[sseagull]

Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears.

Searching is failing me at the moment

edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...

[dheera]

From the article

> 12-moth plan

> 6-month plan

Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan?

Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-month would make sense for dating, specifically.

I mean, if you are a dating app, you should be striving to get users to delete your app as fast as possible (for the right reason), not hang onto an annual subscription.

[derefr]

Month-to-month is just as bad. The ideal business model for a dating site, from the users' perspective, is a one-time advance payment. This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive to get you satisfied as quickly as possible, so that they can spend as little time/money on you as possible, so that your value to them doesn't go negative from allowing you to spend too much of their time/money.

This is, as it happens, how professional matchmakers tend to charge.

[dheera]

> This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive

If the payment is a one-time advance payment, I would imagine this disincentives the business to truly do their best, since they already have your money.

I would think, idealistically, maybe the best model would be an advance payment but with a money-back guarantee of say half the payment if you don't find a match through them.

Legally establishing that you don't find a match could be troublesome though, since the "couple" that actually liked each other could both claim they didn't match, get their 50% back, but you as a business would have no recourse if they got together and lived their lives happily ever after, behind your back. You don't have "rights" to their personal life together as a business.

Unless of course it was a government-run dating service that had marriage, housing, and financial records of everyone. That might work. And for many reasons it's in the best interest of the government to get as many people married as possible.

[derefr]

You don't need a refund. Just presume an efficient market of such companies, where the matchmakers who actually make matches have better reputations, and the ones who don't quickly go out of business. That's how most single-shot service-provider businesses work. (At least, the ones with clear success criteria. Psychics and the like never lose reputation, because there's no standard to measure their claims against.)

The one thing single-shot service-provider businesses (including professional human matchmakers) will do, though, is to calculate a quote for their service, corresponding to how much trouble they think your account is going to be for them. They don't usually bill more if it turns out to be even more of a challenge, but they do refine their quote process after each experience.

Though also, back to refunds: a refund guarantee doesn't need to be part of an explicit business-model, to be part of the effective business model. Dating sites charge people's credit cards. Large one-time charges from unknown companies you don't have an ongoing relationship with are exactly the type of thing that banks/credit-card companies are happy to do charge-backs for. Whether they offer refunds or not, the system will offer refunds for them — and kill their business by taking away its payment-processing if too many users ask for said refunds.

[pdpi]

> Just presume an efficient market of such companies

And those companies are in the business of matching spherical cows in a vacuum.

Efficient markets are useful as a simple model, but you don’t get to wish away real-world problems by pretending the world conforms to that model.

[derefr]

I’m talking about a game-theoretic dynamic that’s easily observed in real world professions (e.g. plumbers, cleaners, art conservators, etc.), and even in exactly the same industry (human professional matchmakers.) The “presumption” here isn’t really much of a stretch.

It just-so-happens that dating sites don’t currently follow this model, because an external force (Match Group) came in and explicitly chose to consolidate the market into a cartel, where 95% of “competing” dating sites are actually in collusion due to shared ownership. But there’s no reason to expect that situation to last forever, any more than there’s reason to expect the dominance of the currently-dominant social network (MySpace/Facebook/etc.) to last forever.

[fallingfrog]

The efficient market hypothesis is wrong.

Here’s why: it assumes that the only form of power or leverage that exists is supply and demand. However there are all kinds of forms of leverage in the real world. There is legal power. Voting. Guns. Unions. Price fixing. Cultural norms. Marketing. Blackmail. All of these are forms of leverage and they are not special cases; rather, supply and demand is one special case which comprises a fraction of the total pressure on wages and prices and success or failure at any moment.

[Pet_Ant]

Sure, but if it doesn't have rundle potential it's not a modern business.

[behnamoh]

IMO the ideal business model from users' perspective could be pay-as-you-go, where you pay for each individual you want to send message to (e.g. $1.99).

[bayesianbot]

There are a lot of dating sites at least in Scandinavia/central europe, where men pay per message (or usually buy message packs, it ends up being around 1€ a message IIRC).

