would be a bit short-sighed from them to focus to much on immediate profit. If dating websites focus to much on “not matching” users then their marriage rate will never improve. if they improve this marriage numbers then they will increase word or mouth advertising, which is possibly where they get many users.
A good selling point for them is that although their marriage rate is low, most unsuccessful users will disregard their results and only successful people will talk about dating websites. Just like tarot/astrology/etc, if you believe, you will disregard the 90% wrong predictions and will focus on the “amazing” 10% right ones.
Wow, this atually makes me feel pretty good about my relative success. I acutally me my ex-wife on Match.com. OTOH I have a free account (for boring reasons I won’t bother to go into) and so have never felt the pressure to get my money’s worth out of it.
LOL PWNT.
Way to destroy the competition, Chris!
@Andy: Seems like maybe he found true love: his profile on OKCupid says he’s married. (He’s chriscoyne, one of the founders.)
It was slim pickings for quite a while on here, but I did eventually meet my girlfriend on okcupid (among others) and we’re still together for over 2 years.
Those other sites are a rip off, especially eharmony. Even as a paying member my messages wouldn’t get delivered and they wouldn’t get delivered to me.
OK I’m gonna play the other side. People get on OKCupid because they are too busy to date — if they don’t meet anyone in 6 months of okc then hey no problemo. So they’re “dabblers”. Which means you have to impress them very much to get them to respond and go out on an actual date. This has been my experience. Lots of contact, almost no actual dates. Versus match.com where women are invested in going out on dates because they are paying for the site. The emotional investment on okc is much much lower.
Still, I love the site and I’m not going anywhere! Just wish you could attract more single women over 35. This site skews hard to the 25-35 set.
This article is very interesting, but it ignores that Match.com offers a Platinum level where, by paying more, you allow unpaid subscribers to email with you.
http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/never-pay-for-dating/3/Replies-And-Messaging.png really needs to be a density plot.
I have to say I disagree with this analysis. Like the author said, “take what I have to say today with a grain of salt.” since I am in an “eHarmony marriage”.
For one thing my response rate was closer to 1/2 or 1/3. And every single person I met through the service was quality. In fact everyone I met would have made a great friend. I know several who didn’t find matches, however in all cases I can say they didn’t follow the advice the service gives you, admittedly it is a LOT of material to read through.
In one case a friend was rejected by eHarmony because he fit a certain personality type they openly said they couldn’t match. If it was in their best interests to keep someone on the hook as a paying customer then he’d have been perfect.
If you look at the data you assembled in a different way it paints another picture. My wife paid for a year (I think, it’s been 6 yrs) up front. I paid for 3. We both ready everything they had to say, mostly out of curiosity for me, to date online safety on her end. We were both very active members and met in about 2 months, before month three we were exclusive. So despite the fact that we were both still “paying subscribers” we told the service to stop matching us. Since we still exchanged emails through their system we were technically still ‘active’. This means that not all of their active paying subscribers are available, thereby reducing the percentage of ‘misses’ in this analysis.
I will admit that eHarmony is not for everyone but I can say it has been thoroughly successful for my and at least 5 other couple I have randomly met.
@ANDREW
I support OKC every bit as much as if I was a paid member really. I am quite pleased with the existence of OKC, and would not want to see them go. I am further pleased with most of the reports they post. But as I point out there is power in the information they have shown us. So now its up to them to use this data in a beneficial way, not just point the finger at every one else. I am not one to let any one off the hook so easily. Some one comes to me and explains that every one who has already constructed a building did it wrong, great I will hear you out, but now I want to see what fruit this new information may bear. I want to see the better building, not just hear about it.
Already knew it. Match and eHarmony are a total waste of money. Their only purpose is for women to convince themselves there are no decent men out there.
That said, the first and last time I used Match I paid extra for their service to determine if people actually read your message. I found that nearly every message I had sent had actually been read (something I found surprising). So my percentage of dead was much lower than reported here. However, I found the response rate for messages read to be slightly under 1%.
The reply rate on OKCUPID is no better—-but at least you don’t pay for it—other than reading the ads.
This is a fun article to read but it would be a lot more meaningful if the numbers (such as marriage rates or dead profiles) were compared to OKC. For all we know, OKC’s numbers are worse across the board.
It’d also be nice if gay folks, like, existed and stuff, in these trend posts.
What if the result that you are 12.4 times more likely to get married if you are not on match,com just confirms the commonly held perception that internet daters are 12.4 times less marriageable than the rest of the dating pool?
you should have photoshoped your head onto David’s body.
I wish I had read this yesterday before I subscribed to match.
Take this information a few steps further, and you find that $137,000/marriage means $68,000 per successful user. $68,000 divided by their highest monthly rate of $59.95 comes out to 1134 months, or 94.5 years you should expect to search before finding Mr. or Ms. Right. Maybe it would be more practical to put that monthly payment into a savings account, where the compound interest over that 94 years is bound to amass you at least a few hundred thousand dollars… I bet a 94 year old man could find any number of hotties who would marry him for that kind of money.
I think this a great website for singles to chat to.
OKTrends (The Official Blog of OKCupid.com) is the proof that God loves us, and want us to be happy. Every blog on OKTrends is a revelation for all single people. We all must
raise a toast to the beauty and truth that every chapter of this blog brings into our life. Peace and love to all of you.
I love this article. I’ve done demos on those sites and I’m absolutely appalled at what little features they have. Bravo OKC. I’m paying$5/m not for the features, but I believe in what you are doing and the work you put into this site.
Wonderful job, I’ll show this to all of my friends!
