Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating

April 7th, 2010 by Christian

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.

The "20 Million Members" Paradox

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.

  1. We'll start with their yearly revenue: $250M in 2009 as reported by the industry analysts at Piper Jaffray and CNBC2.
  2. Since eHarmony charges users by the month, we'll divide that big number by 12 and, rounding up, get $21M.
  3. 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 subscription
    $29.95 per month, for a 6-month subscription
    $59.95 per month, for 1 month at a time
    From 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).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Our remaining dilemma can be expressed mathematically like this:
  7. 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.
  8. 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:

Pay Sites Want You To Message These Dead Profiles

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

As you can see from the flow chart, the only way they don't make money is to show subscribers to other subscribers. It's the worst thing they can do for their business, because there's no potential for new profit growth there. Remember: the average account length is just six months, and people join for big blocks of time at once, so getting a new customer on board is better for them than squeezing another month or two out of a current subscriber. To get sign-ups, they need to pull in new people, and they do this by getting you to message their prospects.

If you're a subscriber to a pay dating site, you are an important (though unwitting) part of that site's customer acquisition team. Of course, they don't want to show you too many ghosts, because you'll get frustrated and quit, but that doesn't change the fact that they're relying on you your messages are their marketing materials to reach out to non-payers and convince them, by way of your charming, heartfelt messages, to pull out their credit cards. If only a tiny fraction of your message gets a response, hey, that's okay, you're working for free. Wait a second…you're paying them.

Now let's look how this skewed incentive affects the dating cycle, especially on sites like Match.com, where it's possible to for users set their own search terms.

The Desperation Feedback Loop

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:

The Pudding

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.

In Conclusion

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.

. . .
  1. Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/technology/internet/13cupid.html
  2. The Big Business Of Online Dating
    http://www.cnbc.com/id/35370922
  3. eHarmony.com's Advertising Splash Page
    http://www.eharmony.com/advertising/singles
  4. 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
  5. Ibid.
  6. Centers For Disease Control
    http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/divorce.htm. Not sure why they care.
  7. The U.S. Census "Unmarried and Singles Week"
    http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/007285.html
. . .
. . .

316 Responses to “Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating”

  1. I must have found all the Nancys’ (See above) in all the dating websites I’ve tried.

    We try, you don’t as you know you have all the dating power.

    Take a lesson from this OKCupid breakdown. This whole thing is a scam and the lazy persons way to meet and greet. Try getting out from behind that computer once in a while, go for a walk in the park and actually talk to and listen to people. These sites, free or pay, exist because mankind is too busy to put the time into face to face time with the opposite sex. It’s easier to have a computer tell you who to talk to and then to camplain about when it is’nt exactly what you wanted and expected.

    We, Men and Women, have no-one to blame but ourselves for our dismal love lifes. Lower you expectatations (not your standards) and try spending some time working on yourselvf and you relationships – lover or not.

  2. dryad_daughter

    I absolutely agree with Christian’s (okcupid’s) analysis of paid dating sites. I tried a couple earlier in life before I discovered free sites (first plentyoffish.com then okcupid.com, which I like much better). When you make first contact on a paid dating site, it feels like you’re emailing into a void. When the you respond to men who made first contact, they’re rarely well suited to you. You’d be better off going out and getting involved in an activity that interests you (and hoping there’s single guys there…). Or you could just join okcupid and get a date right away. :)

    I agree with Jared_1212 though. I would like to see how the paid sites’ success rates compare to those of free sites, including okcupid and its competitors like plentyoffish. That’s just curiosity though (and so I can quote some stats to my poor, disbelieving friends who are still stuck on the paid sites…).

    Also, I’m a living testimonial that the free sites work. I got engaged to a man that I met on plentyoffish. (We broke up after a year and a half for reasons unrelated to the site.) Ironically enough, although I met several guys before he and I hooked up, my soon-to-be fiance was the first guy to email me–a mere two hours after I signed up, and I signed up in the middle of the night. If that’s not a success story, I don’t know what is.