The (mostly) men answering these messages, pretending to be women, get paid around 0.15€ per reply. And obviously writing messages where they try to prolong the conversation and turn down real life meetings or changing to other (free) messaging system "for now"

[dheera]

Why does the system charge men and pay women to message, instead of just charging everyone to message?

I would have thought that of all places Scandinavia would not price-discriminate users based on their gender ...

[dkarras]

Because if you made women pay, the pool of women would shrink considerably and there would not be enough women for men to message to. Ideologies of gender equality aside, simple observation shows that dating is a women's market. Not even just with humans as biologically, women have a lot more to risk (risk of pregnancy, risks associated with being physically weaker etc.) so they choose while men present themselves and try to "woo" them. Of course not always, but it is a very stable base to build up on. If they made both sexes pay, I bet platform owners would earn a lot less as fewer messages would get exchanged overall.

[IQunder130]

If you're running a business things like actually pricing based on the market you've got rather than the one people idealistically wish you had start to make a lot of sense.

[selestify]

Even Scandinavia is not immune to gender disparities in online dating

[dqh]

It might be because men unfortunately, as a group, disproportionately misbehave in these situations. Sending unwelcome dick pics, sending aggressive messages to people who don’t show any interest in them etc. I’ve wondered myself if charging us to send messages might rein in the antisocial behaviour a bit.

[haihaibye]

Asymmetry in gamete size

[imtringued]

If you wanted to go down this route you would pay per date, otherwise what are you paying for? Sure, the algorithm may jinx it by sending you on more bad dates than you wanted, but it would get you further than just a message.

[cratermoon]

> pay per date

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that's been a business model for a very long time.

[IQunder130]

We need an uber for ____

[dheera]

Maybe ideally yes, but that's assuming you only had the option to message them through the platform.

You could always message people for free outside the platform, considering any profile worthy of messaging probably lists enough information to find them on, say, LinkedIn or Facebook, and users likely often drop their personal websites or Instagram/Twitter IDs on their dating profiles.

[SkyBelow]

That would incentivizing matching people with those whom they want to message but aren't likely to start a relationship with.

[dexen]

Counter-intuitively this might be about hedging the incentives for the service provider - to avoid the moral hazard of pushing for indefinitely extending the subscription.

Just as you mention, successful finding a partner means as few "attempts" (apologies) as feasible, which in turn means two "lost customers" to the platform. That introduces a perverse incentive for the platform to "spoil" the dating to keep the customers. By making one long-spanning plan, the perverse incentive is lessened.

[1_person]

I fail to see how making money by shafting the customer one way precludes making money by shafting the customer another way at the same time.

[dkarl]

Assuming you're looking for one lifelong partner, which isn't true of everybody, is it normal to find somebody "compatible" that quickly? Without apps, I think it's common for people to go for years between serious relationships. I don't know why the timeline needs to be so compressed.

For me as a fairly awkward and introverted person, who didn't naturally generate a high volume of new social contacts, one of the things I liked about online dating was that I could make choices more like an extroverted person. I didn't have to think, holy shit, I actually met somebody I get along with, and she seems to like me, I can't afford to let this go or I'll probably be completely alone again for years until I meet the next person. Instead, I could think, this is okay, but is this person a really good match for me? Does she bring out the best in me? Are we going to have disagreements about big life things?

In other words, I could meet somebody I liked, enjoy spending time with them, and still decide not to marry them. And do that over and over again until I met somebody I was confident was a really good fit for me. Like regular people do!

Even when finally I met my wife, it didn't immediately mean the end of dating other people. She had just started dating after many years of focusing on her career. In fact, after having a big heart-to-heart over wine with a close friend one evening about how she needed to start dating again, her friend helped her install Tinder, and I was the second person she matched with. Obviously, after many years out of the dating pool, she was leery of falling for the first halfway decent guy she met, so she wanted to take her time and see what was out there and figure out what she waned. To avoid going insane while she was meeting other guys, I kept meeting new women. We didn't become exclusive until six months after we met.