I calculated the eHarmony success numbers several years ago. I pegged it at 4-5% and he’s got it pegged at 6.2%. Finding a match is hard.
But, there is another way to look at this data. He says that in the general population, 4.5% of singles get married and 6.2% of eHarmony singles get married. So eHarmony increases the success rate by 38%. With eHarmony, because they do values and psychological matching, it would be interesting to know the longevity of their marriages and compare it with marriage in the general population. Are eHarmony marriages stronger?
Great article. I also feel that people are much more real on here compared to paid dating sites. The logic behind this is that since they are paying they tend to make sure they put on flowery words that might not represent them in real life… OKC rocks
Some of this article is very compelling (bit about unsubscribed members especially), but I want to point out that the stat about being MORE likely to get married if you DON’T subscribe to a pay to date site is likely heavily influenced by selection effect because the people who resort to dating sites (and especially are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to be on them) are already less likely to enter a relationship and get married. For this pool of people, it’s entirely possible that joining a dating site (payed included) could improve their odds.
Also, you offer no comparison for the marriage statistics. I assume this is because OKC has worse statistics in this category (possibly because, being a free site, people are much more likely to join and never actually use it, but still).
Very good article
Nice to see some numbers for things I already suspected.
…If you do pay for one of those sites and send messages to potential non-subscribers without including your real contact info you’re just stupid though.
I’d love to see a feature I call the “Reject Button” implemented. It’s mostly for women, but men could use it too. The idea is that when you get a message, you can read it and, if you decide that you’re not replying/don’t like the sender/whatever, you can click “reject”, and you will receive no more mail from that user. The user who sent said message, gets a “not interested” notification, but cannot go back and harass the user about why she’s not interested. That way users can judge the difference between someone who is unable to keep up with all the messages in her inbox and someone who simply isn’t interested. Ideally, I’d like to be able to let users “prescreen” people they aren’t interested in so that users don’t have to waste time with a message when the recipient already isn’t interested.
I actually did a self-study with Chemistry (chosen because most of the initial interaction is canned and my weakpoint is writing first emails). After three months of every single day contacting every girl I was genuinely interested in, I had the following statistics:
Total matches shown to me: 301.
264 of those flat out did not fit my search requirements – 5% actually ended up being matches that I agreed were good matches.
The percentage drops to 0.4% when you consider mutual interest.
I also live in a major city. Of the 301 profiles, only 20 came from that major city. 97 came from the one an hour away. 70 were from my state, not including the city and 75 were from another neighboring state entirely.
you know I knew this already just from my own personal experienes. I have tried eharmony………in the end eharmony was depressing made me feel way self concious and is far from fun. meeting somebody fairly creepy and strange did not help maters now did his assuming to really know me after just a couple questions and reading over my profile, but i managed to meet a friend who then introduced me to OkCupid. I liked the set up right away and it’s been fun. I have to say I like the question feature. it’s a great tool in finding somebody who will more likely be a good match for you if your being honest with yourself as well as them being honest too
Now, if only we could find a website that is a mix between the free-ness of OkCupid and the seriousness of eHarmony…
Most sincerely,
Jessica
Love the blog…it’d be even better if the RSS feed was fixed (full article in the feed would be great):
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Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating
from OkTrends by Christian
[inline] var footnote_index = 1; function footnote(){ var str = “” + footnote_index +”"; document.write(str); footnote_index++; } #picMatrix img { float:left; padding: 2px; margin: 1px; background-color:#eeece1; cursor: pointer; } #picMatrix{ height: 580px; margin-bottom: 20px; } [/inline] Today I’d like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony [...]
OKC is the Sea.
In which we should be.
Why are u paying for a chance?
When we have here a free dance.
This place is the absolute shizzy.
Go on ..Explore it and get dizzy.
Intelligence,
People with sense.
All here.
Under a tent.
You make some valid points however, ask yourself what does a guy have to deal with on a free site? First of all, “fake profiles”, particularly russian scammers and then there are the ladies that try to lure you to some webcam site to watch them do naughty things. You then have the “narcissists/attention whores”. Women that simply enjoy attention and have no real desire to meet anyone. They’re the ones post scantly clad pics or tactically blocked out spots on there pics. Trying to get all the attention they can from guys.
Finally you have what I call the “window shoppers”. Women that log on thinking they will find there Brad pitt or Johnny depp. These women will never settle, but instead make a few guy friends which are really just “options” for them in which they keep leading on until something better comes along.
I almost forgot to mention the “grievers”, Women that are NOT single but enjoy posting on the forums and usually heckling/trolling the single males. I suppose I could also mention how free sites also tend to still have profiles of women/men that have not logged on in over 3months to a year! Some sites do this just to boast about the number of members they have.
The odds of finding women like what I mentioned above is rather slim when it comes to a pay site. So that alone makes trying out a pay site somewhat feasible. The only exception that I can think of is, if your one of those seeking something more physical and decide to sign up to adultfriendfinder. From what I’ve read, that site is to be avoided due to the increase number of escorts lurking on that site.
If a free site can eliminate the problems I posted above then that would certainly put the quality of the site much higher then many others that are out there.
As others have said, match.com has various drawbacks: auto-renew, censorship, clunky interface, etc. (The one thing I like that I think OKC should copy is the ability to pull up subsets like “my turn”, “received winks”.)
I think it can still be worth the $N a month, though. There are people on match who have never heard of OKC through no fault of their own, or you just happen to find each other there instead of here. The rewards of finding someone special are such that it’s worth the time and effort to look wherever you can.
In my case, the women I’ve dated via OKC tended to be more fun and creative and compatible with me, but that’s probably because of the demographic bias. I think I’ll tell all future match dates to join up here.