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Kathryn's Blog: News About Dating Sites and Types
I’ve not heard good things about “Great Expectations.” Sounds as if the Attorney General of Arizona hasn’t either. See below.
Pricey dating service accused of deception
Jun. 18, 2008 06:33 PM
The Arizona Republic
Attorney General Terry Goddard on Wednesday accused Great Expectations, a Scottsdale-based matchmaking service, of coercive sales tactics and deceptive practices to sell expensive dating services.
The company, which says it has 30 years of experience in helping people find true love, said the case has no merit and looks forward to going to trial. It declined to respond to specific allegations.
The suit was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court against Sun West Video, Inc., which does business as
Great Expectations for Singles. The suit is seeking refunds for consumers and financial penalties against the company.
The Attorney General’s office alleged that Great Expectations:
• Misrepresented to consumers the overall number of participating members and members in certain age groups.
• Told consumers that two to three marriages occurred among members every month when it had no credible basis for such statements.
• Misrepresented to consumers that it had conducted a criminal background check on all of its members.
• Used high-pressure sales tactics that included sales representatives urging consumers to contact their credit card companies to get an increased credit limit to pay for a membership.
• Showed potential new members written profiles and photographs of people they said were Great
Expectations members when many were not available for dating.
Back in January 2006, I wrote a blog post that said eHarmony claimed 90 singles a day were marrying because of eHarmony. This article below says the numbers are now 236 people marrying a day who met on eHarmony. I’m not a big fan of eHarmony, but you can’t argue with success. What are the stats for Match.com and Yahoo! Personals?
eHarmony says its goal is not just to find users dates—It wants them to get married. In fact, the company claims that 236 people a day in the U.S. are married as a result of meeting through their site.
Part of a comment on OnlinePersonalsWatch by Evan Chase:
...while some men find eHarmony a pain in the butt due to all its hoops in guided communication, I actually like it and find it a must have for men dating online.
It’s actually more efficient due to the fact that you don’t have to be creative about your answers until long in to the communication process. How many different ways can you answer, “Your Idea of adventure is?”
I’ve thought for a long time that it would be the money that gay people have to spend that would be the key to unlock the proverbial closet. Gay folks, particularly gay male couples, have a lot of money to get rid of—just think about it: Usually two wage earners, both men, who tend to get paid more than women, and most often, no financial responsibility for children. Gay male couples can be economic powerhouses, and just look at ads in the New York Times to see how the tonier businesses are going after their bank accounts.
This article below spotlights businesses that are leaving gay money on the table, eHarmony being number one. eHarmony may be getting enough straight dollars to pooh pooh potential gay clients, but in this economic downturn, no markets can be ignored.
What I don’t like about this article is the use of the word “cater.” The word implies “giving special treatment to” and that is just what the political right tries to portray gays as trying to get: Special treatment. It is not special treatment to get the same service—or rights—as anyone else. The dollars may be gay ones, but they are worth exactly the same whether a gay or straight person spends them, and the money is indistinguishable once it is spent.
Homosexuals’ Money Is No Good Here
Some Businesses Don’t Cater to Gays, Lesbians at a Cost to the Bottom Line
By CLOE SHASHA
June 19, 2008 —
Some businesses still don’t cater to homosexuals, ignoring a potentially lucrative source of revenue, says University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee economist Keith A. Bender.
One of the most well-known examples is eHarmony.com, even as California, the country’s most populated state, began performing same-sex marriages this week. The online dating Web site bills itself as a provider of what it calls unique measurements for compatibility that, according to a representative, do not cater to same-sex partnering.
“The research is based on six Ph.D. psychologists and 29 variables for compatibility called the compatibility matching system,” said David D., an eHarmony representative who refused to give his full name.
The Pasadena, Calif.-based site, which began in 2000, says it serves about 20 million members across the United States, Canada and Australia.
On the sexual orientation issue, “It is false to say eHarmony discriminates against gays or lesbians,” the company said in a statement. “Nothing precludes us from providing same-sex matching in the future. It’s just not a service we offer now.”
The Web site’s measurements for matches were developed by Neil Clark Warren, who says that eHarmony is the first online dating service to use relationship science to pair its singles.
Bender, the Wisconsin economist, believes that the Web site eHarmony and other companies could be more profitable if they offered their services to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.
“These companies are cutting out a certain segment of the population that they could be getting revenue from,” Bender said. “Statistics I’ve heard say that around 10 percent of the population expresses some homosexual tendencies. One way to think about these businesses is that companies like eHarmony could increase their revenues by about 10 percent, assuming that the same rates of homosexuals as heterosexuals would take advantage of these kinds of dating sites.”
There are 417,044 pairs of unmarried male partners and 362,823 pairs of unmarried female partners living together in this country, according to a 2006 American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. That does not take into account homosexual singles or married couples.
Robert Lee, the owner and editor of aLoveLinksPlus.com—a dating service directory—said that while some dating Web sites explicitly exclude homosexual singles, others do not make their policies as obvious.
“EHarmony.com is a standout,” Lee said. “But there are also some smaller niche sites that are only for straights, which are not as vigilant in saying you have to be straight to join.”
Some fitness centers, resorts and other services continue to exclude homosexuals as well.
Recent examples include:
In New Mexico, Elaine Huguenin, a professional photographer from Albuquerque, told a lesbian couple in April that she would not photograph them because she only works with straight couples.
In July 2007, Rochester, N.Y., couple Amy and Sarah Monson were refused membership at the Rochester Athletic Club. These two women said that they were in a committed relationship and that they should be allowed to buy a membership.
It took until June 2007 for the University of Virginia to allow same-sex couples to join its gym, according to the Washington Post.
In May 2008, Drs. Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton refused to give infertility treatment to a lesbian couple because of their religious views. One of the patients wanted to be artificially inseminated, and the doctors’ refusal led to a case that reached the Supreme Court.
Clinical Coordinator Christopher Johnson of the Gay Men of African Descent advocacy group says these practices are offensive and discriminatory.
“In terms of a social decision, it keeps people who are of the lesbian-gay-transsexual-bisexual community outside of society where they can’t connect to one another through those institutions or those businesses,” he said.
“That is discrimination. Although society has made some progress, there is still a lot of work to do to make people know that gay people have rights as well. The decision to have people keep us out of their businesses is unconstitutional.”
But the legal issues are unresolved, said Emma Dickson, a New York attorney.
“There has been discussion about whether sexual orientation is necessarily included under our civil rights laws,” she said. “As we are moving towards recognizing gay rights as civil rights, we could make a parallel between not serving a black person in a diner because of his or her race and not being able to participate in a dating Web site because of one’s sexual orientation.”
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
Here’s a piece for the gay community, though as we know, HIV is an issue for gays and straights. It introduced me to terms I hadn’t heard before—do you know what a pozzer is? Well, read and find out. But the sites listed offer a real service to an important and under served population.
HIV+ Dating Sites Offer an Alternative
by Ambrose Aban
EDGE Contributor
Friday Jun 27, 2008
“Poz-only” dating sites have finally arrived online. Their owners are hoping they help people infected with HIV meet others without the fear and exclusion they might encounter on other gay dating sites. Even more, they hope to foster a sense of belonging within a larger HIV-positive community.
The focus is one of being out and proud as an HIV-positive gay man--and away from the stigma of HIV. The sites also give the men a forum to talk about it. The hope is that, when the secrecy and shame of it is removed, HIV will lose some of its power over their lives.
