Dinner at Tiffanys

Scarlett O'Hara may have dramatically vowed to herself that she'd never go hungry again, but then again she didn't live in the era of Match.com. According to a Business Insider article today, a young woman in New York named Jessica Sporty used the dating service in order to save on her grocery bills. You see, men would buy her expensive meals and dinners, and in return, all she had to do was go on a date with them.

What a very novel transactional process.

From the "trend" piece:

Sporty went from easily spending $500 a month on dinners alone to having someone else dole out an average of $60-plus per night. She also stopped eating lunch and opted for a light breakfast to save even more.

According to our calculations, Sporty made over $1,200 a month.

Match.com does require a $50 monthly subscription, but the dates more than made up for the entry price.

“I mean, a guy buys me three drinks at $15 a pop and that right there made up for my Match fee,” said Sporty...

Well first of all...she didn't MAKE that money, she saved it. But the sad thing about this item isn't the obvious and tired prostitution/Holly GoLightly comparison--hell, we all appreciate a free meal now and then--but how Ms. Sporty's story is touted as some sort of frugal economic advice. You see, she and her roommates were very thorough about their dining expenses:

One of them called for making spreadsheets about each guy who took them out for their drinks and/or meals. It included names, photos and details from their Match.com accounts.

The girls also let each other know where they were going for the night. And they never let guys pick them up at their apartment and instead met up at a public location.

But back in April, when OKCupid wrote a post called "Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating," the companies weren't so sweet on each other.

OKCupid's datahound Christian Rudder used publicly available data to guess at the success rates of eHarmony and Match.com, and decided they came up short.

"Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize," Mr. Rudder wrote, before launching into an analysis that concluded that more than 93 percent of Match's profiles were "dead," meaning abandoned or owned by free-riding users who haven't paid for the ability to respond.

"It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com," he wrote.

Now that Match.com has bought OKCupid, that post has been removed from OKCupid's blog--setting off suspicions about whether the acquisition means the scrappy, fun OKCupid is being forced to button up by its new owners.

But Match.com didn't ask OKCupid to take down the post, CEO Sam Yagan told The Observer, it was just the "common sense thing to do."

"I know everyone wants to make a big deal out of this," he said. "They didn't tell us take it down. I wanted to do it. ... We obviously believe in a free model but there are also paid models and I didn't think [the post's] continued existence served much of a purpose. People will say, 'Oh my God, they've sold out and they're censoring it,' that's fine. When we put our next blog post next week and keep being awesome and the product keeps being awesome and free, people will just realize they're overreacting."

Furthermore, the data that OKCupid gathered from Match.com's public filings and press kit were not completely accurate, he said, which he realized once he saw the real data.

"Upon having more knowledge as we've gone through the process of getting to know Match and them getting to know us, some of the conclusions we drew are not quite as exaggerated as we made them out to be," he said.

Mr. Yagan did not reveal what the real data says or how big the discrepancy was, but said that Match.com is better at getting people together than he originally believed. "In general the totality of data that we have become exposed to leads us to believe that yes, the subscription sites are probably more successful than the post made them out to be," he said.

And even though the two sites are now playing for the same team, it'll be business as usual at OKCupid's Midtown office, he said. OKCupid will remain free and OKTrends will keep publishing the popular research it culls from its members. (Data from Match.com and its affiliated sites will not be included.)

Match and its associated sites may run ads on OKCupid, but that hasn't happened yet and the intention is not to have OKCupid be a feeder site for the subscription sites, he said, Match.com just wants to have a full portfolio of different kinds of dating sites. "I don't know what their grand strategy is. Right now we don't run any Match ads... the plan is just for each of the sites to run their own business. Where there are opportunities to cooperate we want to and we will."

"We're not moving offices. We're not integrating the user bases, not integrating the technology platforms, not integrating the brands," he said. "I'm running the business and I don't know how to run a subscription business. It's not something I've done or want to do."

OKCupid has about seven million users, most of whom joined over the last two years even though the site has been up for five. They're rolling out a mobile app that will be location-aware in the next few months.

It will be interesting to see if the acquisition has any visible impact on OKCupid, but from talking to Mr. Yagan it sounds like it won't. 

"I think the most successful acquisitions are those where not a lot is done to radically change the business model of the company," he said.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The press release indicates that OKCupid will not be shut down and its users siphoned into one of Match.com's subscription-based dating sites. OKCupid cofounder Sam Yagan will head up the company's New York office and continue to run the company's day-to-day operations. "We are excited to join forces with Match because it is clear that no company is more committed to helping people find relationships," he said. "This marriage offers us the best of both worlds: the autonomy to continue pursuing OkCupid's original vision and the ability to leverage Match's reach and expertise to grow even faster."

Match.com and OKCupid are now owned by New York's IAC, which operates some of the best-known properties on the web.

There's already speculation that OKCupid will lose some of its fun hipster personality. Already a blog post titled, "Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating," has been removed.

An excerpt from that post:

Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize.

For one thing, their business model exacerbates a problem found on every dating site:

Women get too many bad matches

Men get far too few replies

For another thing, as I'll explain, pay sites have a unique incentive to profit from their customers' disappointment.

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.

...

It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com.

...

So next time you hear Match or eHarmony talking about how huge they are, you should do like I do and think of Goliath-and how he probably bragged all the time about how much he could bench. Then you should go sign up for OkCupid.

Hopefully OKCupid will keep its personality and its trendy trends blog intact despite being acquired by its 16-year old cousin.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

New York-based BNTER.com is a Twitter-esque site for posting clips of conversations that take place via text message, instant message or with voices in actual real life. Some of New York's techsters have really taken to BNTRing their witticisms, puns and moments of zen. Occasionally we reproduce those here.

New York's HowAboutWe has a simple concept.

Set up a dating site that revolves around date ideas so users get out and meet each other, instead of trolling each other's profiles and messaging back and forth eternally. (Getting people off the internet? Sounds like another startup The Observer profiled this morning).

Competitor Match.com added a similar feature this week called DateSpark. "DateSpark is heavily inspired by HowAboutWe," writes David Evans at Online Dating Insider. "In fact it's pretty much a direct copy of what I consider to be 2010's hottest dating startup."

In response, HowAboutWe is Letting Match.com users sign up for three months for free.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries