

Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - dsplittgerber
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/04/07/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/

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cjlars
"Match.com made $342,600,000 last year. That's $137,000 in user fees per
marriage." - There's your key takeaway.

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papertiger
There are many reasons to pay for a dating service beyond the number of users,
such as a preference in any of these categories: 1) communication process /
privacy controls 2) interface features (filtering options, etc.) 3) advertised
or implied goal of the service (marriage, hook-ups, etc.) 4) strong
concentration of users in your demographic

Also, some of the things that the article discussed, like the "desperation
feedback loop", apply equally to paid and free dating services.

I normally love to read OK Cupid's blog posts, but this one struck me as a
little vicious and disingenuous.

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dlytle
One of the major differences is that OkCupid lets you search for people who've
been online recently, and allows you to contact people without paying for the
service.

The big tricks used by the pay dating sites are that they make it difficult to
identify active users, and people can't read mails they receive without having
an active subscription.

Many pay dating sites have "employees" or scripts whose job is to send vague
messages to people with no subscription, or whose subscriptions have recently
lapsed.

This means that there's both a huge pool of "dud" accounts that you don't know
are invalid, and that you don't know which mails you receive are from real
potential matches.

The end result explains their listed "full userbase turnover"; people sign up
for their sites because they haven't been burned yet, pay until they realize
they're being scammed, and then quit and move to a free site.

OkCupid isn't tooting their own horn in this post; they're just pointing out
the numbers that quantify how much of a scam most major dating sites are.
They've already picked up the people who've gotten burned, and most future
daters who get burned will stick to free dating sites afterwards... so this
won't get them many more users than they would have received anyway.

It just might stop some suckers from being parted from their money.

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nopassrecover
A great way to destroy your competition.

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alanh
I _really_ like how Subscribe & Share are visible on the side as the user
scrolls down.

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jheriko
Interesting article, it does a lot of analysis then boldy states that you
should sign up to okcupid.com instead without a shred of reasoning to back
that up?

Marketing fail.

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dsplittgerber
In case you didn't know, okcupid is free. After reading that article it makes
a lot of sense to sign up with okcupid if you're looking for a dating website
instead of going to a paysite.