  3. millie

    And then there are the flaws….for some reason, OK Cupid will not display pictures on my account…and there is no “send” button to report a problem……maybe we get what we pay for. I’ve never had such problems with Plenty of Fish, though…another free service.

  4. dano112358

    As an accounting major I approve of this blog :)

  5. That must be some of the “new math” I’ve been hearing so much about.

    Totally agree on the first bit. 90+% of paysite profiles are dead. No brainer. I wonder how many on OKC are dead? doesn’t matter, because I filter matches by last logged in. I don’t see them, I’m not going to waste time writing to them.

    However, I come to a different conclusion on the marriage stats:

    Some kinds of people can go to a bar in their town any weekend and hit it off with someone just like them. They don’t need match or OKC or anything. Now, granted, they probably aren’t someone you or I would want to date, but there’s a lot of them.

    so…

    “You’re 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don’t need ANY kind of dating site to find a mate.”

  6. Not Another One

    Interesting posting. The math seems a bit skewed, but….

    I was a paying member of Match.com and got exactly 2 dates from it. One was a lovely woman who was interesting, but we didn’t click. We still contact each other once in a while. The other was a wackadoodle who’s profile was one big lie from top to bottom. I nearly had to get a TRO to get her to go away. After I ‘closed’ my account, I kept getting bogus matches from them to entice me back in.

    Match’s spinoff site, Chemistry.com, was even worse. Not a single accurate match in the batch that got sent to me. More entertainingly, they were using my profile to entice others in, even though I’d been assured by email that the profile had been deleted completely from both sites.

    E-Harmony wouldn’t even accept me as a customer. I recall reading a news article that said they reject up to 20% of people who take their entrance test. I suspect it’s a lot higher.

    OKC isn’t really much better when it comes to matching people up, especially us old codgers, but there’s a lot more to do on the site. And it’s a heck of a lot more fun.

  7. Mike

    Well… some of us are desperate to find someone who we think is right for us… so if there is a way to make that happen… and if I’m able to pay for that oportunity for more of a voice out there fine!

    Subscriber to Match.com, another friend, maybefriends, match infinity, ok-cupid :-)
    Pathetic to some of you I know… but I’d do anything to find my soul mate!
    Mike
    ps, be gentle with your replies :-)

  8. Carter0042

    Exactly why I never trust a for profit company that says its trying to do good. Here’s an interesting related question:

    Hey OKC! How many profiles are active on this site and what is the percentage of those that get married?

  9. Masterson

    I completely agree with this.

    I joined Eharmony and OkCupid approx at same time, I paid for Eharmony I only used it for two weeks at the most… Now I’m stuck paying for two whole months I don’t even bother checking there anymore. I come here more, and have met and chatted with a lot of pretty awesome people.

  10. Jared

    I fear I’m approaching The Desperation Feedback Loop even on this free site. There are far too many females who don’t reply, and I have literally never received a message from someone I didn’t message first.

  11. woisha

    I was told there would be no MATH!!!!!! ma doare capul! (hey at arithmetic I’m a frakking rocket scientist, start replacing numbers with letters and those “deer in the headlights” look like a genius compared to me. Interesting article anyway, and not surprising. Free is still my favorite price for this though. Cheers, and happy cupiding.

  12. Tara

    Just checked match.com to see how much communication is open to non-subscribers. Made a profile, uploaded a picture, just got my first email, and:

    “Subscribe to see who emailed you.”

    Far from letting unpaid users reply to messages, they don’t even let you know who sent it. Or allow you to read it. I’ve gotten a “wink” from a profile that was obviously fake, now I’m wondering if the mail is a fake one to lure me in. (I may be female, but the profile and picture I put up were both BEYOND horrible. I don’t see how it could attract genuine interest)

  13. pearlfisher

    It’s a planned ambiguity between “members” and “subscribers.” So on match, you can’t really spot the deadwood simply by last logon date. There are many more “members” who buy into the match tagline that “it’s okay to look.” They are not subscribers, cannot return e-mails or winks, but are just looking around. They may even have pictures. They look like real live people, but I call them the undead. Sometimes you can spot them because they have embedded some phone number or e-mail address in the running text. Cheapskates, as well as undead.