I think, if I had a single friend who was starting online dating, if they were using a paid app, I would recommend a 6-month plan or 12-month plan, as a reminder that they can afford to be patient and shouldn't rush into things.

[dheera]

Maybe. But I would think that that also introduces a paradox of choice where you are constantly doubting the person you are currently dating, thinking that maybe there is someone that is a better fit for you.

The problem is I don't really think "fit" is an absolute thing. I think the reality is that there is a large set of people can be your best fit if you can grow together with them to be that best fit. A healthy relationship is about actually turning a local maximum into a global maximum by the function naturally and healthily changing to that effect, not assuming the function is constant and then hopping around looking for the global maximum and wondering whether you have reached it. One needs to find one of those people that they can grow with and commit to that growing, one where that local maximum is continually rising in prominence. Some degree of initial commitment and emotional investment without shopping around helps you see whether or not you can grow with that person. If growing together isn't possible, that's a big red flag and the relationship should end.

I agree with not committing after only 1 or 2 dates, but if the dates continue, I would sure hope for exclusivity a lot less than 12 months into it.

[dkarl]

For me, doubt in my ability to know who I could be happy with rose dramatically with a little bit of experience and then fell as I accumulated more and more. Meeting more people made me more and more comfortable with my own judgment about other people and my understanding of what made me happy. I think people who find partners very early in life are very lucky in some ways, though. It's a trade-off, like so many other things. You can have X more years of experience with relationships and with yourself when you choose your partner, or you can have X more years of shared history with your partner.

I do think any doubts you can put to rest in six months or a year, the time is worth it. Couples who divorce take years to do it, and I think they're unhappy for at least half that time.

[jetbooster]

The problem is, for the _business_ the incentive is the opposite. You want the suckers who are willing to pay for your dating app to keep paying, so from a purely callous point of view you want to provide the absolute minimum benefit over the non-paying users that is required in order for them to not leave and try somewhere else. There is almost no incentive for them to _actually_ match you with someone, just string you along just enough to keep you coming back.

[purerandomness]

You're assuming that everyone uses online dating platforms to find one (1) long-term partner with whom they'll be monogamous, which is not the case.

There are couples looking for other couples or thirds, there is the BDSM scene with people looking for casual play partners, and so on.

[spijdar]

This is true, but I believe that the majority of users on "normal" dating sites are looking for single, long-term partners. As I understand, within the BDSM scene there are several websites including social networking sites and dedicated match making sites catering to the specifics of BDSM. I find it unlikely you'd use a "normal" dating site when you likely have pretty specific interests that likely (?) need specific UI/UX to cater to.

Just sort of overall, when your interest is in building a network, finding people to have casual sex/encounters with, a "stream of people to meet" as someone mentioned below, I think you'd want a different website/UI than these big dating sites seem to offer/encourage. That said, I've never used them, just speculating based on the ads I've seen over the years and how they paint themselves.

[purerandomness]

Dating sites that make you answer questionnaires and match based on answers are a really good way to get to know people with similar kinks and interests.

While there are specific sites for BDSM dating with more nuanced optoins, the ads for generic dating sites are all very "tame" and try to not deviate from the perceived norm too much (= "find a partner, have a happy family" type messaging)

The reason is that if you do, it's virtually impossible to get included in Ad networks and App Stores. So you naturally see only dating ads catering to the very conservative viewer.

Example: A BDSM dating site got banned from Googles Play Store after including a background image of a simple leather whip. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/devianceapp/status/1384015666185834501

[vmception]

sure maybe a majority of users think they are, but really aren't.

many users of that kind of profile are just outsourcing actual human interaction to dating apps that claim to solve it but are incapable of doing so

[prepend]

The incentive for the dating app is to keep you unsatisfied, but with some hope, to keep dating and failing over and over. Or I suppose the business models could be either “subscription” based where you keep using it forever or “contract” based where it’s a single fee.

I think the okcupid papers called out how free dating is better aligned with users because they wouldn’t have to compete with the natural tendency to want to make more money through ongoing subscriptions.

