A reader wrote yesterday to inform me that my previous blog entry was short-sighted and just plain wrong! He wrote:
“To say that current technologies don’t provide a step up from the laborious and awkward real world meeting processes is short sighted and just plain wrong. On eHarmony, for instance, tens of thousands of people a year successfully find a marriage partner via the computer. What do you say to that?” – Anonymous
November 30th, 2006
Dear Anonymous,
Before we get into the math, let’s introduce eHarmony to those of us who don’t yet know about its unique characteristics: eHarmony runs an online dating site for people interested in one thing – marriage. The company matches members based on “29 Key Dimensions of Compatibility” which are determined on the basis of 430 attributes that are filled out by each of its members.
The hour or so that it takes to fill out the required 430 attributes certainly hasn’t scared away many potential members. Between 10,000 and 15,000 people join eHarmony each day, adding to the company’s already strong base of over 12 million members. Of those members, roughly 24% have been willing to pay $49.95 monthly or $249.95 yearly for access to their proprietary matches (which, by the way, garners eHarmony a sh**load of profit).
According to eHarmony’s founder, Neil Clark Warren, the company is the best in the business! And he backs up his claim with real numbers: “90 eHarmony members get married every single day,” he says.
That works out to an astounding 32,850 eHarmony members married each year – more marriages, by far, than are attributed to any other dating sites… and enough marriages, perhaps, to convert even the most ardent doubters of the “meaningful connection” capabilities of current online technologies…
Well, not enough marriages to convert readers of this blog… at least, not yet! We know that 32,850 married members each year belong in eHarmony’s win column. But we don’t yet know what number belongs in its loss column. And we haven’t yet compared eHarmony’s stated marriage success rate with the marriage success rate of the U.S. singles population.
So let’s do the math:
· 45 marriages on eHarmony a day * 2 members per marriage = 90 married members per day.
· 90 married members per day * 365 days in a year = 32,850 married eHarmony members a year.
· 32,850 married eHarmony members a year / 12,000,000 eHarmony members = 0.274% of eHarmony members married per year (or 2.7 per 1000).
· Not bad…. if you’ve previously been looking for love in a space shuttle. The percentage of single people in the US who got hitched in 2004 (the most recent marriage census available) was 0.399%, (roughly 4 per 1000).
eHarmony members are paying high fees for the opportunity to use the latest available “matching” technologies. In reality, they are paying for a 0.274% chance of getting hitched with another eHarmony member in any given year. That’s 1/3 worse than the success rate of the U.S. singles population!
Now I know what you’re thinking, Anonymous: “How is it that dozens of PhD’s – whose full-time job is to get this stuff right – can get it so wrong? And how is it that U.S. singles overall – many of whom aren’t actively looking for a partner – can have a higher marriage rate than that of eHarmony members – all of whom have an expressed interest in finding marriage partners?
These are good questions, Anonymous, and I’m excited about finding answers together in these next few blog entries.
Best Regards,
Dan
Hi!
I found your blog entry via Technorati. It’s quite insightful. I’d like to offer though that eH has gathered 12 million profiles since inception. Thus you cannot use this figure as a denominator (divisor) in estimating and comparing success rates. Furthermore, some aren’t single, some are below 18, some are outside the U.S. (There exists people outside the U.S., you know, no matter how much Americans think that the world revolves around themselves.)
A better denominator is the number of currently-paying members, averaged in a year’s time. That’s the true success rate. Of course, eHarmony won’t give this figure away.
Thank you,
eHarmony Blog
http://www.pinoy.ca/eharmony/
eHarmony blog,
Thanks for the reply. You are right that eHarmony has 12 million (now, actually, apparently, 14+ million) profiles created “since inception”. But you are wrong in your other assumptions.
1. The number of users that have registered for eHarmony seeking marriages MUST be the denominator. Those who registered in 2002 and haven’t found partners on eHarmony MUST BE accounted for just as those who registered in 2002 and found marriages after 4 years of looking ARE accounted for.