  14. I was once a member of Match.com and eventually realized the whole thing about the bad odds of getting any replies. Fortunately, I got a reply shortly thereafter. Both of us were already getting close to leaving Match.com and decided to go ahead and trade email addresses, so that we could quit paying.

    That’s when Match.com really got to me. After reviewing Match’s messaging warnings and such (Match claimed to not filter messages, and that I may see something objectionable), I sent my email address to the new found friend via Match’s messaging. She never got my address. She tried the same with similar results. FYI: I don’t recall any policy (at the time) that disallowed sending any kind of addresses, links, etc. via the messaging. Match only stated that such things were not allowed directly on the profiles.

    Apparently, despite so called non-filtered messaging, Match still changed our messages by stripping out addresses, so that we would remain paying customers–even after Match’s job was basically done. Fortunately we were able to outsmart the auto-filter and still got together, we and stopped paying for something we no longer needed nor wanted.

    It’s been a while and my memories are probably waning, but I think that I had addressed Match.com support and complained about the filtered message. Again, if I’m remembering correctly, Match’s answer was simply put, that they don’t filter messages. Yeah, right.

  15. Insightful article, but i agree that you left one important dating vehicle out of the analysis. You have shown your work and concluded that meeting potential dating partners in real life is more likely to result in a successful, long-term relationship than meeting potential dating partners on a paid, online dating site.

    One of your proofs for coming to this conclusion is that only a very small percentage of people who you message on paid, online dating sites can actually respond. From that, I can logically assume that since a free, online dating site allows everyone to communicate, free, online dating sites would be more successful than a paid, online dating sites for a successful, long-term relationship.

    However, you have not compared meeting potential dating partners in real life and meeting potential dating partners on a free, online dating site. This is something I think many of us would be very interested to know.

    Would a ’single and looking’ individual have a greater chance of success by going to coffee shops and joining social groups or would s/he have more success skipping all the ‘getting to know you’ interview-type stress, scanning information about strangers that is not readily available in real life and choosing who s/he wants to approach through a free, online dating site?

  16. Guy Fawkes

    You were very generous to both eHarmony and Match.com. In my experience at eHarmony, I’d say most people there signed up for one month rather than 6 months or a year. It was obvious they were desperately trying to find a match before the end of their month. I’m sure I’m correct in believing that those people found no one and did not renew their monthly membership. I also wonder how many people learn how to manipulate the “personality” (read psychology) test?

  17. AJ

    Great article. Nice to see someone crunch the numbers, even using fuzzy math.
    True that the facts apply here too (men sending mass messages, women getting inundated and turned off) although at least we are not charged for the experience. The OKC engine is also a great idea – push likely free matches, ice breakers, etc. I would probably not come back very often if it wasn’t for the quiver aspect.

    One glitch to the article – the graph. It suggests that men who send LESS than 1 message a day get the most responses bordering on 100%. So if I write a message and do NOT hit the send button then I will absolutely get a reply? LOL

    My only suggestion is the same as what has been stated elsewhere – More Search Criteria to really home in on like-minded people. I.E. a way to set a specific age range, not just a “block” of ages, relationship goals, stuff like that. I saw several people list alternative lifestyle elements for search engine parameters – good idea. As OKC grows it will behoove everyone to be able to find better matches, and adding more personal elements to searches increases the likelihood of a good match.

    Thanks for the article. :)

  18. Samantha Eskuchen

    My only real problem with OKcupid that maybe those other sites offer is that their users fill out some questionnaire about themselves to get the %. On Ok Cupid, they are not mandatory to answer questions and you often get other users sending message to you that only answered maybe 25 questions.

