pay or not to find a mate?

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I have been involved in the online dating industry for over 5 years due to my online matchmaking startup.  I have felt quite disappointed  in all the tricks & subterfuges that are used by most sites to make money.  I determined a long time ago that probably the reason for this is that most sites are founded & run by men.  If you’ll permit me to generalize, men usually have different perspectives about finding a mate.  And unfortunately their focus is usually on making money rather than seeing people find great matches which to most of these sites means loss of membership & therefore revenue.  In the last couple of years we are seeing more women founding sites & female CEOs so hopefully they can turn things around somewhat in this industry.  Because if I continue with the generalization, women have a higher priority & instinct for finding mates.  And believe it or not offering a great service does not equate to an either/or situation i.e., money or great matching service but can actually bring balance into an industry that is totally out of whack & does not have a great reputation!

CNN exposes this in their article The Big Business of Online Dating:

Online dating isn’t just about making love connections, it’s about making lots and lots of money.
And as the stigma of meeting a match online falls by the wayside, the industry’s growth is accelerating. Online dating revenues are growing 10 percent to 15 percent per year, on track to hit one point nine billion dollars within three years, according to Piper Jaffray. The pullback in consumer spending hasn’t slowed down the industry at all: if anything it seems to have made Americans more eager to settle down.

OKCupid had a post earlier in the year suggesting that you shouldn’t pay to find a mate (in other words use their site) & the flow chart above is from this post Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating:

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.
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.


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.

Then we have an interesting post on BigThink Why You Should Pay for Online Dating by professor Marina Adshade Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia where she states:

OkCupid’s dating research blog has worked hard to convince readers that they should never pay for online dating. The basis of their argument is that there are just too few subscribers on fee-for-service dating sites to make it worth the lonely single’s while. I won’t argue their point on that—after all they have a flow chart, and at one point I am pretty sure they used calculus to figure out the number of subscribers (which even I think is a bit audacious). So we will let them have that point: there are fewer potential matches on fee-for-service dating sites.
There is an argument to be made, though, that if you do find a match on an online dating site, that match is more likely to commit to meet if they have paid a fee for the service.
A study published last year tests this theory in an online dating simulation where a participant “pays” a fee to search online for potential dates after answering a series of questions describing their perfect mate. At the end of the search they are informed that a match has been found but that he/she does not have all the qualities the participant is has been searching for (I think we all can relate to that experience). At this point in the simulation the participant is informed that a friend would like to set them up on a blind date with a person who is absolutely perfect in terms of their criterion for a mate. Participants then have to choose how much time they are willing to commit the inferior date from the online service and the superior match that is the blind date. They only have an hour total to split.
It turns out that a person’s preference for the online date is correlated with how much they had invested in the service. Those who paid nothing, or very little, for the search were much less willing to choose the online date over the blind date than those who paid a higher fee. For example, the length of time men in the study chose to commit to the date arranged online was 28 minutes when the cost was $0, and almost 49 minutes when the cost was $50. The length of time women in the study chose to commit to the online date 13 minutes when the cost was $0, and 28 minutes when the cost was $50.
In Halifax, where I live, men pay significantly less for some online dating services than women do. I am sure that the real reason for this is, as a friend of mine likes to say, in this town any man with a job and his own teeth can find a good women. This research suggests though that if a fee is used to encourage commitment, men need far less of an incentive than women do.

 

Lastly the New York Times in their article Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data highlights a couple of interesting points about both free & paid sites:

“We’re not psychologists,” said Sam Yagan, chief executive of the company. “We’re math guys.” (OKCupid)
Greg Waldorf, chief executive of eHarmony, which says it has more than 20 million registered users, was dismissive of the marketing power of OkCupid’s blog reports.
“In general, I can understand why people are looking for any general direction or indication on how to exist in the online dating world,” Mr. Waldorf said. “But people come to us for our matchmaking skills. They don’t want to worry about whether someone didn’t start up a conversation with them because they didn’t tilt a camera at a certain angle for their profile picture.”

My take on this is that being maths guys & data cannot ever really identify the human quality of relatedness & chemistry successfully.  There is an indeterminate mystery there that technology will always struggle to identify.
As regards paid sites, I agree with OKCupid that there is a conflict of interests in a lot of the men who run these sites.  They just wanna make money & have no real investment in  matching couples & therefore (in their view) losing business.  It’s great that some sites have compatibility assessments but they tend to be long & boring to complete.  Therefore a lot of people couldn’t be bothered (I know over the years I have tried quite a lot – see past posts where I have reviewed them).  I still think that the sleazy subterfuge that a lot of these incumbent sites use to increase their numbers undermine all of that, however.
So what is the solution: I think the online dating industry needs a big shakeup & new sites that have innovative ways to actually deliver the service that they promise!  More women need to get involved & deliver some great new opportunities for matching couples.
Here is a great animated video where you can finish the end yourself (a little like real life relationships): interactive!  Have fun…

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» 1 Comment
  • Jude

    You can always find your mate everywhere, I always think those who are going to online dating sites are shy, that’s why they tend to use it. But for some who have the confidence, I suggest you meet them in person. Much more mutual intimacy can grow.