2. eHarmony will not permit people under 18 or married people to use its services. There is are two significant deterrents to “faking” ones identity on eHarmony: a) the cost of the service, b) the fact that people on eHarmony are serious about making truthful, meaningful connections.
3. Though I don’t have the data, I am told that the vast majority of eHarmony users are in the US, where the vast majority of their marketing is. If you have conflicting data, I’d love to see it!
Best,
Dan
I think that it is intellectually dishonest, if not downright fraudulent, to refer to someone who has never paid for access to a dating site as a “member.” It’s a scam designed to make the service seem more active than it is.
If dating services were being honest about it, they’d use the number of actual paid subscribers, which is the only number that actually means something.
Fred,
1. All dating sites refer to those who have created a profile (or in eHarmony’s case, those who have filled out the hours long compatibility matching test) as “members”. Whether or not it’s intellectually dishonest (I see your point… but debatable) it’s become standard practice.
2. To not account for non-paying members artificially inflates the success of the service. Those who spend an hour or two filling out an eHarmony compatibility matching profile, and then — upon further inspection the site and decide not to become members — must be accounted for. They are like the kids who show up to the middle school party, hang out and talk, and then leave, without ever dancing. They were there… and they need to be accounted for… even if they didn’t do the “Fruit Roll Up” and “The Twist” like all the other kids.
Best,
Dan
I just want to point out that 0.274% is better then 0%. For me, it’s an option I’m trying. Thus far, my story is different from most other eHarmony-hate stories in that I currently have 2 open communications (i.e., two women have actually responded) and I’ve been matched with over two dozen matches. Options, even if they turn out to be the wrong ones, are better than having none at all.
It’s worthless to compare eHarmony’s marriage rate against the general population marriage rate because you don’t know if the distribution is the same. The people signing up for eHarmony are likely people who have NOT had success at dating, a subset of the general population. What if eharmony members are mostly made up of the part of the population that’s not having dating success? That’s why it makes more sense to compare it’s success numbers against other dating sites. Are they marrying people that were otherwise not getting married–not are they beating the general population.
I tried eHarmony for over a year, and my experience was that after a few months every profile started looking like words on a screen, not a person. I got tired of going through their process to talk to people. Also, for every result it gave me a very specific type of person. Maybe that was the most appropriate match, but it got boring.
Hello
I’m not from USA sorry my english is very bad I’m from Brazil and I see that eharmony is not a good single site, in the first time that you are there They don’t show you very plainness the status marital, have childreen or no childreen about the matches that you found there This is very vague
And the pics ? I authorized my matches see them in the first time But I’m not sure if they show or not because I don’t have seen anything there until now , It looks like a mysterious single site.
OK - there has to be something wrong with the math here. Did you mean that 3.9% of singles got married every year (so each single waits on average about 25 years before getting married - I don’t know quite how the US Census Bureau counts a “single” but this seems like a better number. If a single only gets married once every 250 years on average, we’re doomed.
However this really makes the eHarmony math look pretty bad, though perhaps not as bad as you thought:
The 12 million registered users is probably mostly cumulative as opposed to active. However, you can do it on rates:
Annually:
4.5 million registrants - ~ 1.1 (25% for simplicity) million of whom pay
33,000 members married in a 12 month period b/c of eHarmony
Assuming that paying doubles your chances of success:
——————
Annual new registrants: 4.5 million
Annual Marriges: 33k
Overall success rate: 7/1000 - 142 years
—-
Annual unpaying registrants: 3.4 million
Annual marriges: 19.8k
Unpaying success rate: 6/1000 - 166 years
—–
Annual Paying Registrants: 1.1 million
Annual Marriges: 13.2k
Paying Success Rate: 12/1000 - 83 years
—–
Population success rate: 39/1000
What it really means is that most eHarmony registrants find someone outside of that network. On average, it probably doesn’t help you get married, because if you spend time dating an eHarmony person, its just time you weren’t looking for someone in your direct network.