The sites include BeOneCity, launched recently in Los Angeles, PositiveSingles, PozitiveLiving, PozMatch.com, PositivePersonals--all personals web sites for HIV+ people.
Angelenos Peter Brook and David Purdue created BeOneCity. Brooks says his site fills the void he found online when he seroconverted not so long ago. “We intend to expand our online services to provide a global HIV positive ’sister’ site within a year that will serve the heterosexual positive community,” Brook says.
BeOneCity isn’t your typical dating or meet-up site. For one thing, it offers relevant news. It also aims to be a forum for pozzers. But like the others, it is above all a relationship site catering to those living with the virus.
“We bridge the gap between the myriad non-profit and for-profit HIV organizations, all working against HIV,” Brook says. “We put a lot of effort into supporting other groups and partnering with them. This offers us a real-world focus for us and for our members, and gives us a community experience in the real world--something often neglected from our life with HIV.”
Why Self-Serosort?
The policy among many gay men remains “don’t ask, don’t tell” on dating sites. General gay sites like Manhunt also currently offers serosorting for its members as well. “We know being able to serosort is valuable to many of our HIV-positive members,” Manhunt’s new chief marketing officer told EDGE.
Robert Brandon Sandor founded Poz4Poz, a series of parties for pozzers a decade ago and the new HIV-UB2.Net (http://www.hiv-ub2.net). He has been a strong advocate for serosorting among gay men.
“Years ago, those who tested HIV-positive had few places to turn for support,” he says. “Fortunately, much has changed. We know more about HIV now. No one is going to be infected with HIV if they have sex with partners who are sharing the same serostatus.”
Many organizations and HIV experts have not embraced serosorting. Although serosorting is entirely based on the foundation of trust, it is still a good way to reduce (if not stop) the spread of HIV to negative men, Sandor argues.
The men who have developed these sites say they are driven by a strong social mission. They believe that their sites can be unifying places where they can mobilize together to help stop HIV. Part of the reason for such sites now is the movement away from HIV from an eventual death sentence to a far more manageable condition.
This is true for straight men living with HIV as well as gay men. Donald Johnson, who founded PositiveLiving.com in 1997 in Austin, Texas, shortly after he was diagnosed with HIV, created his site at a time when there was no way to meet other pozzers.
Like other most online dating sites, Johnson’s site lets users post statistics from height to education, as well a paragraph describing what they are looking for in a relationship. The site also includes advertisements from people looking for roommates or potential friends. If two people decide they want to meet, it is up to them to exchange phone numbers and addresses through e-mail. So far, the free Web service averages 100,000 unique visitors per month, many of them international users.
For Johnson, the success of the site is especially sweet because he met his new wife after she posted a personal ad.
A Safe Space
Chad Morrett, who created and runs PositivePersonals out of Seattle, said the Internet provides a safe, secure place to meet others living with a disease that can be difficult to discuss in person. “When I was diagnosed, I didn’t know anyone else who was HIV-positive,’’ Morrett told a Florida newspaper, recently. “It was a little frightening.’’
AIDS advocates say many people prefer to use online dating services because they provide a sense of control. Also, those on other dating sites might be scared off by the disease--or tell others, says Terje Anderson, director of the National Association of People With AIDS.
“If you do tell someone you’re HIV-positive and do it face to face in a small town, you don’t know what that person will do with the information,” adds Anderson. On these sites, they can put their HIV status out there with an ad, but still be anonymous.
PositivesDating, founded by best friends, Brandon Koechlin and Paul Graves, both 24, in Columbus, Ohio, in 2005, offers free and paid memberships. Visitors can log in to the site’s chat rooms and search through thousands of available member profiles. Paid memberships allow users to keep in contact via e-mail and see who’s been viewing their profiles.
The founders told Entrepreneur, that during the first four months, PositivesDating operated as a free site to build membership. They also sent out informational postcards to support groups all over the country, such as AIDS Project Los Angeles. PositivesDating has close to 2,500 paid members. Monthly memberships start around $14 a month.
As on dating sites like eHarmony, users can take a personality profile survey, after which they receive an analysis of their personality type and what kind of partner would best suit them. They also receive a list of possible member matches based on their characteristics and personality.
These sites tell you that testing positive is not the end of your life or the end of your chances at love. They certainly tell you that it is not the end of your great sex life. The sites are saying that testing positive is, while a tough thing to hear and a tough challenge to overcome, also offers a new beginning.
In fact, the sites’ growing popularity could lead to a battle against the non-serosorting sites like Manhunt and Adam4Adam.
The sites can make the claim to be fighting AIDS in other ways BeOneCity donates 20 percent of proceeds to charities, the American Foundation for AIDS Research and Keep a Child Alive.
Brooks considers it his mission to help educate people to the fact that HIV is not a death sentence. He became HIV positive fairly recently. Although he was gay, he was fairly naïve about the disease. He thought of HIV as a disease that would never happen to him.
“I was simply too smart and too careful to get it,” he says. “I realized my criteria for understanding HIV and indeed understanding myself, was quite lacking. Very quickly I realized that I was ’blessed’ to have contracted HIV in a new era when it is no longer aligned with death and decay; rather it is now a chronic and fairly manageable disease and thankfully, I can expect to live a long life.”
BeOneCity’s articles and links are selected to help people cope with HIV. “You Are Not Alone”, for example, was recently published for the newly diagnosed. Authors Jim Lewis and Michael Slocum, formerly of BodyPositive (http://www.bodypositive.com), discuss the difference between HIV and AIDS.
All the sites also share a common love of sharing and listening.
Finding out that you are infected can be overwhelming. Testing HIV-positive has led some people to quit their jobs, quickly write out their wills, and say goodbye to their friends and family, only to discover that they aren’t sick and will probably live for many years to come.
But one of the truths of joining these sites after you’ve been infected with HIV is that once you know, you can never not know again. Life will always be different. You may be experiencing great feelings of loss about this. You may feel that certain areas of your life are now in the hands of doctors, insurance companies, or symptoms. This can make you feel as though you have less control over your own life and may cause you incredible anxiety. And you’re far from alone: Today, over 1 million Americans are infected with HIV.
“A lot of people afflicted with HIV become social outcasts,” Brook says. Maybe that’s why BeOneCity and other sites have attracted members from as far away as India and Africa. Membership encompasses men and women gay and straight, aged 25 to 70 and from several ethnic backgrounds.
“There is no need for you to handle your loneliness and fear by yourself, and it is probably a mistake even to try to do it alone,” Brook says. “Just hearing how someone else has adjusted to living with the virus can be enough to help you realize that life is still good, that you can still have love and laughter.”
If there is one complaint, it comes from Sandor. Ever the activist, he believes that these sites should discuss serosorting itself. “There are three forms of serosorting,” he says, “and two involve safe sex--but none of the sites stress the importance of serosorting.”
“BeOneCity is a nice site and I understand its usefulness, but I really wish sites like these weren’t necessary,” says Nir Zilberman, the founder of Just One LA (http://www.justonela.com). “As gay men and women, we are all one community. I don’t understand why we need to divide ourselves into smaller segments”
Brook obviously disagrees: “We offer a safe place to unite together. At BeOneCity we can be ourselves, without the judgment or the stigma we often experience from the outside world because of our HIV status.”