    The % for those people may seem high at the time, but that is because by answering only 25 questions they have not reviled that much about themselves.

    Only thing I found I wished Ok cupid would do. Maybe set up a base set of , a good amount of questions on all ranges of a person’s personality and being, they would have to answer them all before being able to message someone or IM someone or the like.

  19. Kodama

    I very much liked the detailed math in this article.

  20. Phe

    I haven’t had much luck with OKC and I have been a member for 2yrs. I’m thinking about going to match.com for a bit. My thinking is if there are some people who pay, they are more serious about dating. On OKC I get girls who just a rebound girl, or they want sex.

    Looking at match.com I do like that it asks for what we look for in another person. I do wish it did weed out who cant contact you if you wish to. Sucks big time.

    Don’t know if i’ll join match though.

  21. -

    just try ‘online dating’ for a while. if it doesn’t work, move along.
    the trouble with real-life is that it’s not setup for ‘dating’ (other than bars, and purportedly, church. and both are too bizarre for me.)

  22. -

    “eHARMony is a cheater’s playground.
    There is no way to search to see if a guy or girl is cheating on their SO”
    ‘find the (holy) cheater of your life’?

  23. you can have any sense of humor...

    as long as it’s my sense of humor.
    “really, who does not enjoy a sense of humor?) ”
    i’m just noting that many people’s sense of humor, may be ‘unfunny’. (and they will see your or my sense of humor as equally ‘unfunny’.)

  24. Lily

    I hear that Eharmony reject Applicant base on whether or not they are religious. So, if you are a Heathen, good luck trying to join! But I agree with okcupid’s analysis that paying for these match making sites does not help you get a date. Oh well, lesson learned (and will never be repeated).

  25. Katsakeeper

    I appreciate this blog because I gave up on using online dating a few years ago simply because your math bears out your hypothesis. The number of active members on any of the paid sites is not what they claim. Also, they are an exercise in extreme frustration.

    I can honestly say that of the handful of men I met on Match.com, I was almost always disappointed when we met. Most were looking for a fast hookup, but their profiles made them sound like they wanted a relationship. They also were pretty good liars about things like being married or how tall they were.

    Also, I can’t count the number of guys I e-mailed/IM’d with ad nauseum and NEVER met. They just wouldn’t make plans. I think they were either their to stroke their low self-esteem or had other issues that were not immediately apparent. It was extremely frustrating.

    Many of the people above my comment complain about not being able to meet people in “real life,” and that is where I was meeting men for the past three years. It’s flawed, too, because you might date someone for several weeks and find out their politics don’t match with yours (I hate Rush Limbaugh; my ex-boyfriend thought he was God–you can see the problem there). Or you find out they have slept with some of your friends. Or they look good but have a really bad heart. And so it goes.

    I signed up for OKC in February this year and not only got real interactions immediately, I quickly met guys who actually went on dates with me! I have my new boyfriend thanks to this site. We’ve been dating for two months and our profiles didn’t match up perfectly, but he seemed sweet and interesting and he has been (so far–ha!).

    I can only say good things about this website. Not just because it’s free, but also because it’s interesting and fun. I tell all my single friends about it.

  26. So, I stopped reading the comments about halfway through, but….

    Yeah, okcupid has just as many “dead accounts” but also has flagmod, and they show up a lot there, so I’m almost willing to bet these dead accounts get deleted a lot quicker.

    And, maybe I’m a bit biased, since I found my partner at okcupid, but I really think okcupid is way better than most of the dating sites out there. Especially match.com and eharmony. Eharmony is terrible. They are incredibly “picky”(i.e bigoted.) about who they choose for their site. Only the best and brightest straight Christians allowed, which is kinda bullshit. Like it’d be cool if they went right out and advertised such, but they don’t and if I recall correctly, there was a big controversy about them not letting gay people on the site.

    And for the people who complained about people emailing them with low match percentages, or because those people haven’t answered enough questions yet, uh….you know you don’t have to write them back, right? Go find people who have answered enough questions for you and message them!