So, eHarmony only adds value if it results in markedly better marriages than would otherwise occur, which is the real goal of the company - it should be interesting to see how they do on that over time - their statistical underpinnings are actually pretty solid - they don’t fall into any of the normal pitfalls you see in statland.
Very interesting numbers. I will be the first to say, as a dating site webmaster, a lot of these sites are skewing their numbers. They can say PH.D all they want, but when it comes right down to it they are about as truthful as Congress.
“Now I know what you’re thinking, Anonymous: “How is it that dozens of PhD’s – whose full-time job is to get this stuff right – can get it so wrong? And how is it that U.S. singles overall – many of whom aren’t actively looking for a partner – can have a higher marriage rate than that of eHarmony members – all of whom have an expressed interest in finding marriage partners?”
There used to be an old saying about “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink”.
The sad fact is that most people haven’t spent the time in personal examination to know what it is they really need in a marital relationship. Most are far more concerned about what others will think about their future “mate”. (Are you looking for a significant other for yourself, or for your friends?)
Even if matched with the perfect person for them they will judge that individual by whatever hidden agendas (sometimes not so hidden) they may have. Such as “He’s not a doctor”,”She’s too flatchested”,”I don’t like the way they dress”, or some other equally assinine excuse.
If you put two people together and only one (or neither) of them is genuinely ready for a relationship the match will fail, no matter how good or “smart” the matching.
My experience with EHarmony was that I met basically the same mix of women I was already meeting elsewhere, with a few more emotionaly needy types than normal.
I agree with the blog. Your chances for success are better by being, active, sociable, and persistant in your local community. Save your money for dating when the time comes.
Actually…we’ll assume the guy knows what he is talking about with the 32,850 a year in marriages. This is per year. Taking an accumulated amount for the total members will skew the data for the yearly basis…better to take the total marriages, or the new members per year. Or take the daily 90 members married and divide by the 10,000 to 15,000 daily.
Best would be total marriages versus total members, but that requires data I don’t have…number of years the business has been in place. So:
32,850 a year, versus 3,650,000 new members a year on the low end is .9%, or 9 per 1000. On the high end with 5,475,000, it works out to .6% or 6 per 1000.
For the daily, since it is just the same numbers on a larger scale, the rates are the same. 90 people vs 10,000 to 15,000.
Now, the math gets worse. Worse as in fuzzier. 24% actually pay, which enables them to meet others, fall in whatever, and get married. That means that the 14,000,000 becomes 3,360,000 total(for paid). On a daily basis, we still have 90 members married(assumed to be paying), out of a pool of 2,400 paying on the low end, and 3,600 on the high end. Of course, these numbers aren’t actually confirmed, and thus should be discarded except for demonstration purposes. Too many assumptions.
But the odds look a lot better then comparing one years success to a lifetimes failures.
I tried it. I was rather disgusted with how superficial it was. I purposely did not post my picture. Most of my matches rejected me because I did not post a picture. (Eh..saw YOUR pictures.) I didn’t want to share my picture with a bunch of strangers. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have shared 456 questions with these idiots either. I was hoping someone would see the person inside me. Yup, anonymous dating is futile and stupid! Plus, being rejected by beggers and losers is not cool.
Here’s an E-Harmony communication for all the guys that rejected me because they couldn’t see my picture. After some intelligent conversation, you would have got:
I’ve been told I look like Jessica Lange complete with the bod. SOOOO…as many of your pictures looked like King Kong, you are probably standing up on a cliff, beating your chest and preparing to scale the Empire State building! cuz you couldn’t have me…you bunch of apes! Should have waited for the picture! I’m a highly decorated military woman, outstanding person, wonderful mom and I got money…
Your Loss! Anna or Fay Wray
I hate to bash eHarmony, but the premises are skewed. After watching my son fill out his profile, pay expensive fees and then go through a painfully slow introduction process followed by long distance calls and finally face to face meetings where there was no spark, I saw that the basic, healthy component of physical attraction is minimized in the “scientific” opinion list. However true it may be that relationships based on nothing more than sight appeal are bound to be empty and shallow, it is nonsense to pretend that attraction doesn’t matter. Withholding visuals is a trite, counterproductive attempt to de-emphasize one of the most significant criteria of them all.
