Our plan to make online dating better for everyone

The online dating world needs an extreme makeover. There are two fundamental problems with online dating. We described one of these on the home page and in the first topic in the FAQ page. This problem boils down to the fact that when people pay online dating sites for a membership, they are not as free to communicate with others as they typically assume (see reference #1). In fact, we would not be surprised to see the Federal Trade Commission step in and mandate that online dating sites provide a realistic idea of the limitations that plague even paid members.

The second problem is that there are now approximately 1000 online dating sites. That is simply too many, because it reduces the number of people on any given site. Let's say that your perfect match has a profile on some online dating site. The question is, which one? You would need to search each of those 1000 sites to be sure that you found your best possible match. No one has the time and money to do that. Ideally, there would be just one online dating site. If you wanted to find your best possible match, and that person was participating in online dating, you would find him or her on that site.

Here is an analogy to illustrate the drawbacks of 1000 dating sites. Imagine that you needed to buy a part for your car, but there were 1000 auto parts stores in your area, none of which carried all of the available parts. To find the right part, you might have to visit all 1000 stores. Furthermore, most of these stores required you to spend 15 minutes to two hours to register as you walked in the door, and then they wanted you to pay $20 to $50 to find out if the parts on display were indeed what you're looking for. If you did not find the part the first month, they would charge you another $20 to $50 to continue your search the next month, and on and on.

Things get even worse if the first drawback (deceptively misleading chances of communication) is incorporated into this analogy. If so, you would have to compose and send messages to find out if the part was the one you want. However, 90 to 95% of your messages could be wasted, so even if you stumbled onto the perfect part, you would probably go home without it. Frustrating system, isn't it?

Is there any hope of consolidating the online dating sites? Do online daters have a chance to communicate free, or at least have all restrictions lifted if they pay for a membership? That may not seem very likely, given that the online dating industry is led by large corporations that are more interested in their profits than your dating success. They are led by smart people who fully understand how their policies are intended to maximize profits, not love connections. Their only hope for survival is to keep people from realizing the limitations of their sites.

Therefore, our first goal is to educate people about the limitations of online dating that affect both paid and unpaid members (see the first topic in the FAQ page for a more comprehensive discussion of these limitations). Our second goal is to provide an alternative site on which you and others can potentially find and freely communicate with anyone who participates in online dating. We've already created that site; in fact, you're on it now. There is nothing to prevent every online dater from creating a profile on ContactMeFree.com in the next week or two. After that, there would be no need for anyone to use another dating site. If you wanted to find your perfect match, you would come here. And you would not pay, because this site is free to use. The primary obstacle to achieving this unification of online dating is that most people don't yet know about us. In 2006, we will implement a multifaceted strategy to popularize the site.

Our foremost goal is to make ContactMeFree.com the clearinghouse for free online dating. However, educating the public about the benefits of ContactMeFree.com may require more resources than we can muster. Therefore, we will also consider the next best alternative, which is to foster the creation of one paid but unified dating site. Each one of the 1000 online dating sites that currently exist would love to be the one unified online dating site. The problem for them is that the market is so fragmented that even the major online dating sites have no hope of achieving that goal — at least, not if they consider only the traditional approaches to increasing market share. If we at ContactMeFree.com cannot unify the online dating world on our own (realistically, we probably cannot do that), we will gladly partner with one of the existing online dating sites. With their resources and our ideas, we can explain to them how they could achieve virtual domination of the online dating industry. Our motivation for this is simple: we think that online dating would be better if everyone who participated in it could go to one site to find his or her perfect match.

If none of the major online dating sites are interested in partnering with ContactMeFree.com, does that mean that the game is over? Not at all. We have a fail-safe strategy to ensure that the online dating world is irrevocably transformed so that people on any dating site can freely and easily contact others without the need to register with that site, pay that site, or even to use an adjunctive site such as ContactMeFree.com. Once the cat is out of the bag, none of their customers would need to pay them to contact others. The paid dating sites need income to stay in business; without that continuing revenue, they will inevitably fail.

