I received an email from Match pitching their matchMobile offering.
With matchMobile, you don’t need to wait by the computer – wink, flirt, get free text alerts – all on the go.
I see the word “free” and I click through to the website. After I log in, I am greeted with this:
Send and receive emails, search for matches and more – just $4.99 per month.
What happened to free? Match is doing a classic bait and switch, disappointing. Text alerts are free, why confuse people? This kind of marketing behavior has no place at Match, shame on them for pulling this stunt.
Mobile is just another conduit into Match.com. The painstaking and expensive process of fitting a dating site into a phone screen is much easier and cheaper now. As mobile-based browsing continues to improve, the market for people who will pay another 25% of their monthly dating costs to get matches on their phone through a paid service will diminish. With my iPhone, there is zero reason for me to pay, just pop open a browser and surf normally. Admittedly, text and image zoom makes the experience a whole lot nicer than most other phones.
Match should dump the Facebook application and instead focus efforts on creating an iPhone app and maybe one for the upcoming T-Mobile application platform. And it should be free.
I was just reading the Online Personals Watch interview with French Match.com General Manager Arnaud Jonglez.
Is Match mobile offered in France? Yes we do have this service but we don’t push it very aggressively. We have it as an additional service that we offer to our users at no extra cost. Match mobile is not our key focus in France because we still growing fast on the web.
I wonder if Match will start charging in France when they have enough members.
Match is rolling out Chemistry.com in France:
in January we decided to launch a French version of Chemistry that is integrated into the Match main service. So far the result has been amazing. Just during the first few months 160,000 people took the 30 minutes test, which shows just how interested people are in tools that help find their soulmate. For us this is also a proof that our vision of the French market and our positioning are right, so we have decided to invest even more in these features and released a V2 of this service just a few days ago. This service that we launched 8 months ago under the name Match Alchimie will help us accelerate our growth on the French market and stay ahead of the competition who is now trying to develop Chemistry-like products.
That’s a much higher adoption rate than the Chemistry.com launch here in the US.