    I’ve found a lot of complaints about okcupid are from people who are expecting for okc to hand them a significant other. It never happens like that folks. Yeah, using the site you can find a lot of one night stands, but you can also find people who are interested in dating. I’ve found both. It’s not difficult. You get what you put into it.

  27. Awesome analysis! We met 13 years ago through match.com and have been happily married for 11 years, but okcupid is FAR better . . . at least for intelligent interesting people. ;) Keep up the good work!

    BTW, one very important omission in okcupid’s search criteria: whether the person WANTS TO HAVE CHILDREN! Okcupid has options for: “Has 1 child”, “Has children”, “Likes children”, “Dislikes children” and “Doesn’t want children”. But where is the “Wants children” option? Please add it! Thanks!

  28. Just_this_guy--

    There’s lots of other reasons to avoid match. For one thing their six month guarantee is bogus. In order to qualify you have to have your profile created and approved within 7 days. When I signed up, they repeatedly refused to approve my profile so that it was not possible to have my profile created in time. Then when I gave up on them and stopped using the site, I forgot that they will continue charging my card every year FOREVER unless I quit, regardless of the fact that I didn’t use the site at all for a very long time they kept charging me. Since it was only once a year, I think I paid them for years before I figured out what was going on and put a stop to it. There’s tons of people complaining about Match doing this to them.

    Then there’s eharmony who suck because they won’t allow gays on their site. That site was set up by right wing Christians associated with Focus on the Family. They had to be forced by a lawsuit to create a second site for gays, but they still won’t let them on the main site. I wouldn’t want to date any woman who doesn’t find that totally offensive.

  29. CJ

    My problem is I keep finding friends through OKcupid and not dates. It’s not really a bad thing, I mean my very best friends I met through the site, but I’d kind of like a date sometime, you know? I guess that’s one of the inevitabilities of queer geekdom.

    AJ, less than one message a day means you send messages every other day, every week, or less.

  30. Mark Stewart

    Oh G! you’re far too kind to eHarmonica (sorry bobD et al). They scored millions of millions of users and made less than 40 couples per day according to a recent TV review broadcast on YouTube.com – they take $642,975.14 per person finding a relationship. That’s pimp fees of $1,285,714.29 per couple. They are total scum f**ker pimps.

  31. John

    Destroyed!

  32. Pelletp

    Well, your analysis is very interesting. But, my husband and I must be an unusual statistic. We met online. I had been on dating sites for years.. match, e-harmony and finally I accepted a free offer with singlesnet. My husband paid for his membership to the site. His first hit was me. We were married 4 months later.. that was almost 4 years ago.

    He was lucky, but, I was successful after a very relentless search, connecting with an average of 25 matches a week and going out for first time coffee dates 2-5 times per week. I kissed many frogs as you can imagine. So, in my case one could say that I beat the statistics by casting and recasting a wider and wider net. I had to go on 376 dates before meeting my husband. He is not just any guy either… he truly is a prince… But, where your analysis comes in is with my experience at singlesnet. The offer allowed me to message my matches. It no longer offers that feature I hear from my still-single girl friends. I will forward your email to them and I suspect they will want to know more about OKCupid.

  33. I got a gift subscription to eHarmony from my (oh so subtle) Mom and I didn’t make any matches. Not being one to waste money, I did all that I was supposed to do to make a match – I signed on everyday, responded to the messages, even if it was to say I wasn’t interested. I emailed and asked for the ratio of male/female subscribers and was told they couldn’t provide that information. I’m a little wary of a business that can’t provide basic details to paying customers. I didn’t renew my subscription.

  34. Machaela

    Awesome analysis! Not only does Eharmony fail 93% of the time, but a large portion of people get rejected from making a profile as well! Thanks for the info ;)

  35. I loved this post and here is why. I never used dating sites before. I always felt they had a ring of desperate to them, so I avoided them. After my last relationship ended, a friend of mine suggested OKCupid, while another suggested Match and yet another suggested eHarmony.

    I avoided eHarmony, because their user base is way too conservative for me. I did sign up with Chemistry.com, Match’s sister site and paid up front for a year. The results were really obvious. Chemistry literally couldn’t come up with matches for me, since I am not mainstream. I got one date out of the whole thing and otherwise wouldn’t even get emails.

    On OKCupid I got bombarded with emails. Granted, OKCupid has a really high amount of freaks, but it also has the widest variety of people, period. I met tons of interesting people on OKCupid, but the best part is that I met my husband on it.

    Yep, you’ve read this right! He, too, had profiles with Match.com and a couple other ones. We have our one year wedding anniversary coming up.

    I had never used dating sites in my entire life and found my soul-mate using a free site! The truth is simple, if you are NOT mainstream, i.e. have tattoos, multi-colored hair, etc. you will NOT find a match on these highly conservative sites. In fact, you will often find more sophisticated appearing scammers and players, as one of my best friends ended up with a guy who turned out to be a total player and liar, coming from eHarmony, the place that matches you based on values.

  36. Really nice and detailed write up, just shows you that free online date sites are just as good as the paid ones if not even better!

  37. greyisboring

    I agree to a point, and everything written is valid. I do remember when pay-sites used to be fairer, and there are still some out there (eg. greensingles) who operate the method that a non-payer can reply to an email sent by a payer without subscribing themselves. I always viewed this as the right way to run a pay-for site.

    People tend to me more serious on pay-for sites too about meeting a real partner rather than a casual date. This different is pointless on the sites listed though because paying doesn’t actually mean you can actually have a conversation with someone, even if they want to.

  38. Evan t Spurrell

    Bro Thank you, deserve a huge donation for all your research. I think a donation basis might actually be a really good route to go. because people who are satisfied with this site and find there true loves will surely want to donate $$$ for the service you provide. and thank you for not being another cheesy dating site. not charging on okcupid sets you apart from everyone else. i am forwarding this article to everyone i know stuck in the pay dating game thank you. insight is truly illuminating.

  39. “It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don’t subscribe to Match.com.”

    Nominally, yes. Of course, this exercise postulates that everyone will be operating on a level playing-field; when in reality I rather suspect that the average marital prospects of ‘people who use dating-sites’, however inherently appalling, would be still more slender but for such exertions. Or, put more bluntly: fewer Americans marry through Match.com than by more traditional methods, granted – but these are perhaps disproportionately apt to belong to that class of people who’d otherwise almost *certainly* die alone.

    Still, it’s easy to see why OkCupid! is the most felicitous option: even if that coveted ‘hot date’ happens to be the sole item on your agenda, devoting a couple of hours each month to refining one’s profile, casting one’s virtual auspices across a ready roster of potential playmates and firing off the occasional greeting is hardly the mark of a social pariah.

  40. *proportionally fewer Americans

    Whoops.

    Incidentally, since I’m still here: who else remembers when OkCupid, Sparknotes et al. were just ‘The Spark’? God, that takes me back (to seventh grade).

  41. mike

    Christian,

    Can you guys do a study on how many miles is best and how far away do most people contact or respond?

  42. EvolvedSungod

    I honestly don’t think guys will get that many more replies on OKcupid than on most other sites, it’s just part of our society that it seems girls are taught to wait for guys to come to them when in reality most good guys are more attracted by assertive women showing emotional balance… Or maybe I’m just tired of always doing the chasing and rarely being chased unless it’s a stalker (oh I’ve had more than a few)

  43. “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. ”

    Where are these guys?! Seriously, if I waited around for a guy to message me I would never visit the site.

  44. inwaterwrit

    Just another OKC success story here- I had been on OKC for a while, but hadn’t put much effort into my search. My now-boyfriend had just come back to OKC a couple of weeks after a break-up. I was his first message. We met two days after our first message, and over three years later, still together and happy! My mother has belonged to eHarm and Match, and no success with either, even though she’s a beautiful and interesting lady. Go figure!