We hope that we do not need to release this "secret weapon" because there is no hope of going back to the way things were once the secret is out. While we are thrilled about the prospect of making online dating permanently free for everyone, we think that most online daters would be better served by paying a small monthly fee to one unified online dating site instead of having it free but fragmented. In our opinion, unification is more likely if one major site implements our strategy. If we divulge the secret, we think that all of the paid online dating sites will go under, only to be replaced by free dating sites supported by advertising revenue. In such a scenario, it would be difficult for any one site to conclusively dominate the others and thereby achieve unification. Hence, we won't yet reveal the secret.

If one of the major players in the online dating industry is smart enough to realize that their business model is based upon a strategy that will soon become untenable, and that site is willing to adapt so they can trounce their competitors, then I think that corporation deserves the success it will achieve. After all, market forces are supposed to reward those with the best ideas. However, in the case of the current online dating world, there are no glaring technological advantages that would allow one site to dominate all others. The big players remain big not because of their novel ideas, but because they have enough profiles listed to draw in prospective customers who are interested in those profiles. The profiles are the bait, and more bait is certain to attract more customers. This may make it seem as if the major players are destined to continue their dominance of the online dating industry.

We disagree. Judging from the past, major corporations are often relegated to the dustbin of history by technological changes. These corporate downfalls are more likely when something pops up on the radar screen that is not foreseeable. That is just what is about to happen in the world of online dating. Having plenty of bait on the major sites cannot sustain them if their customers no longer need to pay those sites. Therefore, size alone will not be sufficient to immunize those sites from a technological revolution that obviates the need for people to continue paying. When those sites go bankrupt, people will simply move their profiles over to the emerging super site. As long as that site charges reasonable fees, gives good service, and welcomes all online daters (unlike some sites that intentionally discriminate), there will be no compelling reason for any online dater to use any site but that one.

Our ultimate objective is to sell ContactMeFree, the intellectual property behind it, our trade secrets for alternative ways to initiate contact without paying, and related ideas for how an online dating company could increase its market share. We are eager to move on to another project that involves remaking an aspect of the Internet unrelated to online dating. However, we realize that the current online dating sites may be too arrogant to think that a start-up company could kill their cash cow. We know that our stronger "contact without paying" ideas can indelibly decimate the online dating industry, which now generates revenue of over $500 million dollars per year. If we cannot find a buyer or a partner interested in pursuing our goal of consolidation, then we will implement our "secret weapon" contact methods. If nothing else, the publicity resulting from that would give us a virtual calling card so that we would not be brushed off the next time we claimed to have a breakthrough idea.

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References

1. Data is difficult to come by because every personals site that we know of does not divulge their percentage of paid versus free members, nor have we yet found one who will release this information. We've read published reports by dating industry analysts who pegged the percentage of paid members in the range of 4.7 to 10%. One of our investigators who is actively involved in online dating called one of the major sites to find out their paid membership percentage. That information should be freely available because it is the only way for an informed consumer to know if it may be worthwhile to pay for a membership, given that messages sent to unpaid members of that site cannot be opened, read, or responded to. Despite repeated calls (and after being referred to someone in their management who never returned his call), he was unable to ascertain their paid membership percentage. This adamant secretiveness is difficult to fathom unless one assumes that the online dating sites have good reason to be so tightlipped about this matter. They do, in our opinion, because we doubt that most of their customers would pay for a membership if they knew that perhaps only one person in ten or one person in twenty would be able to read messages sent to them and reply.

The highest percentage of paid members at any dating site that we have been able to verify is in the "Meet Me" section of HotOrNot. Paid members on that site have one or more stars appended to their profile, making it easy to differentiate paid versus unpaid members. One of our investigators conducted a survey of 400 HotOrNot members (200 men and 200 women) on December 17, 2005, and found that 19% of men aged 33 to 40 in her sample were paid members. However, only 5% of the women aged 33 to 40 in her sample were paid members. We believe that it is reasonable to assume that other paid dating sites have lower percentages of paid members because HotOrNot memberships currently cost less than $6 per month (substantially less than most of their competitors) and their process for creating a new account and profile is quick and easy.

Related topic

What you need to know about online dating, but probably don't