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Match.com no longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers
- benashkan 17y agoTraction really scares competitors.
- seiji 17y agoThanks for reminding me we need to decimate all the horrific dating sites out there. Who's in?
- kapitti 17y agoIn
- lallysingh 17y agoOi! I'm meeting & dating some wonderful women through these things! You just have to know the game and play along. A little experience with queuing models and Petri nets also helps.
- francoisdevlin 17y agoQueuing models and Petri nets? You must be having success.
- jrockway 17y agoCall me old-fashioned, but I just send relevant messages to girls that I think I might like. Not everything is some mathematical operation to optimize.
- kadavy 17y agoIt's all about the one-line hook, baby: http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/match-messages/ http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/match-messages/
- LiveTheDream 17y agoBut dating is a numbers game, and a numbers game is well-suited to mathematical optimization, right?
- lallysingh 17y agoActually the best way I connect to girls is to be openly nerdy. Show the excitement, but keep it short so they don't get bored. As for the queuing models & Petri nets, assuming everyone understood I was a more than a little tongue-in-cheek: - Setup your net as a cycle between weekdays and weekends. I only use 1 week of forward planning, so my base net is 3 weekdays (I save a few weekdays for non-dating) and 2 weekend days. 5 vertices. - Duplicate the net for different stages, roughly equating one stage per date sequence number. E.g stage 1 is first date, stage 2 is the second date, etc. - Each girl is a token. - Each token in each stage tells you how your day is likely to go, once you equate the stage # to an expected progress level. Especially early on in the dating sequence, dates can be short, so multiple dates can be stacked into a day (e.g. an afternoon 1st date vs a dinner/movie 3rd date that night). Nothing fancy by any means. Note, again, that this is pretty tongue-in-cheek, but it does help me keep a rational (and semi-quantitative) focus on what is fundamentally a numbers game. I don't lose my cool on dates b/c each one I understand as a single token, instead of freaking out on how this or that girl could be "the one." Edit: clearly this needs work, but I'll have to look up Petri nets again before tightening this up.
- realitygrill 17y agoPlease explain this. I am grinning hugely in anticipation.
- gaius 17y agoWhy the downvotes? A better dating site is on YC's list of things they want to fund.
- jrockway 17y agoWhat's wrong with okCupid, other than being written in C++?
- randomtask 17y agoWhat's wrong with it being written in c++?
- jarin 17y agoIt's not written on punchcards, that's what!
- philwelch 17y agoIt doesn't have the best revenue model and it hasn't fixed the fundamental gender imbalance problem yet. These two problems have the same solution: charge men for membership, women join for free. Every college keg party has figured this out, I'm surprised online dating sites haven't.
- cabalamat 17y agoDating sites run on the network effect: they are useful in proportion to the number of people on them. If they charge money for members, they will have less people on them. Therefore someone interested in a dating website should join one (or more) that don't cost anything. Oh, and they are less likely to be scams that way too.
- jseliger 17y agoBut the quality of dating sites matters too: is a site with 1,000 flakes or 200 people seriously looking for a date better? One thing that charging, even very small amounts, can do is weed out people who don't care. For example, Love Lab: http://thestranger.selectalternatives.com/gyrobase/Personals/ http://thestranger.selectalternatives.com/gyrobase/Personals... through Seattle's The Stranger seems to work pretty well because a) it's already oriented in the community and b) charges, which keeps out spammers and flakes. You might be right, but I 'm not sure which element is more important: sheer numbers or the quality of the people who have joined.
- jeremymcanally 17y agoThis reminds me of the Intuit/Mint exchanges, pre-acquisition. "What you say!??! You can't be more popular then we!! We demand that you prove this to us."
- brown9-2 17y agoI'm curious about how common this is with big corporations? Do they really think someone will be fooled by their demands which have no force behind them?
- patio11 17y agoLawyers routinely resolve almost all of their work with nastygrams (sternly worded letters demanding that someone take action on behalf of their client).
- Tuna-Fish 17y agoMostly because it usually works. A huge proportion of all people would get quite scared from that letter and comply, simply because it looks so threatening.
- run4yourlives 17y agoI'm curious about how common this is with big corporations? My personal experience suggests it's ridiculously common. People who work in large corporations often feel that the way large corporations work is the only way to do business. Because of that, they simply look at all the resources they require and conclude that since they require this, that there must be no other way of doing things. This is why startups can succeed - large businesses are stuck inside the boxes of their own design.
- eam 17y agoExactly! Now, will history repeat itself? Will Match try to acquire PlentyOfFish?
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- pavs 17y agoPlentyoffish needs to hire a designer. Assuming the number he claims is true, how many users is he loosing because of the site layout? I might sound like a snob, but I have a hard time taking a site designed like this seriously, I don't care how many users or traffic he claims to have. As far as dating site designs go, OkCupid looks great.
- gte910h 17y agoUnfortunately for you, dating sites really suffer from power laws. A dating site with 2x people is 4x as effective
- kyro 17y agoMost of the users that use that site don't care about ease of use. As long as they can find matches, for free, they're happy.
- chime 17y ago> Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer. I'd say he knows his target audience well enough to make that decision himself. There is indeed such a thing as being too polished. The reason late-night TV commercials are cheesy and loud is not because the director lacks the skills but rather because it suits the target market. If POF redesigned their site to look like a glamor magazine website, he might indeed lose a lot of users because they might be intimidated by the design.