I’m on eHarmony now and despite the so called matches I get I haven’t had much luck. I’m not sure about the math. Who really knows what the numbers are on either side, eHarmony or the U.S. census? I find that I start communicating with a match and get to the “Open” communication and everything stops. I keep things pretty lite. I don’t ask very deep questions at this point. My goal is to get to open communication. How much can you really know about a person in those few steps before? My goal after open communication is to get a date. I think many women, at least the ones I’ve communicated with get freaked out with the open communication, freeze up and just stop all together. My God, even if we went out face-to-face it doesn’t mean we’re going to get married. Everyone should lighten up and try to actually meet as many people as possible. That’s the only way your really going to know.
Anna, it sounds like you were pretty negative about eHarmony and the whole online thing to begin with so I’m not sure why you even tried it. I’m sure you are a great conversationalist and person but who would know for sure? Your little experiment closed everyone out. The truth is “Jessica Lange” men are visual. But not all men base everything on that. If after the first encounter or communication you couldn’t carry on a conversation and every other word was “like” then goodbye. Don’t tell me looks don’t matter. You enjoy the Jessica Lange comment someone gave to you regarding your looks. And, looks seem to matter to you as well “Eh..saw YOUR pictures” and referred to everyone as King Kong. Even Fay Ray’s character eventually fell for King Kong.
My personal experience with eHarmony? Two years ago, I joined, communicated with a few matches and ended up going on two dates. The first was a plesaant enough guy, just didn’t have that “connection”. The second? We seriously dated for one year, lived together for another and he just broke up with me last week. He was the love of my life for two years (so eH did that much right) but we didn’t end up together and I’m heartbroken so I kinda want my money back….
I’ve been a member of eHarmony for several months. I’m an educated, attractive, slender, fun-loving gal in my 50’s. What I’ve noticed is that the women in my age range get very few matches compared to the men who receive over a 100 matches per week.
What the women fail to realize is the abundance of ‘quality’ women per man/ratio. The women think because a man requests communication that he’s really interested in her - not realizing that she is only one of many other requests.
A male friend of mine allowed me onto his eHarmony match page. What I saw amazed me. Every week he receives about 100 matches from beautiful, accomplished, wonderful women. He has told me how picky he has become in meeting these women, and how this site has helped him feel like an attractive, sought after male.
I thought I’d found a wonderful man on eHarmony. We got past open communication, communicated by email and the telephone.
When we met there was a lot of chemistry and attraction. Sadly to say, he didn’t pursue me because I lived several hundred miles away an said it was “too much trouble” to travel to see me. I learned that on the way to meet me, hew was communicating with over 20 eHarmony ladies that he lead to believe were very, very special.
This guy made me think I was the love of his life, and that he wanted an exclusive relationship. All the time though, he was pursuing these other women on the site, while feeding them the same line.
While I didn’t expect exclusivity during the early stages of our relationship, I did come to realize that the site really caters to men - and in my opinion turns them into addicted, mid-life romeos who begin to have a very inflated opinion of themselves because of the abundance of women available.
Dr. Warren Clark sorta makes me sick. He doesn’t really explain what his site is really like in his many introductory advertisements.
I think the site is really artificial. It’s difficult to get to know someone because there are so many available women on the sidelines waiting to meet these ‘quality’ men. How do you become real, and really get to know someone when you know they don’t find value in you as a human being? It’s simply too easy for them to run away and say NEXT…………So women remain on their best behavior, hoping for that next date - which I find demeaning and ridiculous.
