OKCUPID BLOG - Apr 7 - eHarmony claims over 20M members on their homepage, and their CEO, Greg Waldorf, reiterates that number regularly in interviews. This sounds awesome until you realize that most of these people can’t reply, because only paying customers are allowed to message. eHarmony closely guard their number of paid subscribers. We are able to deduce their base from known information. eHamorny yearly revenue was $250M in 2009, the minimum average monthly fee is $29.18 so they have at most 719,652 subscribers. That means only 1/30th of the "20 million users" they advertise is someone you can actually talk to. Match.com's numbers are just as grim. It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com.
The full article was originally published at OkCupid Blog, but is no longer available.
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Be careful!
That article only proves that paid online dating sites have low effectiveness / efficiency of their proprietary predictive matching methods for LONG TERM mating. Nothing more.
That article does not prove that free sites are BETTER than paid sites.
Moreover free sites are good for fun dating (instant gratifications, flirting, short term mating)and free sites exist to leverage paid sites.
The Worldwide 2009 annual revenue for eHarmony was estimated in USD 250 millions
[and checking traffic from its 4 different sites, I estimate 20% from Canada, 50% from U.S.A., 25% from U.K. and 5% from Australia]
If you consider 10% of that revenue by ads, it is only USD 225 millions by subscriptions
At a USD 40 (Monthly Average Revenue per Subscriber: MARS)
USD 225 millions / USD 480 (Annual Average Revenue per Subscriber) == 468,750 paid Subscribers
Perhaps eHarmony has only
93,750 paid members from Canada
234,376 paid members from U.S.A.
117,187 paid members from U.K.
23,437 paid members from Australia
The 2010 annual revenue for PlentyOfFish ( the biggest free online dating site) is expected to be USD30 millions, more or less the same amount eHarmony could earn by ……… ads.
Posted by: Account Deleted | Apr 20, 2010 at 05:01 PM
eharmony has less than 20,000 paid members in the UK
Posted by: freeman | Apr 21, 2010 at 01:43 AM
Sombody told me about 17,000 paid member in UK but i don't now if it tru or not.
Posted by: online dating ole | Apr 21, 2010 at 08:30 PM
Paying seperates the cream from the crud. Plenty of Fish, True and OK Cupid are leaders in the low rent dating business - the also rans in the grand scheme of things.
A woman is far more interested in a site with men paying, committed to the process, then to a bunch of freeloaders searching all night, cut and pasting email - trolling for sex. thats why you've got 65% men on POF and OK, and 55% women on eH.
Hard to compare the two businesses. It's like comparing a chic boutique to a whore house.
Posted by: Jeff | Apr 26, 2010 at 08:48 PM
I think you can go either way when it comes to online dating. Some are free some you have to pay for. Well I look at it like this-its a numbers game. The more people you interact with, the more chances you hav to find love or get a date. If your in the USA, and you go and there is 235k people that are online and paying to be there, then depending how bad you want it. You will go to a paid site and interact wit more people. Once you get that down and understand how it work
Posted by: Hugh | May 04, 2010 at 05:47 PM
I just posted a rather lengthy response on my company's blog. I'd love to hear what you all think: http://virtualdatingassistants.com/Blog/2010/05/12/why-you-should-always-pay-for-online-dating/
Posted by: Scott Valdez, Virtual Dating Assistants | May 13, 2010 at 12:26 PM