Which is Worse?

For years now, single people from all over the world have suspected that the online dating sites were using ringers – very attractive people employed by the company to make their service look valuable – and leaving old profiles up long after their owners had quit paying for membership in order to make their pool of potential dates look larger. Everyone knows that there are going to be cheaters on such sites – people who will send you a headshot of a breathtaking (but obscure) actress and claim it’s their own picture, or cut out a picture of a rugged pro athlete (like in the Simpsons episode) and represent that as their true image – but that sort of thing went on before there were dating sites or an Internet to put them on. Everyone also knows that membership in online dating sites is going to skew heavily toward males, just as video dating and matchmaking services did; women are much more worried about the consequences of meeting a total stranger over the Internet, and rightly so. But given the class action lawsuit that has been filed against Match.com this week, I have to wonder what they thought they were doing – and what they were actually charging for…

You can pick up the Yahoo News story about it if you want to, but the gist of it is that the plaintiffs are claiming that as many as 60% of all Match profiles were either inactive or populated by scammers attempting to get money out of them; they also claim that they were initially contacted in order to get them to sign up for the service, but that once they did all of the profiles that had contacted them suddenly disappeared. If these allegations are proven in court the plaintiffs should be able to recover every dollar they spent and punitive damages besides; the practices described are clearly fraudulent, and there is no way the owners of the company could possible defend their actions as legitimate parts of such a business. The real question, at least to my mind, is what they thought they were going to accomplish in the first place…

Running such an enterprise on the basis of matching subscribers according to a simple personality test (of which dozens are available at reasonable cost) would allow the operators of such a site to actually provide contacts to anyone in their system who could reasonably be paired off; they could tell anyone left over (as some people inevitably would be) that there was no match for them in the system at this time, and to keep checking back. If your customers cancel the service and leave after a month or two (or whatever you want the minimum subscription to be) don’t worry about it; the supply of lonely Internet users is not likely to decrease anytime soon, and your only variable cost is whatever the personality test license cost you (assuming you paid for it fair and square, like you should have); a profile in a database doesn’t cost anything to maintain. You’ll need a few hours of programmer time each week (to send out the contact or lack-of-contact emails), but that’s only a few hours of employee time for thousands or millions of messages…

The key to a high-turnover business model (which this would be, if the company was dealing honestly with its customers) is to keep bringing in enough new subscribers each month that you don’t have to worry about the ones who keep leaving. If your price is affordable, your advertising is convincing, and you do occasionally pair somebody off, this should not prove difficult. Conning people with fake messages (if they really were) won’t improve your retention rate that much, since people will get wind of it and there are lots of alternative sites – and other online resources used to meet people. And even if it does work for you, there is still the unpleasant possibility of civil lawsuits, criminal charges, and hundreds of scruffy bloggers mocking you all over the Internet…

I can’t decide which is worse – if these people were criminals all along, or if they’re just too stupid and/or greedy to see that this type of business can be sustained indefinitely (albeit possibly at a less lucrative level) without defrauding anyone or breaking any civil or criminal statute. I’ll keep you posted on how the trial goes…