Research shows positive guys want to date, hang out and hook-up with other positive guys. But Brook disagrees with Sandor’s straight-down-the-line position on serosorting.
“It takes the disclosure, the worry and any legal issues out of the equation and it provides us with the assurance that there is no chance for us to spread HIV,” Brook says. “We do not suggest that positive guys should not be with negative guys. I have had negative boyfriends myself, and you cannot stop love or lust with your serostatus--nor should you.”
Internet dating can work great if you are able-bodied and moderately attractive, but disabilities tend to push singles to the bottom of the list. One of my clients who is disabled has done very well on the site described below, after several unsuccessful years on the traditional dating sites. I didn’t know that the site was based in Israel. Good news for my client who is also Jewish!
Israeli dating site brings joy to the disabled
By Rachel Neiman June 04, 2008
Dean is from England and suffers from Spina Bifida. Amber from Montana was handicapped following a car accident. Despite these challenges, the two traveled thousands of miles to be together and are engaged to be married this summer.
Amber and Dean found each other from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean through a website called Dating4Disabled - D4D for short - a free online community and dating service founded in Israel especially for people with disabilities. The popular international website ranks first in Google searches for “disabled dating”, third in Yahoo! for “disabled services” and fourth in Google searches for “disabled” overall.
The growing community has become a global gathering place for the disabled with over 28,000 unique visitors each month. Currently D4D has members throughout the US and Canada, South Africa, England, Australia, South America, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, China, Japan, Bulgaria, Russia, Italy. Through forums, blogs, group chat and instant messaging, over 8,600 members share resources, make friends and create valuable social ties.
Although not specifically for Jews or Israelis, the key to D4D’s success lies as much in the age-old tradition of Jewish matchmaking as with the modern Israeli specialty of search engine optimization (SEO). D4D was developed in January 2006 by Interdate, an Israeli IT company that specializes in website building, online community portals and Internet marketing. In addition to corporate websites and portals, Interdate developed, manages and runs Shedate, the largest dating website for women in Israel.
Interdate’s founders, Yuval Katz and Daniel Brunicki, decided to focus on the disabled community out of both entrepreneurial and social concerns. “D4D was born out of our understanding that, although they surf a great deal on the Internet, the disabled population the world over was under-attended,” Brunicki explains to ISRAEL21c.
“On the other hand, we had advanced Internet capabilities. So we decided to do a good deed. We view the site as a community service, and beyond that, there’s also a business opportunity; there are 30 million disabled persons in the US alone. Our business model is ad-based - the site is free and we don’t intend to ever charge payment - but we do intend to attract ads that are relevant to the community: services, exhibitions, etc., with a special emphasis on the US market,” he adds.
The other key to D4D’s success is Merryl Kaplan, manager of Member Services and D4D’s unofficial matchmaker. “I’m pretty good at pulling people in,” says Kaplan, whose personal involvement is unusual in the cold cruel world of online dating.
“I get very close to people. I have a woman from California who’s an amputee. She met someone a month and a half ago on the site. Now she just met him in person and she called me. She had a wonderful time. Another woman wrote to tell me she just went to Sweden to meet her guy. Who knows what will happen, but it’s exciting!”
The Interdate team is also sensitive to the unique needs of the D4D community and the site was constructed specifically for special needs: it is easily accessible, easy to navigate and its simple format was designed for sight impaired reading software such as Zoom Text.
“A lot of disabled people are so overjoyed to find a site where they feel accepted,” Kaplan notes. “I get mail from people who used regular dating sites, and as soon as they made their disability known, they were dumped. The relief and sense of ease they have from finding a community where people understand is immense.”
She also provides dating dos and don’ts, as in D4D’s most recent newsletter: “I’ve been asked to pass on advice that many men are happy to be ‘courted’ by women; so ladies, e-mail that man you’ve noticed but hesitated to contact.”
On a more serious note, Kaplan is also responsible for the site’s Safety Rules section. “This is a vulnerable population and there are a lot of scammers, so much of my time is spent reviewing IP numbers and blocking suspicious ones. We block both automatically and manually. Part of my job is also teaching users to identify potential scammers - we do that through our newsletter, and write about it in our forums, so they won’t get stung.”
Brunicki adds that the site guarantees anonymity unless a member decides to “go public”. Also, as D4D is free of charge, it requires no credit card information, ID or social security numbers, phone numbers or addresses.
Facts on Internet dating from the Canadian press:
From an article in the Calgary Herald Canadians are lucky in love, Saturday, May 24, 2008
The poll also found that 16 per cent of Canadians had found love online, with the younger demographic having more success—more than a quarter of respondents aged 18 to 34 had been successful in seeking a mate via the web. Only seven per cent of those aged 55 and older had started a relationship online, either by way of e-mail or the Internet.
I got a request a few weeks back for comments about AshleyMadison.com and similar sites which are set up to help married folks who want to have extramarital affairs. One would wonder: Do these folks really need help? Well, yes, I think so, but not the kind of help these sites try to give. That said, I do have comments and wrote them back to the article’s author. Don’t know if or when my words will be in print (this has got to be a first for me, being quoted in a man’s mag), but I will let you know when and if the time comes.
Here are the writer’s questions (in red) and my response:
You’ve been critical of Ashley Madison and similar sites in the past. No sane person would “condone” infidelity, so beyond that, what’s your criticism? Do you not like how they do business? Do you find them dishonest? Do you think it allows people in unhappy relationships a too-easy way out?
I’m a Romance Coach now, working with singles to help them find a Sweetheart using online dating sites. So married people who use sites set up for singles to find love are a real problem. But also, I’ve been a psychotherapist for over 30 years, and my specialty as a therapist was helping married couples when one partner had had an affair. So I have seen the devastation that occurs with infidelity, way too many times.
Those prejudices aside, I am actually glad that these sites—like AshleyMadison, IllicitEncounters.com, AdultFriendFinder (not strictly promoting affairs, but certainly providing a venue for all sorts of fringe sexual behaviors), Philanderers.com (not a dating site but full of suggestions on how to successfully have an extramarital affair) – exist.
Married folks looking for sex outside their marriage (mostly men) have been a problem on the mainstream dating sites like Match.com and Yahoo! Personals. Speculation has been that as many as 30% of men listing were married (Jupiter Research reported 12% in 2005), though of course they stated otherwise. Sites springing up like AshleyMadison.com give these people a place to go and act out their fantasies without contaminating the pool of singles who are honestly and straightforwardly looking for a legitimate, above-board monogamous relationship. In the last couple of years, I have not heard as many complaints about married men on mainstream sites. I suspect that they have migrated to AshleyMadison and the like, either because the sites exist, or because of the fear of being found out, a real likelihood when profiles without pictures don’t get looked at. Good riddance.
That said, joining one of these sites is does not signify one of life’s high points. While the titillation of sex and “romance” are strong, just the premise of an affair – lying to and betraying one’s spouse – is the nadir of sleaze. And everyone there is of similar character quality. Yick.
If you find yourself tempted to patronize sites set up to allow you to misbehave, you need to look back at yourself and question how you got here in the first place. What does participating in lying and deceit say about you? Is that what you want, to be a liar and a cheat? Would you like to have people say, after you die, he was an enthusiastic player on infidelity websites? He (she) really screwed over his (her) wife (or husband)? That you were so self-absorbed and self-centered that you could justify all kinds of bad behavior to get what you wanted? Don’t delude yourself: People can and do find out. If this is what you have to do to get sex and a parody of romance, you need to do some character work, pronto.
