Archive for April, 2010

Match.com No longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers.

April 28, 2010

Here is comscores worldwide ranking of dating sites for march.    We are doing pretty good considering we are only in  UK, Canada and US.

Last year  Match launched a plentyoffish clone  called downtoearth.com  which was supposed to be a free dating site that would compete with plentyoffish.   After it failed to get any traction they shut down the service..   Now match.com is back again today with today with a legal notice that you can read here.    Match.com says its not possible that plentyoffish has as many signups as we do every day.   Match says there is no way we can generate as many relationships and dates as we do.    Match  than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships  and dates than they do,  and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know.

This letter is beyond ironic considering match’s history of bogus claims,  like this one from last week.  Match  claims that 42% of dates from dating sites are as result of match.com and 30% of marriages are a result of match.com     What they fail to point out is that match has been around for 15 years and most of the sites listed in the survey barely existed 5 years ago.   I especially love their marriage claim,  they take  people who married 5 years ago and met online some 18 months before that.(average dating time before marriage) .    Is there any dating site in that survey other than match  that was a top 20 dating site 7 years ago ?

If we actually look at what match.com claims it gets into the absurd.   Last year they claimed 12 marriages per day.    Eharmony claims  236 marriages per day    Now a year later  match.com claims double the number of marriages as eharmony in this survey around 472 marriages per day or 994 people getting married per day.    Match  also claims that it has 20,000 signups a day on its homepage (who knows how many of those are from the US).  If we assume they get no signups outside of the US,  and they have a sky high conversion ratio of 15% and male and female signups are equal   that means 3000 people decide to pay so they can communicate with other users.   On match.com you can’t talk to a user if you don’t pay.   So does anyone actually believe that every day 944 out of 3000 new paying users of match.com will get married eventually because of who they met on match.com?   do 1 in 3 paying subscribers of match.com even go out on a date???   Last i heard only 15% or so of relationships lead to marriage. 

I am going to focus on my wedding reception this weekend,  and not threats from match.com

Does Eharmony outsource matchmaking?

April 8, 2010

*******  Ian responds in the comments and says that the caption on the video is wrong and they don’t  work on eharmony’s matching algo and he updated his blog to reflect that fact.

Watch this video,  at about 5 minutes in they talk about how eharmony is using his company to generate matches…

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hj2t_ian-clarke-sensearray_news

And the about me on his blog…

http://blog.locut.us/about-me/

“Ian’s current focus is the development of SenseArray (through his company Uprizer Labs). SenseArray is a powerful new type of collaborative filter which can make use of arbitrary metadata in making recommendations. SenseArray is already being used in a wide variety of industries, ranging from online dating (we can’t name the company but you’ve heard of it), to targeted advertising companies with revenues totaling in the hundreds of millions.”

I wonder which of the 29 dimensions of compatibility this falls under?

Facebook dating apps see massive user drop.

April 2, 2010

Facebook turned off app notications last month,   large facebook dating apps like Zoosk and Are you interested saw massive drops in users.   This is why you don’t build companies that are completely dependent on the whim of another company.

http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/03/facebook-developers-see-dramatic-drop-in-traffic-following-removal-of-notifications/

http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/single/-/6953377468

http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/single/are-you-interested/17091798008/


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