- pavs 17y agoIts doesn't even need to look like a glamor magazine website (none of the dating websites do). Even if he doesn't need to make the site look half decent, the design itself is broken. Thumbnails doesn't seem to be properly scaled, they seemed compressed in to a smaller version (I could be wrong but the thumbnails are screwed up for some reason) and what is this in ever profile? http://i.imgur.com/Knicz.png http://i.imgur.com/Knicz.png Its less than 5 minutes worth of work to fix that.
- dannyr 17y ago
- fname 17y agoMatch 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 Would anyone in their right minds consider this?
- ciscoriordan 17y agoAcquisition opportunity?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- macrael 17y ago> 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. If you read the letter Match.com sent to him, you will see that he is misrepresenting it here. All they ask him for is proof that the claims he is making are true. From Match.com: > We demand that you immediately cease and desist from making these false claims. If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims...If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement. I don't know why Match.com would be the people to follow up on a possible false advertising claim like this. I assume they could sue plentyoffish if they don't provide Match with evidence? As plentyoffish points out, it is likely that Match.com (also?) makes false claims, so this could definitely be bluster. But they definitely don't ask for plentyoffish to reveal their processes.
- jdrock 17y agoI can't see how Match.com could possibly defend their case in court if they tried to sue. They'd essentially be asking a competing firm to reveal their trade secrets.
- macrael 17y agoAgain, it really doesn't look like they are doing that at all. They are just asking them to prove their marketing claims. My guess (IANANANAL) is that Match could sue for false advertising charges? Or bring evidence to the FTC? Dunno. But they aren't asking for their trade secrets. False advertising is illegal.
- petercooper 17y agoGood luck to Match.com - not. Any company could try and use this as justification to find out things about their competitors. For example, 37signals claims: "Over 3 million people use our web-based apps to get things done the simple way." Sending them a letter saying that you don't believe them and that they must substantiate the claim by return mail would, I suspect, be met with much laughter.
- staunch 17y ago37 signals line is genuinely horseshit though. They're quite clearly counting people who signup as "people who use our web-based apps". That's a truly false and misleading claim. It's beneath them.
- Timothee 17y agoBut isn't everybody doing that? Or, at least a lot of people? If your database has 3 millions lines in the account table, it feels better to use that number than the number of accounts that, say, logged in in the past x months. Especially if that second number is way less. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I feel it's one of these games where since everyone is doing it, you have to catch up one way or the other.
- regularfry 17y agoIf you read "Rework", you'll come away with the impression that blindly mimicking the competition because "you have to catch up" is precisely not the 37signals way. I do not believe they need to be making inflated claims.
- blasdel 17y agoThey can be making inflated claims for their own fanciful reasons. They don't need to be copycats to be dumbasses.
- regularfry 17y ago
- jarin 17y agoHahaha that is hilarious. As someone who has a dating site as a client (http://setformarriage.com http://setformarriage.com), the numbers are especially funny to me :)
- TotlolRon 17y agoLawyers. What will we do without them?
- jjs 17y agoLawyers. What will we do without them? http://images.google.com/images?q=champagne+popping http://images.google.com/images?q=champagne+popping http://images.google.com/images?q=fireworks http://images.google.com/images?q=fireworks http://images.google.com/images?q=parade http://images.google.com/images?q=parade
- MichaelApproved 17y agoUntil you need one
- nitrogen 17y agoYou only need one because someone else uses one against you, and the law was written by lawyers in language only they can understand ;) Thus, in the hypothetical scenario of no lawyers having existed, either they would be replaced by some other ruling and representative class, or the problems they solve wouldn't have been invented in the first place.
- MichaelApproved 17y agoOften, lawyers help keep someone from being against you. In contact law, lawyers are there to make keep a dispute from happening. A good lawyer will be able to foresee a potential problem and make sure you negotiate it's outcome before you enter into a deal.
- noonespecial 17y agoInstead, the Hatfields and the McCoys just kill each others sons for a couple dozen years. The problems are human nature. Lawyering is often childish, uncivilized and brutish, but we are making progress.
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- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- sosuke 17y agoMatch.com has been bloating numbers for a very long time, they just seem pissed that throwing money at downtoearth.com didn't pay off. I'd love for them to be forced to be truthful about their numbers for a change too.
- kadavy 17y agoFrom the comments: Yeah, 15% sounded high to me, too. But, from my Commission Junction account: 23 leads 3 sales —– 13% conversion ratio – about right.
- oakenshield 17y agoA recent blog post from OkCupid dissects Match.com (and eHarmony, to a lesser extent) to bits: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/04/07/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/04/07/why-you-should-...
- mdg 17y agoHere is an amendment I made to the flowchart in that post: http://i.imgur.com/FRGX0.jpg http://i.imgur.com/FRGX0.jpg
- not_an_alien 17y agoAwesome read. I love the guys at that website, their blog posts are always insightful.
- capedape 17y agoNice chart. I love when they break things down like that and can confirm that the graph with the girls is authentic (been out with 2 of them) One thing these numbers don't take into account is that when people pay for something they're more likely to take it seriously. It's anecdotal, but my experience with hundreds of dates over the years is the women are less flaky on Match vs. OKcupid. It's a case of having to develop a good flake-dar, such is the price you pay for free. Saying that, I'd never want them to go pay, I hope OK and the like destroy Match, they're just better companies with better ideas.
- kyro 17y agoI'd like to hear what grellas has to say about this. Does Match have anything to stand on here? Do they have any sort of case?
- ulvund 17y agoFirst they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. –Mahatma Gandhi
- javery 17y agoThis is on the wall above the front desk in the lobby of Red Hat headquarters. Always love reading it every time I go in there.