P. S. Guys, your fantasy of finding a willing woman on one of these websites to have an affair with is probably destined for failure. Men FAR outnumber women on these sites.
The United States Embassy in Moscow clearly gets frequent reports about US citizens who are victims of Russian based dating scams. Here’s what the Embassy has put out in response, good advice no matter what country you are dealing with:
Internet Dating Scams
The U.S. Embassy receives reports almost every day of fraud committed against U.S. citizens by Internet correspondents professing love and romantic interest. Typically, the Russian correspondent asks the U.S. citizen to send money or credit card information for living expenses, travel expenses, or “visa costs.” The anonymity of the Internet means that the U.S. citizen cannot be sure of the real name, age, marital status, nationality, or even gender of the correspondent. The U.S. Embassy has received many reports of citizens losing thousands of dollars through such scams. American citizens are advised never to send money to anyone they have not met in person.
The internet dating scams include some common elements:
* Misrepresentation about the costs and requirements of a U.S. visa,
* Claims that they must buy airline tickets only in Russia,
* Use of professional models’ photos gleaned from internet web sites,
* Sudden financial hurdles to leaving Russia,
* Requests to send money only through a specific company,
* A scan of a (usually fraudulent) U.S. visa to prove intent to travel.
Please keep in mind that, while the U.S. Embassy in Moscow does not have the authorization to initiate investigations of these scams, the Fraud Prevention Unit can verify the authenticity of any U.S. visa via e-mail at . In addition, complete and authoritative information on applying for a U.S. visa is available on the Department of State’s webpage on Visa Information for Temporary Visitors.
While I don’t like OnlineBootyCall.com and their general premise (On their home page: “You have entered the most unique singles site on the net. Let’s face it; chances are you will never find your soul mate online. So don’t promise marriage just to get a date. Join OBC today for FREE!"), they do have a sense of humor and do not take themselves too seriously. What they do take seriously is having fun. See below the humor they get out of eHarmony’s latest booboo:
OnlineBootyCall.com: eHarmony Ends ‘One Night Stand’ With Walk of Shame
Thursday May 15, 8:00 am ET
SAN DIEGO, May 15 /PRNewswire/—Contradicting its marriage-oriented brand, eHarmony ventured into unfamiliar waters last week by releasing a newsletter titled “Navigating the One Night Stand.” The newsletter instructed singles how to engage in appropriate booty call etiquette, reminiscent of OnlineBootyCall.com’s playful advice in the Booty Call Commandments. The ensuing backlash from members forced eHarmony to take the proverbial “walk of shame” back to their community and issue an apology.
eHarmony’s misstep into the casual dating scene was a tacit recognition of the increasing influence of Americans who are opting to remain single and subscribe to non-traditional dating services. Despite eHarmony’s unwillingness to admit, people joining match making sites are not always looking for marriage. OnlineBootyCall.com, recognizing the special needs of this segment of the population, caters to proud singles who “enjoy being single.” “Let’s be honest, there’s a time in people’s life when they actively choose to be single. They want to enjoy that adventurous stage in their lives. Finding the right person isn’t a one shot, one kill process. You have to explore a bit,” added Moses (Mo) Brown, CEO and founder of OnlineBootyCall.com.
The New York Times(1) piece, “To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered,” captured the crux of this issue, noting that “a growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners.” US Census statistics also corroborate Brown’s statement, as major studies(2) show that the majority of households in the US are comprised of single, unmarried individuals.
With its usual tongue-in-cheek humor, OnlineBootyCall pokes more fun at eHarmony’s embarrassment by releasing its spoof of eHarmony’s marriage compatibility advertisements. The video parodies eHarmony’s compatibility speech, exposing the undertones of sexuality implicit in eHarmony’s coverage of the ‘one night stand.’
eHarmony has an advice section, pretty standard for the most part, but recently the boss was snoozing and a doozy of an article got sent out. eHarmony actually ended up retracting the story pronto and issued an apology. Here it is:
A Note from the Publisher
Last week, the eHarmony Advice site published a column called “Navigating the One-Night Stand” that was also included in the eHarmony email newsletter which reached many regular readers of our Advice site. The advice contained in this column was completely inconsistent with our editorial guidelines and the relationship service that we offer to our members. The day after sending the e-mail newsletter, I was made aware of the column and it was immediately removed from our site.
eHarmony is committed to helping its members find highly compatible, long-term relationships and I regret that the inappropriate content and tone of the column could lead our members to believe that we were not interested in their long-term relationship success. For nearly a decade, eHarmony has served its members very effectively by delivering matches that have resulted in tens of thousands of marriages. We apologize to anyone who read the column and found it inappropriate.
You deserve and expect the best from eHarmony and we are dedicated to providing information that resonates with our diverse, vibrant, and thriving community. Please be assured that we are immediately upgrading our editorial review process and are also reviewing our existing content to make sure that it is consistent with the interests of our members.
Stan Holt (bio) ()
Vice President, Publishing
And here’s the offending piece, which took some sleuthing to uncover (pun intended):
“Navigating the One Night Stand”
So you’re a swinging single and you’ve had a one-night stand. What’s the etiquette for establishing boundaries, calling the day after and getting out without hurting feelings?
While most of us are looking for that special someone to spend our lives with, the single life dictates that sometimes the opportunity for companionship presents itself in the form of a one-night stand. While a one-time roll in the hay isn’t exactly emotionally fulfilling, sex in any form can be relaxing, enjoyable, and fun.
So maybe it’s closing time and you haven’t found Mr. or Ms. Right. If you are up for it, you can enjoy a romp with Mr. or Ms. Right-for-the-night. But when you find yourself in a position to get lucky, you should heed a few rendezvous rules to ensure a seamless one-night-only performance.
Be Up Front
As consenting adults, it’s absolutely fine for both of you to do what makes you happy. The key is to make your intentions clear with your date and call it what it is: sex with no strings attached. Once both of you have appropriate expectations, you can appreciate the spontaneous lovin’ for what it’s worth.
Do the Safety Dance
Keep a cell phone with you, and if you can, tell your friends where you will be and your date’s name. Further, always use protection. Without the risk of sounding like a high school health teacher, protect yourself from STDs and pregnancy every single time to avoid lingering consequences.
Don’t Spend the Night
Unless invited, don’t sleep over. Snoozing together is too official, and it should be reserved for an established relationship. Gather up your belongings and make a respectful exit. Don’t try to leave a trail of personal “bread crumbs,” such as a wallet, a purse—or, worse, your unmentionables—as a gateway for a second meeting. Hanging around implies desperation, pegging you as the sad Clingy Clarissa or Hopeless Harry.
Don’t Call
One-nighters need not call or check up on the whereabouts of the person they shared the evening with. Acting as if your near-anonymous night of passion was a first date will just confuse sex with love.
Keep Your Mouth Shut
Don’t crow about your conquest or the amazing time you had with this lover to your friends like an adolescent.
One-night stands might solicit spontaneity and liberation, but you ought to know enough not to participate in short affairs unless you are capable of the detachment they require.
If you have the ability to live in the moment and not demand a long-term relationship afterward, then you are golden.
Here’s an article about eHarmony that appeared in a recent “Newsweek”—nothing really new, I’ve written about it all before, but here it is in the mainstream press:
An Algorithm for Mr. Right
The site ‘has never been limited to a Christian audience or to any subset,’ says a company lawyer.
