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Joel Cohen, Chief Operating Officer at Match:
Subscribers stay for only about five months on average. 40 percent of those who leave eventually return. We’ve tried a number of things to keep them around longer,” he said. “But you know what? We don’t really want them to stick around longer. We want them to find partners.
Match, or any service for that matter, wants their service to be just good enough to keep you around for a few months so they can recoup their customer acquisition costs. Any longer than 3 months and the percentage of revenue from each month’s subscription fee increases.
As I’ve said here before, Match doesn’t promote their “friendship network” on the site. At all. I’ve never received an email about the service, have you? There has been a “See my friends” link on my profile for months, but it’s not even a live link. I can see my friendship profile in the admin screen, but no one can get to it.
Continuing my tireless research into dating site usability, I hid my dating profile at Match just now to see what would happen. My friendship profile is hidden as well, but I still show up in the search results. How broken is that?
