Online Dating Industry summary 2010

Lack Of Innovation & Decadence can summarize the Online Dating Industry 2010


- Lack Of Innovation, the big dinosaurs
* Match/Chemistry
During the tenure of Tim Sullivan as CEO, Match entered the compatibility matching era with WeAttract's test.
During the tenure of Jim Safka, the IAC (Match) launched Chemistry (the last innovation at Match, it was during 2005).
During the tenure of Thomas Enraght-Mooney, the IAC acquired 27% stake in Meetic but lost the war in Europe.
During the tenure of Greg Blatt, the IAC bought some online dating sites like PeopleMedia's Communities, SinglesNet and YahooPersonals unit.

* eHarmony, a 10 years old obsolete site.

* Meetic (Meetic Affinity)

- tried to innovate this year
* FriendScout-24 with the BQ-Check (a hoax)
* PlentyOfFish, tried to innovate with the POF Marriage Predictor (and failed)
* Personality-based recommender systems
Have you seen the next generation of recommender systems include normative personality traits?
That is the only way to improve recommender systems, to include the personality traits of their users.
Have you seen they need to calculate personality similarity between users?
Have you seen there are different formulas to calculate similarity?
In case you did not notice, recommender systems are morphing to .......... compatibility matching engines!!!

- failed proposals:
* 12Like
* LittleHint

- free sites: are only useful to send prospective customers to paid sites and paid sites send customers to Offline Chains.
* OKCupid
* PlentyOfFish, tried to innovate with the POF Chemistry Predictor and the POF Marriage Predictor and failed
* OasisActive / AmorEnLinea, getting some traction in Latin American countries


- can not take off:
* eVow, the paid site from PlentyOfFish
* Jazzed the "free" site from eHarmony
* eHarmonyBrazil

* eCift in Turkey (a copycat of Parship)


- in decadence
* Be2 (game over)
* Parship (will be game over)
* ParPerfeito
* PerfectMatch

- White label proposals, they do not have weigh in the Online Dating Industry for serious daters.

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WorldWide, there are over 5,000 (five thousand) online dating sites; "dating" is a broad word to define a large group of different proposals.
Online Dating Sites can be classified as:
1.0: "Browsing/Searching Options, Powerful Searching Engines"
1.5: "Unidirectional Recommendation Engines"
2.0: "Matching based on Self-Reported Data / Bidirectional Recommendation Engines"
3.0: "Compatibility Matching Algorithms"

All major actual paid Online Dating sites are old and in decadence losing traffic since January 2009. It is not due to the traction of Facebook, it is the Online Dating Fatigue Phenomenon due to Obsolescence of Dating Sites offering Compatibility Matching Methods.
Social networking/applications could merge with online dating for fun, for flirting, for entertainment purposes, for instant gratification.
Social networking and online dating for serious daters are like water and oil, they will never mix.

Owners and C-level executives of major online dating sites are more worried in attracting, converting and retaining subscribers with automatic renewal of their subscriptions and other credit-card billing trickery, than offering a good compatibility matching method.

The entire Online Dating Industry for serious daters in 1st World Countries is a HOAX, performing as a Big Online Casino, with a low effectiveness/efficiency level of their matching algorithms (less than 10%), and new proposals are not better than the old ones.

Actual online dating sites offering compatibility matching methods are only fueled by big marketing budgets and not by serious scientific evidence. No online dating site can prove its matching algorithm can match prospective partners who will have more stable and satisfying relationships than couples matched by chance, astrological destiny, personal preferences, searching on one's own, or other technique as the control group in a peer_reviewed Scientific Paper. They only use different versions of the normative Big5 or ipsative proprietary models instead (like Chemistry or PerfectMatch) to measure personality traits. They are all like placebo, because they are delivering ON AVERAGE 3 to 4 prospective mates as highly compatible persons per 1,000 persons screened, in exactly the same range as searching on one's own, with a high percentage of false positives, like gun machines shooting flowers.


Online dating sites should had killed offline dating proposals (chains, professional matchmakers, etc) since some years ago, but offline proposals are still alive and with good health.
Divorce rates are still high.

The Online Dating Industry needs innovations, but the innovations the Online Dating Industry needs will come from only one source: the latest discoveries in theories of romantic relationships development with commitment.


1) What is important in attracting people to one another may not be important in making couples happy.

2) Latest Research in Theories of Romantic Relationships Development outlines: compatibility is all about a high level on personality* similarity* between prospective mates for long term mating with commitment.
*personality measured with a normative test.
*similarity: there are different ways to calculate similarity, it depends on how mathematically is defined.


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WorldWide, there are 5,000 -over five thousand- online dating sites
but no one
is using the 16PF5 to assess personality of its members!
but no one
calculates similarity with a quantized pattern comparison method!
but no one
can show Compatibility Distribution Curves to each and every of its members!
but no one
is scientifically proven!