Of course, I know friends who are continuously dating and plan on staying that way.

[galaxyLogic]

That is true. At the same time this viewpoint makes me wonder, what about doctors? Isn't it in their interest to keep us sick so we keep on coming back? And the policemen and prison industry, if crime disappeared they would lose their business. And firefighters too.

[vngzs]

Dating sites are not actually designed to help you find relationships.

They are designed to leave you constantly questioning the relationship you're in, knowing you could always find something better around the corner. They might get signups because people believe they can find a partner, but they keep customers because those people are addicted to the game of newer, "better" lovers.

It's another of many cases of businesses that claim to solve one problem, but really solve a different one that's not in the user's best interest.

[langitbiru]

I'm building a dating app, SwanLove (https://swan.love). It's still in MVP mode and centralized mode.

I'm thinking of pivoting into this kind of business model: B2B. So I make my dating app something like GitLab or WordPress. You can install it and host it yourself. You pay me every month if your users exceeds 100.

Say, you are a priest or a gym owner. You have a community. You want your people in the community (church, gym) to have a chance to find a romantic partner inside the community. Anyone who wants to register in your dating app needs to be a member of your community first (church, gym). This way, I don't even hold the data (avoiding becoming a honeypot for hackers). I just want the money (in an ethical way).

What do you think? Is this ethical business model for a dating startup?

For the centralized dating app, maybe the subscription package can help them foster their relationship. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it.

Or you can create a bounty in the dating app for someone who can introduce a wonderful person to you. Then if you get married, the dating startup gets a cut from the bounty. The problem is how you verify whether people get married or not. Can we do something like bootcamps offering ISA that can access their students' tax records?

[nonameiguess]

This sounds perfectly ethical to me but it's not clear what value it provides. People who are part of the same church or gym already have the opportunity to get to know each other by being in the same physical community in the first place and don't need a website where they can interact with the same people but online. If they do want that, they're likely to just set up a Facebook group. While the obvious disadvantage there is now Facebook owns their data, but it's also free and most people are going to choose free.

Ironically, online venue for a real-world network limited to verified members of that network was what Facebook itself originally was, until they realized opening up to everyone was the difference between a novelty for college students and a multi-trillion dollar world eater.

[TheAdamAndChe]

Dating apps and websites depend on proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding in order to lead. As such, they are very prone to becoming monopolies, and a market leader wouldn't be likely to use someone else's SaaS app. I'm just not sure there is the demand for 1000 semi-large dating apps unless tech isolationism somehow becomes the norm, and it that happens then it would include SaaS isolationism.

[Aethelwulf]

There are already white-label dating-site providers out there. Most of the "specialised" sites (e.g. uniform-wearers, "professionals") are running on them.

[GCA10]

But wait!

Yes, aspiring monogamists will fit your bill of people who "want to be off the site in 12 months" or sooner. That's one segment of your users, but it really isn't everyone by a long shot.

Plenty of users are signing up for the chance to meet ("get to know") a steady stream of people. We don't stigmatize people who subscribe to Netflix for many years so that they can keep watching different movies and shows. There's some segment of the dating-site world that has more of a Netflix model in mind.

[dheera]

> There's some segment of the dating-site world that has more of a Netflix model in mind

Although I'm sure those users exist, I'm sure they aren't the majority of the world, who would rather just be happily married and get on with life? And even if not, these users who have different expectations should not be matching with the former.

[TeMPOraL]

> And even if not, these users who have different expectations should not be matching with the former.

Actually, given the extreme social stigma worldwide (even in the most progressive western countries) against casual hookups and low-commitment dating, people looking for "more of a Netflix model" will still gravitate towards the same sites ostensibly servicing those "who would rather just be happily married and get on with life"[0], because these services offer the widest choice of possible partners, while giving everyone plausible deniability.

--

[0] - I think that, given aforementioned stigma, it's even hard to estimate how many people in a given age bracket want this, and how many just say they want this, because it's the only accepted thing to say out loud.