Not good! Found the site to be a waste of time. Learned that the men are overwhelmed with women. Learned that the odds are so slanted that while its possible, its probably not probable that
a woman in her 50’s will find a mate on this site. Being overwhelmed with matches only makes a man feel rather cocky, and self-assured - not taking the time to really get to know a woman, because there’s 100’s of ‘nexts’ waiting with a flip of the button.
What I came to believe about eHarmony after being a member for a year is that the older a female is the fewer the matches. Also, I came to believe that people may be “matched” with names that are no longer members, so it looks as if there has been a match, but the “match”, for all practical purposes, “doesn’t exist”. As a result, there is no way to continue on to “open communication”, b/c the “match” is only on the data-base, and not a member. Finally, I think that the site must be top-heavy with women, so that older men get lots of matches, whereas older women get fewer.
In the year I was a member, I actually had only one match which led to open communication. (All the others were closed out by the time I got their names.) When I sent my picture to this man he said, “Wowee!” and that I should have put my picture up initially, b/c he thought I would have gotten lots of responses. (Surprisingly, I’ve heard that that often backfires, in that people see a nice looking person and wonder what is “wrong” with her that she can’t find a date.)
I wrote to this man (the only match) for a while. He was nice and it was fun to communicate with an “actual match”. We both realized that we weren’t really compatible, but we had fun writing to each other. I asked him in one of my emails if he had gotten a lot of matches, since he had joined. He said he had about 25 women he was writing to and three that he was visiting. It just confirmed my opinion about eHarmony’s ability to actually match older women.
Previously to getting this one open match, I contacted eHarmony three times that I had had no open matches and that all the “matches” were closed before I ever got them. eHarmony customer reps were “surprised” and said that that was unusual. They suggested that I re-submit myself, so that I would be put into “a new batch”. Well, that happened 3 times. The very last time was when I got this one match (the one I mentioned above). I often wondered if he was slipped in just so that I would get a match. We certainly didn’t match anything that we had put down in the questionnaire.
I asked the reps on one of my calls to them, if people were matched up with names on a non-member list. No answer. I also asked if there were many men in my age bracket (50’s at the time). No answer. I also asked if once I drop eHarmony if my name would be left on the database and sent out to others as a potential match. No answer. (Who knows? Maybe others are now getting shut out before they ever have the opportunity to communicate with me, their “perfect match” :0), since I am not a member and don’t know about them. In any case, as you can probably surmise I won’t be showing up on eHarmony’s TV ads with “my soulmate”.
I knew two other women in younger age brackets who also never met anyone via eHarmony. None of us is weird or unattractive. I just believe that it’s hard to meet someone these days, eHarmony or not.
I am also having similiar experiences with e-harmony. Especially with the guided communication process. You can go through a bunch of hoops, finally get to open communication and then everything stops. Very frustrating. On top of that, the questions that people ask can range from everything to “describe your relationship with your parents” to “do you believe in traditional gender roles when it comes to marriage.” That’s a little deep for a first “meeting” I think. Let’s not jump the gun, here. I think it would be much better to judge compatibility if you could just write mormal casual emails to someone–or talk to them via their phone service. According to eharmony..some people can be shy, but if you need an icebreaker like eharmony’s guided communication process to be able to talk to someone–maybe you shouldnt be dating. I wonder if eharmony keeps this communication process because it makes the process of actually meeting someone take alot longer…
Also, they really should add some sort of search feature, because like someone else said, you cant really perfect finding a good relationship down to a science. Attraction has to be there too.
One more tip–I experimented with the serach radius–if you open your search up to the world or to your whole country thinking it will help you get more matches–I have found you are highly likely to get matches very far from where you live and not many that live near you–yet if you just limit it to the area close to where you live you get the same amount of matches–but in close distance. So although it seems counterintuitive, my advice is to only open up your search radius if you would really want a long distance relationship. Chances are, you will get the same number of matches eventually in feasible driving distance. This has only been my experience–so I can’t say for certain if its true but it seems to be.
How Do I Hate EHarmony? Let Me Count the Ways. . .