Lisa Miller
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 2:57 PM ET Apr 26, 2008
Let’s say you want to get married and you’re thinking of joining an Internet dating site. Wouldn’t you want that site to be just a little bit picky? Wouldn’t you want it to eliminate the creepy already-marrieds—and the pathological liars? Wouldn’t you be grateful to meet someone who shared your values on children, money, education and God? Isn’t that what your mother wants?
eHarmony, which has had 20 million users since its founding in 2000, promotes itself as the dating service your mother would approve of. Its implied promise: that in this world of hookups, eHarmony can get you hitched. Lately, though, the company has faced a public relations crisis, triggered both by a competitor’s clever advertisements and by a lawsuit charging that eHarmony discriminates against gays and lesbians. Founded by a 72-year-old Christian self-help author named Neil Clark Warren, the dating site requires users to answer 256 questions about personality traits and values. Then, with the help of a complex algorithm, it matches people with much in common. Warren’s philosophy is as comforting as mashed potatoes: “It is so much better to love someone who is a lot like you,” he told National Review in 2005. A company spokeswoman boasts that 236 eHarmony users marry every day.
Among the young and the single—especially those with Blue State values—wariness about eHarmony runs high. For one thing, there’s the association with Dr. James Dobson. Warren published several of his books under the imprint of Dobson’s Focus on the Family and then, when he was first flogging eHarmony, he did it largely via Dobson’s radio show. “James Dobson … did more to help us get started than any other person,” Warren told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2005. Because of Warren’s strong evangelical bona fides, the impression persists that eHarmony is a dating service for Christians—even though the company has severed its ties with Dobson’s group, and eHarmony “has never been limited to a Christian audience or any particular subset of the population,” says a company lawyer.
Trickier (from a PR point of view), eHarmony rejects about 20 percent of its applicants and doesn’t fully explain why. The Internet is abuzz with possible explanations, and last year a savvy competitor called Chemistry.com capitalized on these suspicions. In television ads, seemingly eligible young people face the camera and complain that they returned their library books on time or were only occasionally depressed—and still were rejected by eHarmony. These ads drew a bright line: Chemistry.com is for people who believe in love and romance; eHarmony is for squares who follow an indecipherable set of rules. An eHarmony spokeswoman explains that the site rejects people who are underage, already married or dishonest—as well as those whose answers raise flags about their mental health.
In June, a California judge will hear a plaintiffs’ motion for class certification in a case that accuses eHarmony of discrimination against gays and lesbians. eHarmony does not reject gays—it simply doesn’t accept them: the only choices on the site are “man seeking woman” or “woman seeking man.” A company lawyer explains that eHarmony makes matches based on unique scientific research into what makes heterosexual unions work; it hasn’t done the same kind of work on gay unions, though it doesn’t rule out such research in the future. While this explanation may be true, it also sidesteps the real problem. eHarmony was founded eight years ago by a conservative Christian who had a passionate interest in the benefits of shared values in heterosexual marriage—and he sold this formula within the Christian world. (Warren was not available for comment.) Today, the company desires to reap the economies of scale offered by a mainstream clientele, and in the wider world, shared values are not as easy to compute.
More humor from OnlineBootyCall:
Booty Call Commandments:
I. Thou shalt get out before the sun rises
II. Thou shouldest never ask “can we see each other from now on?”
III. Thou shalt refrain from referring to our activities as “love making.”
IV. Thou shalt not request advanced plans.
V. Thou shalt kiss anything except my mouth.
VI. Thou shalt scream my name often
VII. If someone cometh over whilst thou art here, thou art my cousin from out of town.
VIII. Thou shalt not ask me to walk thee to thy car. Don’t thou knoweth what it looketh like?
IX. There shall be no “pillow talk.”
X. There shall be no cuddling—ever!
If you think that there is not big buck in even the free dating sites, take a look at the following article about PlentyofFish and its founder Markus Frind. PlentyofFish just sold for an obscene amount of money. Congrats to Markus!
PS I’m not a fan of Plentyoffish. I am a firm believer in “You get what you pay for,” and free sets the bar pretty darned low. However, if you resist paying on the sites that charge and get a free ride on those who do pay up (about 12 to 1, unpaid to paid), give us all a break and go on over to Plentyoffish where you can openly hook up for free.
January 13, 2008
MARKUS FRIND, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller “The 4-Hour Workweek” — in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week — but his face could go on the book’s cover. He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.
For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.
There’s much to be admired in Mr. Frind’s entrepreneurial success. But his site, now almost five years old, has some unfinished patches and irritating quirks and seems to come from the Anti-Perfectionist School of Design.
Mr. Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET. The site first became popular among English-speaking Canadians. Popularity among online daters in many United States cities followed more recently, and with minimal spending on advertising the site. According to data from comScore Media Metrix for November 2007, Plenty of Fish had 1.4 million unique visitors in the United States. In December, Mr. Frind said, the site served up 1.2 billion page views, and page views have soared 20 percent since Dec. 26.
Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience. Wherever a row of members’ photos is displayed, which is most pages, many of the faces are elongated or scrunched because Mr. Frind has not taken the trouble to write the software code that would automatically resize frames or crop photos to prevent distortion. When I asked him why he had not addressed the problem, he said it was a “trivial” issue that did not bother users.
A blasé attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive. Somehow, the site instantly replenishes the lost customers and attracts many more to boot.
No one heads to Plenty of Fish for the customer service, which is all but nonexistent. The company does not need a support structure to handle members’ subscription and billing issues because the service is entirely advertising-based. Its tagline is: “100 percent free. Put away your credit card.” For hand-holding, users must rely on fellow members, whose advice is found in online forums. The Dating & Love Advice category lists more than 320,000 posts, making up in sheer quantity what it lacks in a soothing live presence available by phone.
The principal customer service that Plenty of Fish provides is responses to complaints about possibly fraudulent identities and to subpoenas and search-warrant requests. Last year, Mr. Frind hired his first, and still only, employee to handle these requests, freeing him to attend to adding new servers when required and tweaking code. “Most of the time, I don’t need to do anything,” he said.
To keep his site’s forums free of spam, Mr. Frind has refined a formula for analyzing customer feedback and arriving at a determination of whether a given forum post is spam and should automatically be deleted. He has also devised some new software twists that enable him to offload work to his customers, letting users review the photos that are uploaded to the site.
Mr. Frind says that close to 50,000 new photos come in every day, each one of which needs to be checked to verify that it is an actual person and that it does not not contain nudity. The work would be costly if Mr. Frind relied on a paid staff to do it.
Fortunately for him, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of humans eager to look at pictures of other humans, and Mr. Frind taps his customers to carry out the reviewing, gratis. Some have made it their principal pastime. Among Plenty of Fish’s volunteers were 120 who last year evaluated more than 100,000 images each. He explains his volunteers’ enthusiasm for the work as an expression of gratitude: “Lots of people feel like they want to give back to the site because it’s free.”
Plenty of Fish displays banner ads, Google-supplied ads and, most profitable of all, “affiliate” marketing links that send users to other dating sites. For example, Mr. Frind said, when one of his customers clicks on an advertisement for a book titled “Double Your Dating” and, after being sent to the publisher’s Web site, ends up buying it for $40, the publisher pays Plenty of Fish a commission — of $40 — for the sale, glad to have landed a customer that past experience shows is a good prospect for “upselling” other goods and services related to dating.
