Dating Services

Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch got in contact with Greg Blatt, the new CEO of Match.com to get a comment regarding the recent New York federal court suit filed by Sean McGinn (see Story) According to Blatt in a statement he made to OPW:

Match.com’s continued success depends upon the success of our members in making online connections and turning them into meaningful relationships offline. The allegation that we would deceive our subscribers by encouraging them to connect with inactive members therefore makes no sense and is contradicted by our 14-year record and the hundreds of thousands of members who find someone special on Match.com every year. We understand that finding romance, offline or online, can at times be emotional and personal, and we wish Mr. McGinn well in his search. But his lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend it vigorously.

It is true, Match.com for the most part does not let you know when you are searching that the dating profiles you are viewing are from paying members or not. The only time you can tell for sure is if the member has the Profile Highlight feature (it is highlighted in red). Most other paid dating sites (like eHarmony) operate the same way. What Match.com does do is attempt to return the most active members on the site that fit within your search criteria. Most active users are either the ones paying for the service to find a partner or new to the service looking to see what Match.com offers. What Match hopes with this strategy is when a paid user messages a new user, it will entice them to signup.

Despite how this suit goes, I bet Match will speed up the process of getting the new Platinum Membership out to all markets (Story). It's almost like they saw this suit coming since the Platinum Membership allows paid members to receive messages from any member they have contacted, whether or not they are a free or paid member of the dating service.

On Tuesday we reported that Plenty Of Fish was down for over 10 hours. Today we found out why. Late Monday a power outage made POF go offline. With the website already down, it was decided that it was a good time to upgrade the core database server (both hardware and software) which hadn't been touched since 2005. Users of the dating site should see significant increase in speed of the site loading, especially during peak times.

We also found out that there is an upgraded scheduled for image serving. Nearly 10,000 images on average are served per second on POF and they currently have over 200 million images stored. Will we see additional downtime next week while this upgrade is performed? Markus didn't mention any but we may see one if moving image servers doesn't go off without a hitch.

We have had a run of press releases over the last week or so dealing with dating services. I found one for eHarmony in which they have chosen to use the fraud-fighting technology called the Interceptas platform, from Accertify. eHarmony reviewed several fraud detection systems and found the platform from Accertify would enhance their fraud-fighting capabilities the best. Interceptas is a tool for e-commerce websites and it:

provides comprehensive fraud-fighting tools and components in a single, integrated system that allows merchants to integrate more data into the fraud-fighting process for improved screening success. The platform can be used to manage a variety of data management challenges across the enterprise. In addition, its automated workflow features strengthen fraud defenses and reduce the manual effort involved in fraud protection.

Incereptas is just one of the many systems eHarmony uses for a multi-pronged fraud protection strategy.

For more information on the dating site mention in this article, check out our eHarmony Review.

On June 5th, 2009, IAC completed the deal previously announced in early May with Meetic (see Story). IAC sold Match.com European operations for 27 percent equity stake in Meetic along with a 5 million Euro promissory note.

The Online Dating Insider pointed out that Hannah Schwartz of the Australian dating site RSVP said that their membership is up 31 percent this quarter when compared to the same quarter last year. Schwartz states in the following video (around the 6 minute 27 second mark) that the membership increase is driven mainly by woman and the total membership number for RSVP is now over 1.4 million.



She further states that when surveyed, members have turned to online dating due to the recession, and the need to cut back expenses.

For more on this popular Australian dating site, read our RSVP review.

On Tuesday, Match.com was sued in New York federal court by Sean McGinn for $5 million. This New York man alleges Match.com deceives its members by posting profiles of dates who cannot respond to communication requests, since they have not paid for a subscription. McGinn attorney, Noah Hart says people leave the dating site feeling completely "ignored and rejected" since no one replies to their emails. Hart is hoping to turn this suit into a class action.

Online dating sites have been sued a number of times lately. eHarmony has been sued at least twice, over gay rights issues (see Story) and in March True.com was forced to pay a $1.5 million settlement in regards to their auto billing and renewal practices of memberships (see Story).