Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating « OkTrends
gwern.net Created: January 18, 2025 Updated: February 26, 2026 article
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Curator's note
Paying for online dating is often a calculated trap. The article reveals that platforms like Match.com are designed to keep you single because your subscription is their profit. They use "zombie profiles" of inactive users to lure you in, making you pay to message people who will never reply.
Essentially, these sites sell the illusion of opportunity while sabotaging your actual success. It’s a provocative look at how algorithms prioritize revenue over romance—a must-read for anyone tired of swiping into the void!
Highlights
As a founder of OkCupid I'm of course motivated to point out our competitors' flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt. But I intend to show, just by doing some simple calculations, that pay dating is a bad idea; actually, I won't be showing this so much as the pay sites themselves, because most of the data I'll use is from Match and eHarmony's own public statements. I'll list my sources at the bottom of the post, in case you want to check.
Pay Sites Want You To Message These Dead Profiles
The Desperation Feedback Loop Even more so than in real life, where fluid social situations can allow either gender to take the "lead", men drive interactions in online dating. Our data suggest that men send nearly 4 times as many first messages as women and conduct about twice the match searches. Thus, to examine how the problem of ghost profiles affects the men on pay dating sites is to examine their effect on the whole system.
When emailing a real profile, a man can expect a reply about 30% of the time. We've conducted extensive research on this, and you can read more about it our other posts. Let's couple this 30% reply rate with the fact that only 1 in every 30 profiles on a pay site is a viable profile. We get: 3/10 × 1/30 = 1/100 That is, a man can expect a reply to 1 in every 100 messages he sends to a random profile on a pay site. The sites of course don't show you completely random profiles, but as we've seen they have an incentive to show you nonsubscribers. Even if they do heavy filtering and just 2 of 3 profiles they show you are ghosts, you're still looking at a paltry 10% reply rate.