eHarmony eats the long tail
Posted: April 9th, 2007 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Media And Advertising | CommentsA woman I met on another personals site used as her profile tagline “eHarmony said I was unmatchable.” I had never used eHarmony, but I was nearly certain that she was joking. Wasn’t the whole point of online dating to give each individual access to such a wide range of personality types that the chances of there not being at least one match worth investigating was infintessimal? Wasn’t each personals site effectively a database that could be queried by each user?
In the case of eHarmony, the answer is no. I logged in as a new user and answered a long series of surveys, reassured by sidebar testimonials and progress bars that I was doing something good for myself, and almost done doing it. When I was finished, I was depressed to discover that I, too, had been rejected:
I went on to the free personality profile, hoping to glean some understanding of why I’m so unlovable, and found that after all the forms I’d filled out, eHarmony had rated me in four categories:
- agreeableness
- openness
- emotional stability
- conscientiousness
- extraversion
The accompanying explanations heavily imply that my low scores in some or all of these areas are what makes me hard to match with other people.
Note that I’m not being told that there isn’t anyone who matches me in the database. It’s clear that my profile wasn’t even compared to anyone else’s. The issue is that eHarmony does not operate from the assumption that everyone is matchable. Rather, they operate from the assumption that compatibility takes a certain combination of characteristics. If you meet the criteria, they put you in the pool. If not, they don’t even bother.
This is an interesting business model. Why not allow argumentative, emotionally unstable introverts to hook up with each other if that’s what they want?
It takes a bit of reading between the lines, but I think the reasoning goes something like this:
- eHarmony doesn’t believe that such matches can actually be worthwhile.
- eHarmony refuses to endorse matches that are not between two people who share a core set of values that eHarmony also shares.
Of course, the folks at eHarmony can do whatever they like. But it might be more in the spirit of “openness” and “conscientiousness” to admit up front that what they’re doing isn’t matchmaking. It’s preaching.
Could be preaching, or a genius velvet-rope spin on word of mouth marketing. See, I hate those eharmony commercials. The guy creeps me out (years ago when I first saw the commercial, I was convinced it was some sort of scientology-owned matchmaking service). Also, the “success story” clients on the commercials are so frumpy and bland, every single one of them. It is like an advertisement for averageness.
Never would I have considered checking out their “free personality profile” if it weren’t for your post. Just knowing that people actually get rejected, well, I HAD to find out if I was eharmony-worthy. I’d be willing to bet that the people they reject deliver 10x more traffic than the people who are not just accepted, but found the love of their life on eharmony.
For the record, I did get past the velvet rope, apparently I’ve proven myself to be eharmonious. Since I have no interest in actually using their service, I hope deleting my profile won’t take as long as it did to fill out their personality survey!
I agree eHarmony really misses the boat. How can they have a match making site and not care about a good match pool. I can understand focusing a site to a heterosexual market. Interestingly enough I found a site that is trying to collect these “rejects” – http://www.bemyeharmonyreject.com/dating/. Also I heard that eharmony is starting to change its tune abit. We shall see if people are satisfied with any pending changes.
I tried to fill out the profile to see if I too would be rejected. It was too much work and I gave up….
I guess the site would be describe me as too lazy…
Sunita, I think that is probably a common experience. Registering takes forever, and when you know that they might actually reject you as a customer, your incentive to continue can easily wane.
Interestingly, okcupid also asks an endless series of questions. But in their case, even though there really are an infinite amount of questions (most are user-generated, so there are more every minute), you can stop answering them whenever you want to, and still participate.
However, I grew bored with the service and deleted my account without every meeting anybody.
When registering some years ago, I got the “incompatible” message too – but my assumption is that it related to income.
I always wondered how “compatible” e-Harmony would determine me to be if I posted an annual income of 6 figures. Would they have really let me go? Kinda doubt it…
E-Harmony is a Christian front. Seriously.
i recently started using eharmony and it’s actually been okay (i’m on my fourth day here) but after reading the last comment here about it being a Christian front, I have to say…I don’t know if there are really just a lot of religious people out there…but it’s come up with maybe 20+ matches so far and more than half of them list their Christian faith and God as being EXTREMELY important to them…which I’m not gonna lie, I found kind of strange considering I was pretty clear about the fact that I am not a religious person.
I was rejected yesterday instantly after spending over hour filling out radio-dial questionnaire that went ridiculously long. Only had about 4 places where I actually typed in comments – isn’t that better description than marking radio-dial answers to one word descriptions?? I thought instant response to my questionnaire response was very insensitive especially for those of us starting out again after long dry spell. The Personality Profile was way off – didn’t even sound like meïŒ Gather from these comments above me saved me a heap of money.
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