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OK Cupid's OK Trends blog had an article titled "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating", but they removed it after they were acquired by match.com, a paid

OK Cupid's OK Trends blog had an article titled "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating", but they removed it after they were acquired by match.com, a paid dating site. You can Google around and find a few copies of the article.

danso 14y ago
Yes I remember that, and that's a good example... E-dating has been going on for what seems like forever in the Internet age, but its near-ubiquity is still a relatively new phenomenon. In the short-term and medium-term, it's probably good for dating services to have relationships break up in a timely manner. But successful couples (5+ years and more) are valuable too, because they pass along by word of mouth how happy they are because of their experience with [whateverservice]...and are likely to disparage it (justifiably or not) when the relationship goes sour. For a dating service to have the cynical goal of creating high turnover seems to me to be a race to the bottom that may end up having negative returns in the long run. Just as Apple clearly can make more money this decade from a customer who has to buy a new computer to replace their 2-year-old unupgradeable one -- compared to a customer whose Mac lasts them through high school and college -- I would say that Apple's current cachet (speaking as a long-time PC user) was highly dependent on the latter situation.
mesozoic 14y ago
The irony is that their profit model is based on advertising which has the same incentive to not get you into a long term relationship.
- snprbob86 14y ago
  OK Cupid has (had?) both ads and an ad-free A-list subscription package. However, I doubt either of those were their primary sources of income. OKC has an extremely robust survey platform baked into their question and answer system. I suspect that the demographic and market analysis data is extremely valuable and that selling it to advertisers, consumer packaged goods companies, etc. would be very lucrative.

danso 14y ago

Yes I remember that, and that's a good example... E-dating has been going on for what seems like forever in the Internet age, but its near-ubiquity is still a relatively new phenomenon. In the short-term and medium-term, it's probably good for dating services to have relationships break up in a timely manner. But successful couples (5+ years and more) are valuable too, because they pass along by word of mouth how happy they are because of their experience with [whateverservice]...and are likely to disparage it (justifiably or not) when the relationship goes sour. For a dating service to have the cynical goal of creating high turnover seems to me to be a race to the bottom that may end up having negative returns in the long run. Just as Apple clearly can make more money this decade from a customer who has to buy a new computer to replace their 2-year-old unupgradeable one -- compared to a customer whose Mac lasts them through high school and college -- I would say that Apple's current cachet (speaking as a long-time PC user) was highly dependent on the latter situation.

mesozoic 14y ago

The irony is that their profit model is based on advertising which has the same incentive to not get you into a long term relationship.

snprbob86 14y ago
OK Cupid has (had?) both ads and an ad-free A-list subscription package. However, I doubt either of those were their primary sources of income. OKC has an extremely robust survey platform baked into their question and answer system. I suspect that the demographic and market analysis data is extremely valuable and that selling it to advertisers, consumer packaged goods companies, etc. would be very lucrative.