THE BIG MONEY - June 27 - Most subscription-based sites have been
battling a downward trend for a while. And since last year, Match.com's
traffic has been flat at best. As Techcrunch notes, Match.com does most
of its growing these days by buying competing Web sites, rather than
reinventing the world's oldest dance. Match.com is also becoming
Yahoo's official personals service. In the same vein, eHarmony found
itself last summer trying to explain how a 20% increase in
registrations led to a 33% drop in traffic. The numbers suggest that
while singles in search of a match may post a profile, they're not
finding who they're looking for. The true threat is "noneconomic"
competition that steals market share and has no interest in selling
out. Markus Frind created Plenty of Fish as a coding exercise in 2003.
Primarily supported by advertising, Frind this year introduced a paid
membership level for users who are "serious," but the site still has
free access. But as in any good arms race, even Frind is now promising
that his site can predict whom its users will end up marrying, so he is
taking the fight to paid sites' intellectual turf. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
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