Figures Don’t Lie…

Normally I wouldn’t be paying much attention to an Internet pay-site acquiring the rights to a free site, or to anything that has been taken off of the free site since its acquisition, but in this case the acquiring site is one of the big dating sites (Match.com) and the deleted material was a blog post explaining a why you should never pay for a dating site that used to appear on the “OK Cupid” free site. Since this type of Internet business has come up on the blog a few times in the past month, I decided to take a look at the argument that the founder of the free site was making. It turns out that there are some interesting numbers here…

To begin with, consider the claim that these sites have tens of millions of customers. In one case, one of the big companies claims they have 20 million of them, but if you divide their gross income for the last year by the amount they charge per customer and take into account their own figures for turnover every 6.5 months, they can’t have more than about 750,000 paying customers at any one time – or about 1/30th of the total. You read that correctly; 96.25% of their accounts are going to be inactive (and therefore unable to respond to your attempts to contact them) at any give time. Even worse, if you’re a man sending messages to an active account, you have about a 30% chance of getting a response (which is huge, compared with most advertising, for example). If only one out of every thirty messages you send actually goes to a live account, that means that you can expect to get 1 response for every 100 messages you send. Which, in turn, means that to get any significant number of responses you need to send hundreds or even thousands of messages, which means you’re going to have to make them impersonal form letters which are even less likely to get a response…

But even worse, according to the author, is that according to census figures and one of the dating sites’ own success claims, you are more than 12 times more likely to get married if you don’t belong to this site than if you do. Which is to say that the group of single people in the US who don’t belong to this online dating site account for a percentage of all marriages that is 12 plus times larger (relative to their numbers) than the percentage that belong to this one site and get married. It’s not a true correlation, since those figures don’t account for all of the competing dating sites, old-fashioned services that don’t work over the Internet, professional matchmakers, and so on. Still, it is kind of a disturbing thought – and it’s rather unpleasant to think that one of the biggest pay-sites just bought one of their free competitors and took these warnings about pay-sites down…

Now, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with Internet dating sites as such; I’m not even saying there’s anything wrong with ones you pay for. The two biggest sites claim to be responsible for about 5,000 marriages and about 86,000 marriages a year, respectively, and it would be difficult to say that those 91,000 people didn’t get value for their money. If we assume that at least twice that many people at least got dates or other enjoyable experiences out of their investment, that would mean as many as 300,000 happy customers, which isn’t bad – unless you happen to be one of the 39,700,000 people who paid their $600 and got absolutely nothing because all of the people they tried to connect with were “ghosts,” as the inactive accounts are called...

Twenty years ago in Los Angeles I worked with some people who belonged to one of the pre-Internet dating services, paying $3,000 a year for public mixers and the occasional “personal” introduction – and back then, that was a lot of money. No one I knew ever got a date using the service, but it hardly mattered; even though they knew the odds, there was always the chance that they might end up being one of the 3.75% and not one of the 96.25%, and that was enough to keep them coming back month after month. Modern dating sites can claim that they are selling something other than hope (and a rather forlorn hope, at that) if they want to, but just remember the old saying: “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure…”