  45. I didn’t read every word from your article, but the one thing I do agree with is EVERYTHING. I tried to go through e-harmony and what I realized was that every time I got a response, it sounded like I was reading my information. There was absolutely nothing to compare the guy to, with or about. I mean all my same words were showing up and that sounded like really suspicious to me so I quit going there, and I thank God I did not send any money.

    OK cupid is doing OK, but they are sending me people in other states and I have specified in my area, so that is a little frustating, but it’s free so I don’t complain.

    Have a great day everyone

  46. Jennafer

    I tried one of those paid websites, just a trial. I took the test that took ages to complete, and then when it was over it said I had no matches!

    It’s been over a year and it STILL says I have zero matches. It must have given me my own special personality if it thinks that.

  47. matt

    I have gotten a few good matches on here. Short, well rounded relationships. They were never the kind of girls I would bring home and many could not deal with my anime watching or my need to go to cons.

  48. symplectic

    I came to the same conclusion that Christian did about two years ago, after J-Date turned into an utter failure, and I realized I was responding overwhelmingly to non-subscribers.

    OKCupid has its own major flaw, which is that the majority of people seem to be on here for the questions and quizzes, rather than to find a romantic connection. Being free saves me from wasting money on this site, but doesn’t save me from wasting time, effort, and creativity on this site.

    Craig’s List has given me the most success, because I can craft exactly the kind of message I want to attract a partner, and I will get responses if it’s well-written and strikes a chord with the reader.

    Writing a well-crafted, intelligent message to a woman on OKCupid in theory should be a successful strategy, but in practice it is usually a waste of time. The women on this site are so overwhelmed with responses that they stop checking their inboxes after a while, so it doesn’t matter what you write. I find it takes me 15-30 minutes to write a message to a woman that takes her personality into account, and touches upon the issues I want to convey. In a search, I may find five or six women I’d like to respond to, but I usually only have time to send three or four messages a week, and some of those are not as well-crafted as I would like, because I’m too busy. I usually get one response per twenty messages I send. It’s just not worth it.

  49. drstein

    I met an great woman here, but after a few years it didn’t work out. I tried Match.com and ended up being one of those people that found someone there. We’ve been together for three years and married for one.
    But.. *she* contacted *me* on the site. I was skeptical at first because it was just as my 6 month membership was about to expire, and match.com is known for using ‘bait profiles’ to entice people to sign up. I had a friend that worked there, and he explained the process. It’s deceptive of them, but it’s profitable. I was one of those people that had sent out many many well thought out emails and got nearly nothing back. Sometimes I got downright rude replies back, which surprised me.

    But, OKC has a younger demographic too. That’s something to consider. The demographic on match.com seems to be older.

  50. Justin

    I always felt eHarmony was good for nothing more than their screening process. I also think they fudge their numbers. I’m on my second six month membership with eHarmony that I plan to cancel at the end. A lot of my eHarmony matches have closed the match and not giving a legitimate reason for doing so. I think this shows that matches on eHarmony do not know what they want in a relationship. This is why I feel eHarmony is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

    Personally I feel I have had better luck meeting people on OkCupid than with eHarmony. I have met people here that eHarmony would not have matched me with, and it turned out that these people I have met on OkCupid have become quite likeable and great. Understand I am not knocking OkCupid but just proving you may have to lower your expectations to find a match that could turn out to be your soul mate. eHarmony just sets its expectations too high.

    What’s awesome about OkCupid is even if your only a 55% match with someone, if you’re willing to take the time to get to know that person and that person’s also willing to take the time to get to know you, you could turn out to match perfectly with that person. Of course, eHarmony would not match you with someone of 55% compatibility, but this just shows you have to lower your expectations and actually take the time to get to know someone. Plus on OkCupid you can communicate with others a lot faster than the four step process on eHarmony.