How do Match.com and Eharmony stay in business when free sites like okcupid exist?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve recently, against my will after more than a decade, become single again.

As someone who never really dated, ever (always friendships that turned into loooooong term relationships), online dating has been an excellent teacher: as a guy, it teaches you to try and try and try again, and not sweat it when you don’t even get the time of day from someone who seems just who you’ve been looking for. Eventually, you find people, and you don’t sweat the small stuff.

It’s also been a huge ego boost, in that you realize that most of the men out there are, simply, inarticulate douchebags who don’t have the self control to refrain from mentioning their genitals within seconds of talking to a woman. If you can manage to be even slightly more interested than that, women are, at the very least, incredibly relieved. So while many men complain about how no one ever writes them back or writes them, I’ve generally had lots of responses/people contacting me, which makes me feel much better about myself (sort of important for healing when you’ve been a faithful partner to someone for years, cheated on and abandoned, and have a hard time even imagining the idea that you’ll ever love anyone else, or they love and understand you, as much as you did your former partner)

But anyway, I’ve tried eharmony and match.com They’re okay. Clunky interfaces mostly, bizarre, and ridiculously expensive.

But then I found okcupid. It’s free, and its WAY better designed (in terms of features and so forth) than these other two super-successful sites.

As far as I can tell, the only thing match and eharmony have going for them is that people who are willing to pay money are self-selected “more serious about serious relationship” people. But this effect seems both overblown (still plenty of un-serious idiots with lots of money), and not very important in the end anyway. Free sites may have more scammers, jokers, and people that just aren’t all that interested, but they also have everyone else too: it’s just a little more time and effort. It’s freewheeling, sure, but hey, that’s dating. It’s better than plying drunk people in bars.

So anyway, my confusion/question is simple: how the heck do eharmony and match stay in business? They charge absurd amounts for weakly designed services that spend most of their time trying to prevent users from actually communicating with each other outside the paywall. Their vaunted “matching” algorithms are utterly laughable: they’re nothing more than statistical matching based on similar answers to a set of questions. Okcupid does that… with far more questions and fidelity. In fact, I’ve found many women who eharmony matches with me who then also show up on okcupid with high match %s. If okcupid can get the same answers as eharmony does, but for free, with user-generated questions, there’s just nothing to eharmony’s claim to have anything special to their own process.

As far as I can tell, aside from the “paywall” factor, the only reason okcupid hasn’t run eharmony and match out of business is that okcupid can’t afford to spend millions advertising and getting it’s name out there.

2

My only experience with any online dating site was the couple of months I was on OKCupid.

I never had a date because of it. There was virtually no one within 100 miles of me on there who seemed even worth considering. The only somewhat promising exchange was with someone who was about to move across country, so that didn’t go anywhere. Otherwise I got a fair number of creepy messages from creepy people, including men old enough to be my grandfather.

I don’t know if the pay sites are any better, but if there are many people who have such worthless experiences on the free ones then I can see how they might figure that they’re getting what they pay for and try out a subscription site.

3

It’s probably a very different experience depending on whether you are in a major city or not. I’ve met lots of people through all the sites in question, and am fairly happy about the general concept. But I admit: it’s got to be a very different experience depending on the sheer volume of available singles in a given area.

4

I’ve been at it, more or less, for about six months.

The problem with OKCupid is that a significant proportion of the women it attracts don’t actually appear to be interested in getting dates. The cutesy questions and tests and stuff attract a lot of women who are already in relationships, and many of the ones who aren’t in a relationship with an actual dude seem to be in a monogamous relationship with the Internet.

On Match, everybody knows everybody else is there to get dates. And as clunky as its interface is, it’s miles ahead of POF. If POF sucked less from a usability perspective, Match might go out of business.

I’ve never tried Eharmony, for the many of the same reasons I’ve pretty much given up on OKCupid. All of that personality matching stuff, for me, is a mountain of bullshit and a time sink. I’ve had far more success with the old fashioned way on Match and POF:

[ol]
[li]Hey, she’s cute…[/li][li]Proper spelling and punctuation in her profile…[/li][li]And she seems funny.[/li][li]Message sent![/li][/ol]

Eight times out of ten, I get a response, 3/4 of which develop in to a date.

On OKCupid, that approach gets a response maybe two times out of ten, and 90% of them will mysteriously stop replying after you suggest getting a drink.

5

Is Yahoo Personals still charging to contact people? I remember years ago I had some luck with them.

6

No personal experience with this but in response to the question put forth of why eharmony and match stay in business, I WAG that it is because people, especially women, see a pay-site taken more seriously than a free site. On a free site there is probably a lot of BS, scams, bums, etc. Weirdos no doubt are everywhere. Although I am not a woman, I can easily picture myself thinking (if I were one) that on a pay-site at least the bums and less seriously people are already weeded out.

Not too different a concept than that of pay poker sites versus free roll poker sites. On paid sites, you avoid all those pesky “all in on every hand” morons.

Just my two cents.

7

The key thing that eHarmony has going for it is that since they’re supposedly targeted at marriage, rather than uncommitted relationships, they have a lot of support from the fundy community.

They do have something special to their own process, but unfortunately it’s the wrong thing. All of the statistical work they were founded on was based not on finding people who should get married to each other; it was based on finding who’s least likely to get a divorce. But there are a lot of people who’d never consider a divorce, but who nonetheless should never have gotten together in the first place.

