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by papertiger
5903 days ago
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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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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.