For all that Mr. Frind has accomplished, his site looks puny when compared with Craigslist, which has built a mighty automation engine tended by only a handful of people. Craigslist’s personals draw about six million unique visitors a month, more than any other dating site, and its listings for all categories generate 10 billion page views a month. It covers 450 localities in 50 countries around the world — with only 25 employees. It is among the top 10 busiest English-language sites, but the customers who enjoy its free listings, like Plenty of Fish’s, must serve themselves or seek assistance from others. “Anything that represents customer hand-holding represents a failure of site design,” said Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist’s chief executive. “We try to make changes to the site to make the problem go away.”
BOTH Plenty of Fish and Craigslist have created sites that run almost completely on their own, but in different ways. Craigslist has no commercial messages other than listings, and it collects fees only for a minuscule slice of its posts. It charges employers for jobs listings in 10 of its 450 cities, and brokers for apartment listings in New York City. All other listings are free. “To most of our users,” Mr. Buckmaster said, “it’s a mystery how we make money.”
At Plenty of Fish, there is no mystery: a large square of advertising sits in the middle of most profile pages. Its success demonstrates that many consumers will tolerate, and even embrace, advertising when a site offers a free service for which others charge membership fees.
Mr. Frind has found that rare business in which the profits gush in, whether or not he leaves his hammock.
Around Valentine’s Day, Sara Schaefer Munoz posted on a Wall Street Journal blog about high priced matchmaking services. She refers to an article in Financial Times which thank goodness clarified for me that Munoz was writing about introduction services that took both men and women, not like the trend we have seen to match wealthy men with gorgeous young women. I’ve written about those sites before, see here.
Munoz asks for readers’ comments, and she got lots of them! You might want to take a look at the comments yourself. The really interesting part is that practically none of the comments are about high-priced introduction services. Instead, they are about online dating, mostly success on Match.com! Hey, good advertising, huh?
For Busy Professionals Seeking Love, Are Dating Services Helpful?
Posted by Sara Schaefer Munoz
We’ve talked about how busy young professionals have trouble finding the time to focus on dating. According to this recent article in the Financial Times, several elite dating services — modeled on executive head-hunting firms — promise to find you the perfect mate for a price.
One service, the Country Register, charges £10,000, about $20,000, for an 18 month membership in its top tier personal search service, and is currently signing five new city-based clients a month — twice the joining rate for 2000, the piece says. The service spends at least half a day in the client’s home getting to know them and promises that respondents are met and screened in advance.
But why pay a premium when you could meet people at work, or take on inexpensive Internet dating? A former busy professional at Merrill Lynch says in the article that “The last thing I wanted after work was to socialize with bankers or sit down at a computer.” Singletons also say that online dating requires a lot of time to sort through profiles and craft witty responses to potential suitors. (It can take so much effort to present yourself that some are even plagiarizing profiles they find online.)
I’d love to hear from single professionals who are looking for love. What’s your experience with online dating? Where have you met — or looked for — a mate? Would you pay a premium for an elite match-making service?
Four years ago, I lived in a small city where it was hard to meet single, like-minded men. I posted a profile on Match.com and eventually received an expression of interest from a man who lived 90 miles away–someone I would never have met any other way. We e-mailed a few times and then arranged to meet in my city for a drink, which led to dinner…and, about 10 months later, marriage. We now have a 2-year-old son. Online personals don’t work for everyone, but they did for us.
When I met my final “date,” I had already been on Match.com once before. The second time, I posted new and improved photos (of myself) and a rewritten, snappier profile (that I wrote on my own). I resolved to keep the e-mail correspondence to a minimum. I set up in-person meetings as quickly as possible to avoid any fantasy, “virtual” dating, which is easy to fall into when you’re e-mailing someone you’ve never seen before.
For someone who had done everything I could think of to expand my social circle and meet new people in my city, online personals worked better than my other efforts–through which I met some wonderful friends, but no potential boyfriends.
Comment by anonymous - February 19, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I tend to think that the only real advantage that an ultra-premium service could offer is a signal between matched participants that both are monetarily successful. While online surveys are imperfect, I have no reason to believe that a person can’t put up a facade for half a day to present just as ideal an image to a premium service as they do to an online site. To be sure, there is more of an initial guarantee of the validity of the person’s identity and appearance, but if someone online presents a false appearance, that will be found out quickly in the light of a real meeting.
Totally free sites are probably so diluted as to be useless, but lower premium sites do some analysis to attempt basic compatibility and weed out people who are really on the fence about whether or not to put some effort into it; and ultimately, perception of compatibility is a rather imperfect science anyway, so having a range of options is probably a good thing.
I think that unless someone prioritizes financial success above all else, paying $20,000 is not going to produce markedly better results than paying somewhere in the $100-2000 range.
That said, while the traditional approach of meeting people in life is theoretically great, it’s a rather sensitive issue for people in tightly wound social networks; one bad relationship and one’s entire social fabric can become unwound.
Comment by Clinton - February 19, 2008 at 11:25 am
When clients ask me about the best dating sites, I always list Match.com at the top. How could I not, when I met my Sweetie Drew there almost exactly ten years ago right now? I love it that Match.com has stayed at the top (or nearly so) of the thousands of dating sites that have cropped up. And I particularly like the new look Match started a year or two ago—a classy black and white, with style and pizazz. My impression is that Match is trying and succeeding in attracting a bit of a higher cut of singles. See this piece below which validates what I have been thinking:
What The Heck is Going at At Match.com?
Posted: 03 Mar 2008 02:41 PM CST
Recently, I have been on several great dates and been deluged with emails and winks from some very cool women on Match.com. Did someone at Match optimize a database differently, tweak the search page, or are they spending more ad dollars in different ways?
Whatever the reason, I am seriously impressed with the people Match is attracting these days. Obviously there are a number of factors, some of which I can control, others not so much.
The usual post V-day signup splurge is in full effect, I’ve got some new photos and, hello Match, every single woman that emails me says my little mini-blog post that I updated at the top of my profile is a big reason they contacted me. They know I’m active and taking the time to do something different to put myself out there and differentiate myself from the rest of the single dudes.
I only belong to about 10 dating sites now, down from a peak of 25+ a few years ago. I’m not seeing anywhere near this amount of activity on any other site except for OKCupid. Singlesnet sends out a lot of emails but they are so spammy and unauthentic that I don’t even bother replying anymore.
To give eHarmony credit, I have gotten matched several times recently, but I’m not a member right now so into the trash bin they go. They really need to do a better job enticing me into being a member again, their re-marketing messaging is not doing the job.
I feel like I need to put up a giant disclaimer when I write about my personal experience with dating sites. I talk about dating site clients, I trash sites that obviously are just in it for the money and doing a crap job of it, and after 6 years in this business I am admittedly jaded, but not pessimistic (there is a difference), about online dating.
That said, it feels really good to experience this uptick in activity. Here’s to all dating sites working harder to make this experience the rule, not the exception.
One of the greatest things about Internet dating right from the start has been the inclusion of gays and lesbians on regular mainstream sites like Match.com and Yahoo! Personals. What a step forward to ending discrimination for sexual minorities. And how regressive it seems now when sites like eHarmony refuse to work with gays and lesbians. Now sites are cropping up for gays and lesbians specifically, and the regular sites are marketing to the gay population. Yea! Here’s an article that describes both:
Gay matchmaking sites find a growing market
Anastasia Ustinova, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Dale Bullock, a longtime matchmaker for lesbians and gay ...