8

I’m unconvinced that eharmony’s system has anything to it more complex than simply correlating similar answers to random personality questions. Their “questionnaire” is a joke: any random ten year old could have come up with the depth of their questions. At least okcupid gives you a general web2.0 freedom to create and answer questions as you please, matching up with people via a predictable and sensible method of simply figuring out which people are likely to have similar values and ideas.

9

simple answer; because people will always pay for something they can get for free, whether it’s porn, sex, or water. Personally I like plentyoffish. I did similar to what black rabbit did to figure out who I’d write to. Cute? check. Can type in full, complete sentences? Check. Seems to have some sort of wit about her? Check. I’d say about half the profiles I responded to I got dates. I even responded to profiles that I didn’t have anything in common with at all except I thought they were cute. I figured I’ll never do anything interesting if I just meet people just like me. I met my current girlfriend off plentyoffish as well. We’re now coming up on a year pretty soon. I never did get their fish profile thing though.
Edit: Oooooooh it means plenty of fish, not plenty offish. Hmmm…

10

I have tried all three mentioned in the OP and agree that OKCupid is the best of the 3.

I haven’t found anyone via any of the three, but I didn’t spend any money not finding someone via OKCupid.

(And to be fair to OKCupid, I have only been a member for 10 days.)

11

You know that one guy at the bar… any bar, every bar. You know him, he’s the guy walking around asking every woman in the place out on the basis that, sooner or later, someone will say yes. He’ll tell you you’re the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen and when you say “No thanks” he’ll shrug, turn to the woman next to you and tell her the same thing.

Anyway, I’ve found OkCupid has a high population of that guy.

12

I was on OKCupid and was so scared by the people it matched me with, I closed my account.

I was on Match.com for a couple of months and got only one coffee date out of it. The guy’s life history was eerily similar to my own, but he was boring as hell.

I was on eHarmony for one month. I had four coffee dates. Two of the guys I would have seriously liked to have for friends. One other was a disaster. The fourth is sitting across the table from me now–we’re getting married in July.

I felt that the quality of matches I was delivered on eHarmony was much, much higher than on either of the other two sites, obviously. So my experience is different from yours.

13

The owner of Plenty of Fish is considering adding a paid version. Some people do think that paying means you are more serious about finding someone.

http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts11916896.aspx

14

I mostly can’t stand plenty of fish’s web design. :slight_smile:

I might be willing to buy that the quality and density of people overall was higher, but you really think there was something to the matching? From what I can tell, it’s a load of well-branded fluff. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that putting a cat lover with a cat hater is statistically a bad idea. There’s nothing special about their questionnaire nor anything mysterious about how they likely use it to suggest matches.

eHarmony also sort of annoyed me in that it never seemed to properly pay attention to height as a match factor. I’m a 5’5" guy, and in my experience, women much taller than me just aren’t interested (pretty obvious in match and other open search sites: most women, even 5’0" ones, seem to search for at least 5’8" and up, never even seeing my profile). I don’t take offense to this: we all have our fantasy qualities, and I have to admit that I sort of fancy smaller women myself: we all sort of want to be someone’s tall, dark, and handsome fellow, and while the other two I’ve got down, the first one is all relative.

But eHarmony, on the other hand, seems to insist on matching me up with Amazon after Amazon, whether I tell them that height is important or not (though, bizarrely, there’s no option to tell them what ABOUT height is important: more unclear interface design), even though many of them say right in their profiles that they’re interested in a man of such and such a height.

15

A paying site will generally weed out the folks that are married and/or just trying to get some side action.

I certainly found I was matched with a better class of people on eharm than plenty of fish.

The bottom line is, if a person can pay a few hundred dollars to join a dating site number one, they are serious and number two, they probably have a job.

16

The matching algorithm stuff is all hokum.

I’ve had far better luck by putting my basic demographic/personal details in my profile and writing a decent introduction.

Then, I do a search based on the corresponding details that I’m looking for in a partner. Even if I don’t exactly match one of her preferences exactly, it doesn’t cost me anything other than a few minutes to send her a message.

That’s one of my problems with OKCupid. They put so much stock in their stupid questions and tests, they make it very difficult to search for unmarried moderate/leftist atheistic/agnostic slim/athletic/average women aged 25-33 with at least a couple of years of college and no more than part-time custody of any children, who drink and don’t mind cats.

Those are the kind of women I’m interested in talking to, and I don’t need some stupid matching algorithm to tell me otherwise. For some reason, though, I keep getting sucked back in to OKCupid by messages from chicks who aren’t really interested in doing more than online flirting.

Word.

17

I don’t use any of these services, but this comment reminded me of a one-liner a friend of mine once delivered “I only take my popular pseudo-science in pill or liquid form!”

18

I always get a kick out of the commercials that offer to match you up “in terms of compatibility”. What’s the alternative, getting matched up in terms of incompatibility?

In my case, I’m not looking for someone to marry, I just want to meet someone to socialize with once in a while instead of sitting around the house.

19

I dunno. Given that a decent date these days costs around 100$ for a guy, the date alone requires some sort of source of income. :slight_smile:

20

I don’t get a sense that okcupid puts “much stock” in anything at all, which is perhaps why I like it best out of all the major sites. They have their user-generated question matching system, but you’re welcome to completely ignore it if you want (unlike eharmony, in which the concept of “searching” is completely disallowed). And it’s freewheeling: you can talk to anyone, upfront, without restrictions.

Hey, while mere online flirting isn’t the same thing as a path to a fulfilling relationship, I wouldn’t knock the need to chat with interesting, beautiful members of the opposite sex as a means to simply enjoy and learn the art of socializing.