Pardon the Law&Order title, but there are a few comments I wanted to mention. First is regarding Match.com’s Invisible Millions. Ross Felix responded to my blog post about Match which was reposted to Twitter.
Match.com 15 mil users / 1.32 million premium members = 91% of the people can’t reply to your email without upgrading their membership.
Fernando on Chemistry.com around the world. I don’t understand it but love his phrase, “Match is a cannon shooting flowers.”
Speaking of Match, Online Personals Watch says 8M Look For Love On China Site.
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I must be slow because I have no idea what this post was trying to say. Is it that Match.com is trying to encourage their membership to upgrade? And, if so, what is wrong with that? I have used it before – it’s a decent site. I talked to what I believe to be real online daters and actually met one or two for dates. Nothing happened, but in that regard I would say my experience with Match was pretty favorable. YES, I did spring for a 1 month membership. People who don’t are just being cheap IMO.
15 million profiles and only 1.32 million people can email you. Thats the issue.
Hi Dave:
Executive Team only like a cannon shooting flowers means they announce “Great Innovations”, “pretty radical redesign” and they are only new stupidities, like bells, whistles, horns, drums or other diarrhea of superfluous marketing devices instead of real innovations: the ones which will revolutionize the Online Dating Industry; the ones which will allow to cross the barrier of more than 2,000,000 paying subscribers for IAC’s Personals (Match, Chemistry, Udate, and other sites powered by match, like NetClubEncuentro), and sustain more than 2,000,000 paying subscribers
In a previous post “October 6, 2008 A Conversation with Match.com GM Mandy Ginsberg ……. Mandy was the GM of Chemistry.com previously ………… We’re going to see more innovation from Match in 2009 than we’ve seen in the past few years”
It seems the only “big innovation for 2009″ was to:
* simply translate the personality test used in Chemistry into several languages (as if it were only an ipsative instrument for entertainment purposes. Who independently validated/certified that test???).
* for China, Japan, Korea and other asiatic countries, changed 3 pictures to give them an asiatic-look (workplace, couple kissing in public and house styles)
* to rename Chemistry as Daily5, Cupido Diario, Alchimie, Chemie, Amor, Afinesati, Com-Bacio, match_insights_personality_test (for UK) depending of the country they target.
i.e. “Daily5″, outside the United States, is Chemistry rebranded and merged with Match local sites.
The “Daily5″ is the greatest mistake Match had ever made. It is the confirmation of what I have been saying for years: a compatibility matching method with a whole precision less than anyone could achieve by searching on one’s own!
Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
I’m really surprised that it’s such a high rate, but this why I tell my readers not to take it personally when someone doesn’t respond to their messages on Match.com.
Short version:
Many sites (Match.com, for one) have standard (non-paying) and premium (paying) members. Typically those sites don’t allow the standard members to send or receive emails, and not only that, they won’t even tell them who emailed them. Now, I understand the idea is to convert non-paying members, but it’s being done to the detriment of those who do pay. Match.com’s 1.34 million premium members can send emails to their heart’s content, but just consider that the odds are far better that they’ll end up writing to one of the 13+ million that won’t know that YOU emailed them. For the non-paying members, the owners of the sites hope that you’ll be so excited that you got an email you’ll just fork over the cash to read the email.
David Evans reported earlier this month, that some sites aren’t waiting for you to convert, they’re allegedly taking matters into their own hands. onlinedatingpost.com/archives/2008/12/singlesnet-lawsuit
Right now on Match.com’s homepage it says 20,000 people join per day, a little while back it was 80k per day. They also keep saying 500,000 people find relationships a year.
So worldwide they have 15 million members who signed up at some point (whatever active means), 1.5 – 2 million of which pay per year. So lets say 500k users *2 = 1 million people get into a relationship on match.com every year, 50% Success is amazing considering only 1 in 10 people can actually read and respond to your emails.
That’s a large drop in daily signups.
Active I think is 6 months? I’m not sure. Over the years different people at Match have said 3,6 and 9 months = active.
I think 500k people in relationships might mean just that, not a million.
You’re right about the success rate.
I’ve been a paying member since 2002 so I’m not currently familiar with how many people would be emailing me and Match showing me the upgrade screen. I should go make a new account.
Hmmm… This seems a bit out of whack.
The success rate seems pretty good despite the low percentage of people who can contact you. Match is still considered to be the cream of the crop right? Or has another taken over?
Markus,
I saw the 20,000 registered members statement too. About a month or so ago IAC’s fact page about Match.com said 60,000 new people registered a day. Now it says 71,000 register a day. Maybe the 20,000 mentioned refers to just North American visitors?
Just saw a Match.com add on TV .. it said 20,000 new members per month. The real question — how many of those are profiles where the user creates the profile, never pays for the membership and never logs in again.
Ross Felix
Founder, Dating Revolution
Another interesting datapoint to consider- how many people become inactive members each day?
Another interesting datapoint- how many members become inactive each month?
I’m confused. I just reviewed Match.com’s home page and it says two interesting things.
1) “…and today serves more than 15 million singles in 37 countries.” Does that mean that they have 15 million current users? From Match’s press releases, they only have 1.34 million paying users. So for the 13+ million remaining users, perhaps a good chunk of them are the non-paying users that just never canceled their accounts?