[FridgeSeal]

Bumble has a feature where you can indicate what you’re looking for, options are “something casual”, “don’t know yet”, “relationship” and “marriage”. You can also filter for this.

From experience: very few people have “something casual” set, but I know from female friends that there’s plenty of guys with “don’t know” or “relationship” set despite looking for something casual.

[p_j_w]

Those users don't have to be a majority to be money makers for the companies that put out the sites.

And even amongst people who want to settle down, a fair share of them probably also wanna do a fair amount of looking around in their late teens through some point in their 20s, and maybe even early 30s.

[6510]

People are not having kids because it's to expensive.

[jdminhbg]

The cost of 12 months of a dating site is trivial compared to the benefits of finding the right person. If someone offered you a soulmate if you gave them a couple hundred dollars, you'd take it in a second, right? Paying ahead actually aligns your incentives better, because the site is no longer incentivized to drag you along single month after month to keep you paying.

[throw14082020]

This is bordering on logic like the following: - Water is really important, why don't you buy this $100 bottle of water. - The site has an incentive to improve your dating outcomes. No, it's primary objective is to maximise revenue, everything else is a side effect. - Paying more for something means someone will commit/ follow through, somehow raise incentives. This is just a guess, not supported or disproven by reality.

I like to think defensively especially when it involves companies. What are they doing, and what do they stand to achieve?

These apps have not shown any value to their users, paywall their content and have an aggressive-long-term subscription model because they have optimised themselves straight into the garbage can, by thinking short term.

[hansvm]

Effectively, you're not paying for "12 months" despite the label, you're paying for a significant chance at finding a soulmate? If that's the case, why not label it as such?

[chucksmash]

Because after your 12 months you can't use the profile any more. Better to label what you pay for accurately.

[fho]

Kind of related: one of the dating platforms in Germany advertises with "every 10 minutes a single falls in love on XYZ" ... 1 year / 10 minutes = 52560 ... that's a pretty bad success rate for a platform that supposedly has millions of users.

[billytetrud]

The big spenders on dating sites are the ones there just to screw around. That's why they all mostly become toxic hell holes, because the economics incentivize catering to those assholes

[otabdeveloper4]

This is an open secret, but many (most?) "dating" sites are just ubertized prostitution providers.

In this context, a "12 month plan" is just their bulk discount.

[Abishek_Muthian]

If a dating platform fulfills its promise i.e. offers users only the best date with whom the user could potentially have a long-term relationship then the user gains but the platform would soon run out of the users(Chicken-and-Egg is most prevalent in dating platforms).

So these platforms are only optimized for - Choice overload, Doom scrolling based on physical attractiveness.

[Breza]

Dating websites are the one category where either having an amazing site or a truly terrible site both lose you subscribers.

[IQunder130]

Wanting to be done in under 12 months and actually being done in under 12 months are two very different things.

[vmception]

you described one user profile of a half dozen use cases of dating apps

no dating app is actually designed for that one use case, just like Cosmopolitan magazine, they are built on frustration and doing counterintuitive things designed for never reaching that kind of user's goal

[toper-centage]

Why are you assuming everyone is looking for long term relationships and not hookups or fwb?

[dheera]

I guess one of the fundamental problems then is that these two mutually incompatible groups of people are mixed up in the platform?

[distantaidenn]

Some users just wanting a string of hookups, perhaps?

[chovybizzass]

Serial daters. Plenty of guys just using these apps for one-timer hookups or FWB. They stick around for a month then onto the next branch like a damn monkey.

[dncornholio]

This. Before tindr you just had 'dating' sites.

[toomuchredbull]

This guy doesn't understand modern dating...

[asiachick]

I find there are mixed incentives. An evil paid dating site might try scammy things to get you to sign up. Some site I tried did this. Free to sign up and immediately got "too good to be true" matches that you could only access if you paid. But conversely, free sites I get lots clear predators either only looking for sex or scammers trying to get money. OTOH my experience on an actual paid site ($150-$400 a year) no free sign up, is that nearly everyone is seriously looking for long term relationship.