What is eHarmony’s secret?

Before you can join eHarmony, you have to take a personality test which takes up an hour of your time. This is generally considered a bad thing in the internet world. You want to make signing up as easy and painless as possible. The longer the sign-up process, the more potential customers drop out.

After you finish the test, eHarmony may tell you that you’re personality isn’t suitable for their service. Turning away willing customers seems like a really stupid business model.

And then eHarmony charges more money than any other dating site. I think it’s still $50 per month.

There’s the theory that after putting so much effort into joining, people are more likely to pay the high fee. Car dealers like to do this to you—make you waste as much time as possible at their dealership. However, what works for a bricks and mortars operation doesn’t necessarily translate well online. It’s a lot easier to just click the little “x” at the top right of the web browser than it is to walk out on a flesh and blood salesman.

Match.com, the original superstar of online dating, has been so jealous of the newcomer that the company finally introduced an eHarmony clone site, called Chemistry.com (notice how Match is able to afford the best domain names).

I think I know the real reason why eHarmony is successful, and it’s not the personality tests. But hey, maybe I’m wrong that.

Comments

[Peter]

"I think I know the real reason why eHarmony is successful"

Assuming of course that eHarmony actually *is* successful. It's a privately held company and does not release financial results. As far as its claims of member dating success are concerned, unless these claims are subject to independent audit (which I suspect they aren't), we have no way of knowing if they're true.

Chenistry.com

I wonder how many hits they get from highschoolers looking for help with their homework.

[anonymous_coward]

That's okay, they only attract the ones who can speel rite =P

[Likes the Rice]

"Chenistry"

A great name for an asian dating site...

[Kirk]

Pete wrote:

"As far as its claims of member dating success are concerned, unless these claims are subject to independent audit (which I suspect they aren't), we have no way of knowing if they're true."

From the Atlantic story linked in the last thread, it looks like only one out of every 130 people who take their questionnaire get married. (Forty-six marriages a day, 12 thousand "new" people daily taking the questionnaire.)

It may be successful as a business, though. Maybe that's what H.S. is getting at.

[anon coward]

"only one out of every 130 people who take their questionnaire get married"

That doesn't sound much different from the odds of marriages within social groups and organizations in real life. How many people do you know from your high school class or previous/current jobs married each other?

[janes'_kid]

Several months ago someone who writes for (I've forgotten, but I am guessing Slate as that is the site I visit most where writers talk about their unstructured research.), anyhow, this person filled out the I eHarmony questionnaire as several different persons and reported that only Christians or persons deemed to be convertible to Christianity were accepted.

[Lugen]

"...this person filled out the I eHarmony questionnaire as several different persons and reported that only Christians or persons deemed to be convertible to Christianity were accepted."

I've heard that too, but I'm guessing you could just lie(not that anyone would do that on an internet dating site, mind you). You could also just cruise your local churches if you want to meet a Christian chick (or synagogue if you're looking for some jewish tail). Joel Osteen has done pretty well for himself:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080808/ap_on_re_us/osteen_s_wife_lawsuit

Be sure and hit the slideshow. I doubt he used the internet though.

[Peter]

As for the 1-in-130 get married figure, I'm presuming that it refers only to people who got married through matches on eHarmony. No doubt many others got married to people they met elsewhere.

[Turambar]

I think one advantage eHarmony has is that its sleeze factor is pretty low.

The people in the ads arent models although they wear the Dr. Phil guest uniform. They arent the "Hawt Singles in your Area" type. And they talk about how they were looking for love and marriage.

I think this helps hesitant people to give it a whirl because they dont get the computerized meat market from it. The fact that guys cant just attack them helps too.

If you are thinking the Sams Club membership/Amazon Prime sunk cost is what is hooking them, I think that is wrong.

[Spungen]

I think it's something about appealing to the religious.

I had a professional, middle-aged divorced man tell me just today he got rejected. He's not sure why, but noted he picked the "no religious preference" answer.

[Joshua Holmes]

eHarmony is successful because its customers believe that the screening process cuts out the weirdos and pervs.

[APH]

PlentyOfFish is a free dating site and it's tremendously successful - it's basically a one-man programming job and it racks up a ton of money from advertising. Because it's free, there's more proles and teens than other sites, but using filters when searching can weed out a lot of the undesirables from the results list.

[SFG]

Funny. I got rejected too. I always thought it was my negative personality, but maybe it was my religion...?

I'll try it again as a Christer and see what I get.

[Jim Beam]

How does one search for older women (35-55) who are looking for a young guy between the ages of 18-25 on those sites?

I still have yet to bag a much much older woman, and I better before it's too late.

Any advice for a guy who lusts for non-ugly, non-trashy, non-psychotic, women almost twice his age? Everybody I meet that age is either married or ugly/weird/psycho/etc...

[Thursday]

A few thoughts on eharmony's success:

1. It is marketed to the marriage minded not "daters." This weeds out a lot of low quality people of both sexes.
2. The complicated starting process weeds out the stupid and impulsive.
3. The somewhat higher cost weeds out those of lower economic status.
4. Though it isn't an exclusively Christian site, it's popularity within the evangelical Christian community wards off the pervs and players.

