eHarmony Responds to Marriage Numbers Article

I am glad to see eHarmony responding in their official blog to an article titled "Marriage-Maker Claims Are Tied in Knots " from the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ article examines some of the marriage statistics released by dating sites like eHarmony as well as the methodology used to calculate such statistics. We talked a bit about this topic as well, a couple of weeks ago when the original WSJ article was published (see Story).

The WSJ article didn't look to kindly on the stats released by dating sites, and for the most part I agree with the author. The public does need to know how these statistics are generated. Of all the dating sites mentioned in the WSJ article, "eHarmony stands out as among the more careful ones". This is not exactly a glowing report for eHarmony so, they decided to post a response on their blog.

In the eHarmony blog post they go into further details on how they calculated that their dating site was responsible for 2% of marriages in the United States, from the 12-month period ending March 2007. Most of the information we already knew about from a previously released PDF file titled "eHarmony | Harris Interactive 2007 Marriage Metrics Number of eHarmony Marriages" (see Story), but the post does flush out a few more details. What this blog post does show is, eHarmony is trying to be as open and transparent with their research findings as possible. I think the name "Open Communication" may indeed be a good choice for the official eHarmony blog.

Here is the full eHarmony response to the Wall Street Journal about how they calculate their marriage statistics. For further information about this dating site, read our review of eHarmony.