Searching is failing me at the moment
edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...
> 12-moth plan
> 6-month plan
Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan?
Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-month would make sense for dating, specifically.
I mean, if you are a dating app, you should be striving to get users to delete your app as fast as possible (for the right reason), not hang onto an annual subscription.
Just as you mention, successful finding a partner means as few "attempts" (apologies) as feasible, which in turn means two "lost customers" to the platform. That introduces a perverse incentive for the platform to "spoil" the dating to keep the customers. By making one long-spanning plan, the perverse incentive is lessened.
This is, as it happens, how professional matchmakers tend to charge.
You could always message people for free outside the platform, considering any profile worthy of messaging probably lists enough information to find them on, say, LinkedIn or Facebook, and users likely often drop their personal websites or Instagram/Twitter IDs on their dating profiles.
Hmm, I'm pretty sure that's been a business model for a very long time.
The (mostly) men answering these messages, pretending to be women, get paid around 0.15€ per reply. And obviously writing messages where they try to prolong the conversation and turn down real life meetings or changing to other (free) messaging system "for now"
I would have thought that of all places Scandinavia would not price-discriminate users based on their gender ...
Or until the women find out that all the men are online and figure out that maybe they need to get an account too?
I mean, the numbers are still close to 1:1 so ultimately it should work out if you treat men and women equally.
If you make men pay you are only propagating stereotypes that men should always pay (and indirectly as a result) that men should get more pay, and that men should be leaders and women should be followers. Treat both equally and start we start eliminating these stereotypes. Women can and should be leaders as well in modern society, including in initiating relationships.
I mean, in cave people times, yes, men had roles and women had roles, but this is 2021, and we should be a whole lot more civilized than assuming roles based on gender, no?
If the payment is a one-time advance payment, I would imagine this disincentives the business to truly do their best, since they already have your money.
I would think, idealistically, maybe the best model would be an advance payment but with a money-back guarantee of say half the payment if you don't find a match through them.
Legally establishing that you don't find a match could be troublesome though, since the "couple" that actually liked each other could both claim they didn't match, get their 50% back, but you as a business would have no recourse if they got together and lived their lives happily ever after, behind your back. You don't have "rights" to their personal life together as a business.
Unless of course it was a government-run dating service that had marriage, housing, and financial records of everyone. That might work. And for many reasons it's in the best interest of the government to get as many people married as possible.
The one thing single-shot service-provider businesses (including professional human matchmakers) will do, though, is to calculate a quote for their service, corresponding to how much trouble they think your account is going to be for them. They don't usually bill more if it turns out to be even more of a challenge, but they do refine their quote process after each experience.
Though also, back to refunds: a refund guarantee doesn't need to be part of an explicit business-model, to be part of the effective business model. Dating sites charge people's credit cards. Large one-time charges from unknown companies you don't have an ongoing relationship with are exactly the type of thing that banks/credit-card companies are happy to do charge-backs for. Whether they offer refunds or not, the system will offer refunds for them — and kill their business by taking away its payment-processing if too many users ask for said refunds.
And those companies are in the business of matching spherical cows in a vacuum.
Efficient markets are useful as a simple model, but you don’t get to wish away real-world problems by pretending the world conforms to that model.
It just-so-happens that dating sites don’t currently follow this model, because an external force (Match Group) came in and explicitly chose to consolidate the market into a cartel, where 95% of “competing” dating sites are actually in collusion due to shared ownership. But there’s no reason to expect that situation to last forever, any more than there’s reason to expect the dominance of the currently-dominant social network (MySpace/Facebook/etc.) to last forever.
Here’s why: it assumes that the only form of power or leverage that exists is supply and demand. However there are all kinds of forms of leverage in the real world. There is legal power. Voting. Guns. Unions. Price fixing. Cultural norms. Marketing. Blackmail. All of these are forms of leverage and they are not special cases; rather, supply and demand is one special case which comprises a fraction of the total pressure on wages and prices and success or failure at any moment.
I like to think defensively especially when it involves companies. What are they doing, and what do they stand to achieve?
These apps have not shown any value to their users, paywall their content and have an aggressive-long-term subscription model because they have optimised themselves straight into the garbage can, by thinking short term.
Yes, aspiring monogamists will fit your bill of people who "want to be off the site in 12 months" or sooner. That's one segment of your users, but it really isn't everyone by a long shot.
Plenty of users are signing up for the chance to meet ("get to know") a steady stream of people. We don't stigmatize people who subscribe to Netflix for many years so that they can keep watching different movies and shows. There's some segment of the dating-site world that has more of a Netflix model in mind.
Although I'm sure those users exist, I'm sure they aren't the majority of the world, who would rather just be happily married and get on with life? And even if not, these users who have different expectations should not be matching with the former.
And even amongst people who want to settle down, a fair share of them probably also wanna do a fair amount of looking around in their late teens through some point in their 20s, and maybe even early 30s.
Actually, given the extreme social stigma worldwide (even in the most progressive western countries) against casual hookups and low-commitment dating, people looking for "more of a Netflix model" will still gravitate towards the same sites ostensibly servicing those "who would rather just be happily married and get on with life"[0], because these services offer the widest choice of possible partners, while giving everyone plausible deniability.
