Online Dating Insider Links December 2, 2008

by David Evans on December 3, 2008 in Social Networking

Match serves one billion winks. Winks are the most useless online dating tool for serious singles, why even offer them?

Plentyoffish says Listening to users is bad.

Social dating startup Ignighter gets new offices.

3D Explorer launches avatar creation tools. No plug-in, no download. Supports Windows, Mac and Linux, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Match just billed me $101.94 to continue service for a year. Someday, somehow, dating sites will clean up their act regarding re-billing. Being alerted that a company is about to bill your credit or debit card should be a law. Many dating sites rely on a considerable number of people forgetting to cancel their subscriptions, which is legal, but that doesn’t make it right. Subscription-based dating sites will do whatever they can to keep the money flowing. I’ve given up on them actually gaining a conscience when it comes to filling the coffers, it’s not going to happen any time soon.

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1 SaÃ¯d Amin December 4, 2008 at 1:51 am: “Match serves one billion winks. Winks are the most useless online dating tool for serious singles, why even offer them?”

- not everyone is an outgoing and/or seasoned online dater like you Dave. some people feel their way into it, some jump right in. also, “winks” work as an ice breaker that leads to an opportunity for a site to send you a notification email (ie. brings people back to the site). i sometimes wish that you operated a dating site to get a proper perspective for why sites do what they do, and what works..

“Being alerted that a company is about to bill your credit or debit card should be a law.”

- sure, why not. while at it, let’s have the same expectations from our cable company, isp, cell phone provider, local gym, etc.. the renewals do not bother me a whole lot, so long as the terms are clear up front; what does hit a nerve is the inability to conveniently cancel a membership. AOL was the infamous king of making people jump through hoops to cancel their dial up service. i suppose that desperate times call for desperate measures. personally, i have been trying to cancel my gym membership for the last 3 months and after 3 trips to the gym to fill out paper work and speak with management, i am still getting billed and unable to cancel my membership over the phone *errr* some dating sites make it easier than others…while on this topic, check out comments from frustrated Meetic members sounding off – http://www.dating-service.com/blog/37/meetic-uk-review/ – ouch!

don’t miss the forest for the trees.

life,
-s

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2 Ross Felix December 4, 2008 at 11:00 am: SaÃ¯d,

I understand your comment about the winks. But there’s a second reason that the winks are there, not just to help shy people. Match.com only allows premium (read: paying) members to send emails. Winks allow the non-paying members a (albeit) useless way of contacting the paying members, or allowing a paying member to send a contact to the non-paying member that they’ll actually receive. The hope, of course, is to convert the non-paying member to a paying member.

That said, Match.com advertises that they have 15 million members, but their press releases indicate that only 1.32 million actually pay for the service. With a ratio like that, obviously their attempts at conversion aren’t succeeding that well.

Regards,
Ross

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3 David Evans December 4, 2008 at 2:10 pm: Point taken, my perspective is that I talk to a lot of online daters, and women in general despise winks. If you’re not capable of sending a woman an email, what does that say about you?

Agree about not being able to cancel memberships, I should have used that as the argument.

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