2)”Every day, more than 60,000 new singles join our growing community.” Wow, that is certainly impressive. But here’s where it gets confusing. On 2/12/2007, Match said that they had over 15 million users, and as of 12/21/2008 still advertise 15 million users on their site. At 60,000 new users per day, 365 days in a year, that translates to 21.9 million new users in the past 365 days, but yet no increase in their “total member base.”
3) Why would their TV ads say 20k per day, but their website says 60k per day?
Any ideas or clarification on what I’m missing?
Ross, you’re not taking churn into account. Dating sites are like big revolving doors. For each new member, how many leave? I think we can agree that Match lacks consistency in it’s marketing.
I agree that there must be churn, of course there is. Just saying that the odds are low that they start and end the year at the same point they started, with 21 million going through the doors over the course of the year.
Are there any studies out there detailing what the churn rates are like on dating sites?
I’d be very interested in hearing.
Churn rates are all over the place. I’ve heard lots of numbers, covered by NDA’s unfortunately. Ask Markus at PlentyofFish he’ll probably tell you.
Just look at the AFF prospectus.. Its 19% for them… I’d say most sites are reporting their 2 year signups as active members.
Thanks Markus. I’ve been sick as a dog the last week or so, will dig into the prospectus and pull together some links and analysis.
Now its not that “15 million profiles and only 1.32 million people can email you” its “15 million profiles and only 1.32 million people can read your emails and email you”. My understanding is that you used to be able to see the emails as a non-premium user but just couldn’t respond to them. Seems that has changed… now you can’t even see what people are writing you… you can just see you are getting emails. I’d be very interested to know the churn rate for Match.com. I just did a small sample using 87 profiles and found a monthly churn rate of right at 15%. Obviously, the sample is too small but its the closest thing to real data I’ve seen on this for Match.com. Although I’d love to know the exact monthly churn rate, what interests me more is how we’ve been able to get over a 35% response rate for 2 of our clients if only 8.8% (1.32 / 15) are supposed to be able to see the messages, much less respond to them. I know there are some things we do such as pay close attention to how long its been since they last logged in but I have a hard time believe they account for this difference (b/w 8.8% and 35%). Anyway, this is really interesting stuff. I’d love to see more analysis in this area for Match.com as well some of the other major sites.
Scott,
Things may have changed, but this is my understanding. On several dual tiered (paid / unpaid) sites it works as follows: non paying members can’t read emails sent to them but what’s even worse, is that they don’t know who sent them. Perhaps people would be more likely to pony up the cash if they knew prince charming had just written to them. Sites like these don’t want you to know who wrote to you — since often, it’s not from someone you’d want to hear from. They’d rather you just take a chance after receiving, say 5-10 emails, that one of them has to be good, and you’ll convert to a paid member.
By way, Match.com is now under 1.2 million paying members as per IACI’s 2Q 10Q (Match is owned by them).
I think one other point that you might have missed in your post – is that just because they’re not a paying member, doesn’t mean that they didn’t just log on yesterday. So, just looking at the last log in date isn’t necessarily a good way to check to see if they’re a paying member or not.
Frankly, “It’s ok to look” (one of Match’s taglines) while intended (I’m guessing) to make people feel there’s no stigma with online dating, alternatively reminds people that over 13 million of Match.com’s members can ONLY look and do nothing else.
Dating is tough enough in the best of circumstance. Having a >90% failure rate that you can do nothing to control is horrible. But don’t think Match is the only one with this problem. I’m sure Yahoo, Spark Networks, Chemistry and eHarmony are right there with them.
Thanks Ross. Some good points there!
Only one thing I wanted to clarify: You are right when you say “just because they’re not a paying member, doesn’t mean that they didn’t just log on yesterday”… I just mentioned that because we think, for example, that a high percentage of those people whose “Last Login Within” is “Over 3 Weeks” haven’t logged in because they never upgraded to a premium membership. You’d think if you were paying $40 per month for a premium membership you’d log in at least once every 3 weeks. There is no way to tell who is a paid and unpaid member but contacting people with the most recent activity should increase your odds of contacting people who can actually reply.
Anyway, in addition to the topics I raised made in my last post… I’d be interested to know what kind of response rates others have been able to achieve on Match.com and other sites.
Comments more than welcome :)
Scott,
I agree, regardless of what site I was on in the past, I never bothered emailing people who hadn’t logged on within the last week. True, she might be on vacation in Monaco, but it could also be that she had just started a new relationship and wanted to see where it was going to go without meeting new people.
By the way Scott, I’d love to have a more in depth discussion on this topic off line… feel free to find me on Twitter – @datingrev
Or Dave, if you’re reading this, feel free to provide Scott my email address.
Ross, Just followed you on Twitter (@OutsourceDating). Send me a direct msg with your contact info and we’ll chat sometime soon.
Would like to know if there is a site that you can post about profiles on Match? People are not who they are and it would be great to warn future victims from getting sucked in
Start with dontdatehimgirl.com and dateraters.com. Unfortunately the effectiveness of these services is not airtight, but it’s a start.
Did anyone get anywhere on elucidating Match’s churn %age?