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[0] - I think that, given aforementioned stigma, it's even hard to estimate how many people in a given age bracket want this, and how many just say they want this, because it's the only accepted thing to say out loud.
From experience: very few people have “something casual” set, but I know from female friends that there’s plenty of guys with “don’t know” or “relationship” set despite looking for something casual.
I think the okcupid papers called out how free dating is better aligned with users because they wouldn’t have to compete with the natural tendency to want to make more money through ongoing subscriptions.
Of course, I know friends who are continuously dating and plan on staying that way.
There are couples looking for other couples or thirds, there is the BDSM scene with people looking for casual play partners, and so on.
Just sort of overall, when your interest is in building a network, finding people to have casual sex/encounters with, a "stream of people to meet" as someone mentioned below, I think you'd want a different website/UI than these big dating sites seem to offer/encourage. That said, I've never used them, just speculating based on the ads I've seen over the years and how they paint themselves.
many users of that kind of profile are just outsourcing actual human interaction to dating apps that claim to solve it but are incapable of doing so
While there are specific sites for BDSM dating with more nuanced optoins, the ads for generic dating sites are all very "tame" and try to not deviate from the perceived norm too much (= "find a partner, have a happy family" type messaging)
The reason is that if you do, it's virtually impossible to get included in Ad networks and App Stores. So you naturally see only dating ads catering to the very conservative viewer.
Example: A BDSM dating site got banned from Googles Play Store after including a background image of a simple leather whip. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/devianceapp/status/1384015666185834501
no dating app is actually designed for that one use case, just like Cosmopolitan magazine, they are built on frustration and doing counterintuitive things designed for never reaching that kind of user's goal
They are designed to leave you constantly questioning the relationship you're in, knowing you could always find something better around the corner. They might get signups because people believe they can find a partner, but they keep customers because those people are addicted to the game of newer, "better" lovers.
It's another of many cases of businesses that claim to solve one problem, but really solve a different one that's not in the user's best interest.
For me as a fairly awkward and introverted person, who didn't naturally generate a high volume of new social contacts, one of the things I liked about online dating was that I could make choices more like an extroverted person. I didn't have to think, holy shit, I actually met somebody I get along with, and she seems to like me, I can't afford to let this go or I'll probably be completely alone again for years until I meet the next person. Instead, I could think, this is okay, but is this person a really good match for me? Does she bring out the best in me? Are we going to have disagreements about big life things?
In other words, I could meet somebody I liked, enjoy spending time with them, and still decide not to marry them. And do that over and over again until I met somebody I was confident was a really good fit for me. Like regular people do!
Even when finally I met my wife, it didn't immediately mean the end of dating other people. She had just started dating after many years of focusing on her career. In fact, after having a big heart-to-heart over wine with a close friend one evening about how she needed to start dating again, her friend helped her install Tinder, and I was the second person she matched with. Obviously, after many years out of the dating pool, she was leery of falling for the first halfway decent guy she met, so she wanted to take her time and see what was out there and figure out what she waned. To avoid going insane while she was meeting other guys, I kept meeting new women. We didn't become exclusive until six months after we met.
I think, if I had a single friend who was starting online dating, if they were using a paid app, I would recommend a 6-month plan or 12-month plan, as a reminder that they can afford to be patient and shouldn't rush into things.
The problem is I don't really think "fit" is an absolute thing. I think the reality is that there is a large set of people can be your best fit if you can grow together with them to be that best fit. A healthy relationship is about actually turning a local maximum into a global maximum by the function naturally and healthily changing to that effect, not assuming the function is constant and then hopping around looking for the global maximum and wondering whether you have reached it. One needs to find one of those people that they can grow with and commit to that growing, one where that local maximum is continually rising in prominence. Some degree of initial commitment and emotional investment without shopping around helps you see whether or not you can grow with that person. If growing together isn't possible, that's a big red flag and the relationship should end.
I agree with not committing after only 1 or 2 dates, but if the dates continue, I would sure hope for exclusivity a lot less than 12 months into it.
I do think any doubts you can put to rest in six months or a year, the time is worth it. Couples who divorce take years to do it, and I think they're unhappy for at least half that time.
So these platforms are only optimized for - Choice overload, Doom scrolling based on physical attractiveness.
I'm thinking of pivoting into this kind of business model: B2B. So I make my dating app something like GitLab or WordPress. You can install it and host it yourself. You pay me every month if your users exceeds 100.
Say, you are a priest or a gym owner. You have a community. You want your people in the community (church, gym) to have a chance to find a romantic partner inside the community. Anyone who wants to register in your dating app needs to be a member of your community first (church, gym). This way, I don't even hold the data (avoiding becoming a honeypot for hackers). I just want the money (in an ethical way).
What do you think? Is this ethical business model for a dating startup?
For the centralized dating app, maybe the subscription package can help them foster their relationship. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it.
Or you can create a bounty in the dating app for someone who can introduce a wonderful person to you. Then if you get married, the dating startup gets a cut from the bounty. The problem is how you verify whether people get married or not. Can we do something like bootcamps offering ISA that can access their students' tax records?
Ironically, online venue for a real-world network limited to verified members of that network was what Facebook itself originally was, until they realized opening up to everyone was the difference between a novelty for college students and a multi-trillion dollar world eater.
In this context, a "12 month plan" is just their bulk discount.