Growing up, Bethtina Woodridge heard all kinds of advice about dating, finding a husband and getting married.
“You don’t have those tips about meeting women,” said Woodridge, 31. “How do I approach her, how do I know she is gay?”
For Woodridge, finding that special someone turned out to be easier online. Several months after signing up for dating service Chemistry.com, Woodridge was matched with her partner, who was “incredibly honest and sincere, and she stole my heart.”
After online giant eHarmony made headlines last year by saying its psychological research is based exclusively on heterosexual relationships, a growing number of rival online matchmakers are using their algorithms to find same-sex love as well.
“There are just not enough services for creating healthy relationships, and (it is) a major gap in the gay community,” said matchmaker Patrick Perrine, founder of San Francisco-based Mypartner.com, which caters to “sophisticated, cultured and relationship-oriented gay men” and has more than 50,000 clients across the nation. “There has been a long-held stereotype that gay people are only looking to hook up.”
But there’s disagreement over whether gay people fall in love the same way as straight people. Some matchmakers, including Chemistry.com, say the chemistry of love is the same whether you’re gay or straight. But matchmakers who dedicate their services exclusively to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community disagree, pointing out that little theory is available about gay relationships outside general psychology.
“When you are dealing with a Mars-Venus situation, it is one thing. When you are dealing with Mars-Mars, it’s different,” said Stuart McFaul, marketing director of the newly created Partnerforlife.com, which has created an algorithm based on years of founder Dale Bullock’s private matchmaking experience in the gay community.
Unlike adult hookup sites that allow users to browse profiles, online matchmakers offer lengthy personality tests, designed to match clients with a compatible partner. Though companies keep their algorithms secret and little scientific data is available about the effectiveness of the services, thousands of those looking for a soul mate are willing to pay up to $40 per month to try them out.
Advertised as gay-owned-and-operated businesses, sites such as Partnerforlife.com and Mypartner.com ask their members to answer questions that assess their personalities as well as cover different aspects of a modern gay man’s life, including sexuality, HIV and parenting. Offline services such as relationship counseling and seminars are also available.
“Differences between gays and others have nothing to do with the fundamentals, but with day-to-day living,” said Bullock. “The prime goal is to create a community support structure for our couples to grow closer together and to develop a standard model for their relationship.”
The matchmakers claim “you can actually find people who are compatible, and this is a major advance that is going to keep the industry alive for the upcoming 50 years,” said Mark Brooks, an Internet dating and social networking consultant.
Matchmakers like Chemistry.com, which estimates that about 10 percent of its 3.7 million clients are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, say all love is equal, straight or gay. Last year, the company launched a TV campaign criticizing eHarmony for rejecting applicants it deems undesirable, including those looking for same-sex partners.
Chemistry.com is using a single algorithm created by Helen Fisher, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, who has identified four personality types based on chemicals in the brain that tend to be associated with different types: the explorer, the builder, the director and the negotiator.
The explorer, for example, has high levels of dopamine, a chemical that tends to make a person curious, creative, spontaneous and irreverent. The explorer’s perfect match is the serotonin-driven builder, who is calm, cautious and detail-oriented.
People are usually drawn to the partners who complement their type, Fisher said, and that rule of attraction goes beyond their sexual orientation.
“We are not measuring what your appetite is for your sex partner; we are measuring basic human characteristics,” Fisher said. “Who you choose to love is one thing, how you feel when you are in love is another, so I am operating under the assumption that gays are going to fall in love and have absolutely the same experience and choose the partners in the same way straight people do.”
While matchmakers scramble to tap the booming industry, academic researchers say they hope the growing competition pushes companies to post their research for peer review.
“And unlike those (companies), most scientists don’t have good resources to collect data,” said Eli Finkel, a psychology professor who studies dating at Northwestern University’s Relationships Lab. “Until we have actually seen their data, we would not be able to know” how effective the sites are.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to counter the stereotype that gay men are not looking for serious commitment, Partnerforlife.com’s ads feature ordinary-looking couples doing everyday activities with tongue-in-cheek slogans such as “One-nighters are great ... 365 are better.”
“This is what attracts people the most - so gay men and lesbians can look at each and say, ‘We can have ordinary lives just like everybody else,’ “ McFaul said. “Our ads are a celebration that we have arrived.”
Here you go, rich ladies and gorgeous men, a dating site just for you. PocketChange.com hosts a speed dating section: Men 35 and under can apply, based solely on appearance. They must submit 5 photos for judgment. Women must be over 35 can apply,and must qualify (solely based on wealth) in one of four ways: Must make more than $500K, have liquid assets, entrusted assets, or a divorce settlement of $4MM+. (I’ll show my ignorance: How much is $4MM? I guess if I don’t know, I haven’t got it.)
CrazyBlindDate.com last month">I wrote about CrazyBlindDate.com last month, the perfect site for those of you who think Internet dating is too slow. Now CrazyBlindDate has expanded into more cities: Los Angeles, Chicago and the Washington, D.C. So if you live in one of the urban areas they cover (New York, Boston, San Francisco and Austin), you can be out on a date in 15 minutes.
CrazyBlindDate.com Now Available in Los Angeles, Chicago and the Washington D.C. Metro Area
Hugely Popular Free Online Dating Site Continues to Gain Momentum; Named 2007 Online Dating “Innovation of the Year” by Online Personals Watch
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Starting today, singles in Los Angeles, Chicago and the Washington, D.C. metro area have their chance to join the growing CrazyBlindDate.com phenomenon. Already a success in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Austin, CrazyBlindDate.com is the only online dating site that encourages singles to get off their computers and into real, live dates, meeting people when and where they want.
Created as a free, fun and spontaneous new twist to the often tiresome world of online dating, CrazyBlindDate.com users simply enter criteria for their date (age, height, ethnic background, education, etc.) and choose the time and location from a list of local venues. Once CrazyBlindDate.com finds two compatible daters, both parties receive text messages and e-mails with the date logistics. Both daters must reconfirm their availability before the blind date is finalized.
CrazyBlindDate.com, first launched in November 2007, has received an incredible response and was recently named the online dating industry’s #1 Innovation in 2007 by Online Personals Watch. According to an analysis of the first 3,000 CrazyBlindDates:
* Over 2/3 of all daters rated their dates as “good” or “great;”
* 87% of singles told a friend about their experience on CrazyBlindDate.com.
“We’ve been thrilled to see such an overwhelming response and look forward to serving the voracious appetite of singles in LA, Washington DC, and Chicago,” said Sam Yagan, co-founder of CrazyBlindDate.com. “Singles across the country are finding that CrazyBlindDate.com is the one website that quickly connects them with real, live dates, taking the work out of online dating and replacing it with spontaneity and fun.”
John Tierney from the NYT is doing a series of articles about Internet dating. I wrote about it here in late January. Tierney focused on the sites like Chemistry.com and eHarmony that do the matchmaking for you. Here he describes going onto eHarmony with his wife to see if they get paired by the matchmaking. They had to fudge a little (eHarmony rejects those who tell the truth that they are married), but who cares about lying online, right? (That’s sarcasm from me. Lying in your online dating profile and communications is short-sited and perhaps disastrous. You can read more of what I have to say about it here).