Summary: People use eharmony because of the higher quality of people they meet there.

[Jason]

"I wonder how many hits they get from highschoolers looking for help with their homework."

High-schoolers don't get homework anymore. At least not in the US...

[Turambar]

"Any advice for a guy who lusts for non-ugly, non-trashy, non-psychotic, women almost twice his age? Everybody I meet that age is either married or ugly/weird/psycho/etc..."

Well you missed prime time because you you would have found easy pickings at any bar adjacent to a showing of Sex in the City.

You do have to factor in the fact that anyone who has been through a divorce is going to be a little nuts. That understood, the bar at the Cheesecake Factory should have what you are looking for.

[anonymous_coward]

I am amused by the fact that HS has a banner ad for Muslim dating, considering his views on the matter.

[Peter]

"I am amused by the fact that HS has a banner ad for Muslim dating, considering his views on the matter."

It might be tied in somehow with his long-running ad for Persian rugs.

--

"That understood, the bar at the Cheesecake Factory should have what you are looking for [older divorced women]."

Upscale food stores such as Whole Foods are also said to be fertile (heh) grounds for finding older women.

[beowulf]

Put the whip down, the pony's dead.

Plentyoffish's no fee/ad supported/run out of Vancouver apartment business model is the category killer.

[Tanked]

Jim Beam gets it. MILFs/older babes are a vast untapped resouce ready to be harvested. Verily, Brothers, MILFs and older babes are the answer!

[Jim Beam]

I wonder if the older women at the Cheesecake Factory bar or Whole Foods have the mutual desires? That being, trying to bag a guy nearly half their age. Or being drunk, very drunk. Sounds like a plan.

Sex and the City fans? I also meant to add "non-annoying women" to the undesirable list, who would make me wanna strangle them after a 2 minute conversation.

I'm picky, I know...

[Kirk]

Jim Beam wrote:

"Any advice for a guy who lusts for non-ugly, non-trashy, non-psychotic, women almost twice his age?"

Spungeon's around here somewhere.

(ducks and runs away)

[Hang Your Head!]

Kirk,
I'd like to take this time to remind you that you served in the military and should therefore be ashamed.

[25 to Life]

I wonder if this guy used eHarmony:

http://cjonline.com/stories/082008/loc_320718683.shtml

I'd love to see his profile!

[Teddy Atlas]

I tried eHarmony. Within one week, I was dating an 18 year-old girl who looked just like Elisha Cuthbert and was a total nymphomaniac.

[Peter]

@ 25 to life:

From the linked article:

"At the conclusion of the hearing, Hall was bound over for trial on felony charges of first-degree murder and aggravated indecent liberties with a child 14 to 16 years old and certified for trial on a misdemeanor count of desecration of a corpse."

Really, why bother with the descration of a corpse charge?

[Half Sigma]

"I tried eHarmony. Within one week, I was dating an 18 year-old girl who looked just like Elisha Cuthbert and was a total nymphomaniac."

Ha ha very funny. Btw, I adore Elisha Cuthbert.

[25 to Life]

"Really, why bother with the descration of a corpse charge?"

Why not? Maybe they can actually get the animal to do some time before he gets to go on furlough a la Willy Horton. But since it is Kansas and not MA, hopefully he'll get the rope.

[Saladman]

I waded through eHarmony's test and got dropped. I also know that on the Meyers/Briggs scale I have a personality type that only about 1% of the population has. So I assumed that if nothing else, the eHarmony test screens out the difficult cases to focus on easy matches.

I hadn't considered it being only a marketing technique, but that could be part of the rationale.

[cm]

I know one guy (not yet the gal) who found each other on eharmony, and after now a few months, marriage is being planned.

Given the history of the whole thing on which I won't expand in detail, my take on it is that the role all these dating sites are filling (aside from people looking purely for sexual encounters who are likely deterred by the tests and fees) is that of the traditional matchmaker, i.e. creating a partner-finding platform for people who are past the phase of life where daily life is rife with opportunity for hooking up with friends and potential partners.

In other words, exiting school/college and entering the (professional?) labor force seems to drastically reduce opportunity for hooking up. (Not necessarily in every individual case, but apparently in the aggregate.)

Before the Internet, there were matchmaking agencies, dancing events, etc. to facilitate the same. The Internet is just another medium.

[Peter]

"my take on it is that the role all these dating sites are filling ... is that of the traditional matchmaker, i.e. creating a partner-finding platform for people who are past the phase of life where daily life is rife with opportunity for hooking up with friends and potential partners"

Agreed. My reasoned guess is that eHarmony's age distribution is older than one might expect. Not that there's any way of finding out, as the company probably considers it proprietary information.

[capella]

The reason EHarmony is successful is that a substantial fraction people who are attracted to the advertising and willing to put up with the long questionnaire, the high fees, and the draconian matching scheme (you can't filter people directly by age, education religion, or other things that are supposedly more superficial than a computer's assessment of your "personality dimensions") are desperate to get married.

On a site like match.com, you have people who want badly to get married - but also people who are looking for a less urgent relationship, or just to meet people and have fun and/or sex, and people who are there very casually or at the urging of friends. So it's just like the real world, which is the thing all these people are trying to avoid dating in.