eHarmony? IPO? Oh god...

money.cnn.com

4 points·myoung8··4 comments

Say it ain't so.

$59 a month? Are you kidding me? If people want a product like this that badly, its no wonder free competitors like PlentyOfFish have done so well. I am simply shocked the monthly fees are so ridiculous. People actually pay that?

In light of this, date matching with mobile devices (bluetooth or GPS enabled) could be a tremendous opportunity.

You can actually get a much cheaper monthly rate if you commit to several months. I don't remember exactly but it's something like $35/mo for 3 months and $25/mo for 6 months (the article quotes a $21/mo figure for a whole year), and when that time is up they continue billing at the reduced rate. They also offer ex-members lots of deals (which seems like blatant price discrimination to me)

Also, the membership fee and the sign-up process is designed to weed people out as much as it is designed to attract people.

My startup is similar to eharmony and chemistry. We have more than 800 users in Mexico. But we still don't know how to make money. The trick is that advertisement is expensive and people are secretive about their use of the service and they don't tell their friends.

> The trick is that advertisement is expensive

Dating keywords are bid up, way, way up.

I am in a similar boat with a small advertising budget, for the past 2 years I have been using www.adbrite.com. At first it takes spending some time getting ads on sites to determine if they could drive the right traffic but now I am saving a huge sum over what I was spending on Google ads. My marketing budget is really low, about $2 a day so I am really serious about getting the right traffic instead of junk traffic.

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