As with the other Tierney articles, the comments that follow are at least as interesting as the article. If you can still see them on the NYT’s site, scan down and take a look.
And what do you think about the point that several commenters made, that Tierney was unethical in lying on the eHarmony sites, particularly since the site immediately started providing him with matches that he was clearly not going to pursue?
My eHarmony Experiment: Can This Marriage Be Matched?
By John Tierney
Now that a couple of hundred Lab readers have told their online matchmaking stories, let me tell you mine. After visiting the eHarmony Labs for my Findings column on matchmaking, I wondered if its algorithm would match me and my wife of 12 years, Dana. So we each registered separately with eHarmony and answered the 258 questions. We falsely said we were each divorced (because eHarmony doesn’t offer its service to people already married) and each childless, but otherwise we told the truth.
After we filled out the questions, we each were given a personality profile. It was pretty general — and tactfully written so that it emphasized the good aspects of each trait — but it seemed reasonably accurate to each of us. There were five general categories. We got identical ratings for extraversion and emotional stability. We got pretty similar ratings for conscientiousness (I was “flexible”; Dana was “very flexible”) and openness (I was “curious”; she was “very curious”). Our biggest difference was in the category of agreeableness: Dana was rated as consistently taking care of others, while I was consistently taking care of myself. EHarmony tried to put the best spin on my selfishness by explaining: “You believe that compassion has a role to play in your life, in a structure of values that encourages people to take care of themselves. Uncritical tenderheartedness does as much harm as good. . . . Fostering such independence is the best way you find there is to love and care for others.”
Then, presto, eHarmony started providing matches. Dana got more — understandably! — but even selfish me got several dozen over the course of the next week. Unlike some of the Lab readers who complained about the abundance of devout Christians on eHarmony, we weren’t overwhelmed with evangelical partners. There were, though, many people passionately devoted to walks on the beach.
We got a lot of matches in the New York area, and some farflung ones, too, but not the match that we wanted. Even though we’d said we wanted nearby matches and had entered the same ZIP code, eHarmony didn’t match us. Does this mean that there’s something wrong with eHarmony, or with our marriage?
I sought counsel from the wizard behind the eHarmony curtain, Galen Buckwalter, the psychologist who serves as the company’s vice president for research and development. (You might have seen him in a documentary that’s been airing on public television stations recently, “Rolling,” which profiles him and two other people who use wheelchairs. He became a paraplegic after breaking his neck when he was a teenager.) Dr. Buckwalter created the algorithm a decade ago by testing questions on 5,000 married couples and focusing on the answers of the happiest couples (the ones who scored in the upper quartile of a measure called the dyadic adjustment scale).
Dr. Buckwalter reassured me, after I summarized our general personality profiles, that there was hope for the marriage. “Your personality profiles do suggest a good overall degree of compatibility,” he said. “However, I cannot from this information know if you and your wife meet our models’ criteria for matching.” He explained that the “matching models include more specific constructs than are used in the personality profile.” He wondered if some of the preferences we’d indicated — like our tolerance for drinkers and smokers — might have ruled out a match. I checked and told him that we’d marked mostly the same preferences except for the smoking category. Although neither of us smokes, my wife had said that she was open to a match with a smoker, whereas I’d said I wasn’t open.
“Voila,” Dr. Buckwalter said. ” The smoking likely did it. We find much higher user satisfaction when we keep those who don’t want smokers with similar persons.”
That was encouraging — briefly. Dana went back and changed her preferences to rule out smokers, and we both asked for new matches. We each got a few more matches over the next couple of days, but not each other.
Dr. Buckwalter encouraged me to look at the bright side. “You both have gotten a good number of matches within a relatively short period of time,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This does suggest there are additional matches in both of your pools of compatible matches. Do these additional matches include each other? Given the widespread use of the Tierneys as the definition of marital bliss in relationship science, I can only assume so!”
Well, we appreciate his good humor, and we’re trying to hold the marriage together. Maybe eHarmony will match us yet. Maybe we’ll find another matchmaking site to see if we find each other — although I do feel a little guilty doing this kind of experiment, because it wastes the time of all the partners who were matched with us during the past week.
I hereby apologize to all the women I rejected, usually by checking off the same lame excuse: “I don’t feel that the chemistry is there.” Really, it’s not you. It’s my wife.
UPDATE [Monday, Feb. 4, 5 p.m.]: Some readers criticized me for doing this experiment, so I should explain it a little more. I didn’t actually contact any of the women with whom I was matched; nor did I know their identities. I merely saw the profiles that they provided to eHarmony, which listed some some basic facts (like their first name and home town, their age and occupation) and some answers they gave to standard questions (like their favorite activities). I couldn’t see their pictures because eHarmony won’t show you a photo of your match unless you’ve provided your own photo, and I hadn’t done so.
I could have contacted any of the women by going through eHarmony, but instead I chose to close the matches. I told eHarmony I wasn’t interested and checked the “no chemistry” box in explaining why. I realize I wasted a little of the women’s time, since they looked at my profile when we were matched, but I hope it didn’t take long.
I always recommend that singles pick a big, established, well-trafficked dating site, one that charges a fee. And of course, if you join, you should pay. Here’s a report that backs up some of my rationale—that people who join and pay a fee are more serious and see others posting on the site as more serious too. Underlining below is mine.
The typical online dater is serious, says report
People who date on the internet tend to be serious about the endeavour, a new report asserts.
According to eMarketer, those who use paid-for subscription services to meet prospective romantic mates are doing so because they want to find a specific sort of person who takes the venture as seriously as they do.
Citing comScore figures that reveal 97 million people visited matchmaking websites in December of last year, representing a ten per cent year-on-year fall, the report comments that a specific demographic is drawn to such resources.
“Online dating site users are looking for a pool of other people who are serious about dating, and pay for access to that pool,” the publication notes.
Meanwhile, an International Herald-Tribune article is cited in which the chief executive of Match.com, Thomas Enraght-Moony, describes internet dating as “highly underpenetrated”.
Hitwise has reported that the term ‘Valentine’s poems’ was the most popular search phrase containing the word Valentine in February 2007.
If you are an eHarmony fan and regular (and readers know that I have definite opinions about eHarmony -- just read my postings to find out), you’ll love the resource I just found: A blog dedicated to the tricks, twists, and turns of eHarmony. I certainly don’t have the time or dedication to figure out how to make eHarmony work better for you, but you may find what you need here.
Most people know that Internet dating is one of the biggest money-makers on the web. Even though total visits were down 10% in December, revenues continue to climb. Speculators say that the less serious singles are dropping out, and the truly serious are paying up. See the article below, I added the underlines.
JupiterResearch Sees Steady Growth for Online Personals, Despite Explosion of Social Networking
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--JupiterResearch-- a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, reports consumers are looking for love in cyberspace at a steady pace, which will result in significant growth during the next five years. Online dating and personals will increase from $900M in 2007 to $1.9B in 2012, according to the recently published JupiterResearch report, “US Paid Content Forecast, 2007 to 2012.”
Despite the grave outlook in some press reports, there are no signs that the eruption of social networks has burned the paid online personals market.
“Still, as casual visitor traffic slows or shrinks, competitors will have to seek out harder-to-sell consumers, as well as offer additional services to their existing customers,” said David Card, Vice President and Research Director for JupiterResearch. “And competition is already ferocious.”
Personals remain one of the larger paid content categories online. Only music |