EHarmony is like going to a party with a super intrusive friend who insists on personally introducing you only to the people they feel are “compatible” for you, and who then insists on acting as a liason and running messages back and forth, when all you’d really wanted was to go start a conversation with that cute person across the room.
In terms of dating, I found their site time-consuming and difficult to use. I think that they use their “free personality quiz” as a marketing gimmick, which means that they send a lot of “matches” from people who are not actually using the service (and who you therefore won’t be able to contact). I didn’t get many matches from my county, or even from the adjoining counties (I am a decent-looking, fairly well-adjusted female 35-year-old PhD student). I DID get quite a few matches from middle-aged Asian businessmen, and from overweight 45 year-old machinists who lived in places that I’d never heard of and that were not nearby (not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with any of these things). I would get about 10 matches or updates like this each day, which quickly became overwhelming. When I tried to screen my matches myself, I had to wade through sometimes hundreds of “closed” matches to find any possible matches that I could contact. This was kind of a downer, to say the least. While I didn’t mind seeing “closed” matches,I wished that I could find the matches that DID work without having to scroll through pages of ones that didn’t.
When I finally did find a person who seemed interesting, I would “request communication” but get no response, most likely because that person wasn’t paying to use eHarmony. When I did find someone who responded, we had to go through a prolonged process of sending and receiving information and questions. It sometimes took weeks to even get to the point where I could actually email the person. Often one or both of us would lose interest or close our accounts before we could get to the email stage. Once during my three-month membership I got to the phone call stage with someone after a good 2-3 weeks of “guidance,” but then he never called me again. After several weeks of “guidance” with a second person, we got to the “open communication” email stage, but I THOUGHT I had closed my account and stopped using it, and I think eHarmony blocked out the email address I sent to the guy so that he couldn’t contact me unless I renewed my membership. In any case, finding a match with eHarmony turned out to be a time-consuming and arduous process to go through for men who lived 1-3 hours away and who didn’t seem to be that interested anyway.
I closed my account with eHarmony in December and then found on my Visa bill that the company has continued to charge me $29.95 per month for their service. When I called their customer service number, their agents, then their manager, said that they had no record that I had closed my account in December, and that I must not have followed their website’s directions correctly. When I asked them to mail me a letter acknowledging that I had closed my account, they said they were not able to send mail. They finally agreed to email an acknowledgment while I waited on the phone, but they were unable to get it to go through to my email. I suggested they send a letter, then I suggested another email address. Their agent finally became frustrated and agreed to refund one of the two months they’d overcharged me. I also had to separately request that I be taken off their email list — their spam rendered one of my inboxes almost unusable. Based only on the difficulty with closing an account, on the company’s apparent inability to keep or send records, and on the fact that the company will continue to bill you at their highest rate, I would not subscribe to eHarmony.
I went back to Match.com. They’re more open and more basic, but their website interface is much easier to use. Plus I learned that I prefer to have access to a wider range of people, and that I trust myself to screen out who I do and do not want to date.
I have been a member twice, once at age 58 and again at age 61. I got two radically different personality profiles and was matched to radically different types of women each time. So much for the scientific nature of the test. People do not have radical personality transformations at age 60 or so. I liked some of the matches the first time, but the matches the second time were colorless wimps. It is common for the women to post old photos and to claim things about themselves that are more socially desirable than their true characteristics.
Dear Moderator: append the following to my previous post.
What I found common to the two memberships was that as time went on the probability of finding a match I liked declined and the probability of their responding to a communication request declined.
Both times only three matches ended up at the full communication stage and these matches occurred in the first month.
On the statistics, you need to compare the marriage rate of the general public that wants to get married to the site rate.
In the late 70s I belonged to the Peninsula Bible Church singles group. They had about 500 members each Sunday. There was an average of one engagement announcement per week. This comes out to a 20% annual rate of finding a mate.
Another problem with the site statistics is that the rate is probably not uniform over age, gender, and reasons for being single. In my age group there are 10 women per man.