OkCupid is a terrible service. It disassociates real people who don't pay, and encourages fraudulent scams such as pig butchering. Bots are ridiculously easy to spot. You can end up in an endless loop of the same rejects unless you start blocking them.
On the other hand, I met my wife there and my two children wouldn’t exist if not for it. That said, the OkCupid of today and that of 2011 when I used it are probably quite different.
Unfortunately most consumers are unwilling to pay what something is worth to them. Businesses are often the same so it isn't just consumer behaviour.
Meeting the right person should be worth a lot, and we should be happy to pay thousands for that.
Of course the profit depends on the user statistics too: I'm not sure what the economic term for profit thresholds for power law masses versus targeting - where say lots of users with a low profits per user (say advertising) beats reasonable profits per user (say kagle).
It's because we loosely understand that value based pricing is a scam.
An insulin shot at the right moment can be of unlimited value to the consumer. SaaS salesmen try to capture the entire value add a tool gives a user, but this seems to kill companies as the price a competitor can undercut by is huge (so much that the original price seems exploitative).
Basically any marketing based on the "value to me" I'm sceptical of.
An approach with transparency, that shows "this is what delivering an actually good product costs", might be possible...
The problem is most people won't send in a check to the matchmaker when they get married (or whatever the success criteria is). You've got to pay before the introduction, and you can't know if the introduction will be good before you have it.
E-Harmony seemed like it was going for the pay a bit more, one time, and you'll take who you get and be done. But I don't know if that worked for them.
"A Jewish man goes into the synagogue and prays. "O Lord, you know the mess I'm in, please let me win the lottery."
The next week, he's back again, and this time he's complaining. "O Lord, didn't you hear my prayer last week? I'll lose everything I hold dear unless I win the lottery."
The third week, he comes back to the synagogue, and this time he's desperate. "O Lord, this is the third time I've prayed to you to let me win the lottery! I ask and I plead and still you don't help me!"
Suddenly a booming voice sounds from heaven. "Benny, Benny, be reasonable. Meet me half way. Buy a lottery ticket!""
It seems like these dating services could hold the bulk of the money in escrow pending the marriage. Maybe you pay a few hundred up front, but a few thousand in escrow, and when you get married, it gets paid out.
Well, you can't marry who you never meet.
What would it be worth for you to pay a bribe to a time traveler not to go into the past to prevent your parents from ever meeting? ;)
Perhaps not. But you could still imagine a for-profit matchmaking service that would do a better job of aligning its interests with those of its clients. For example, it could collect only a small fee upfront with an agreement that if you meet Mr. or Ms. Right you'll release a larger fee held in escrow.
I imagine that would need to be quite personalized and high touch, but it would be an appealing contrast to standard dating sites, which have interests diametrically opposed to those of their users: a user who makes a long-term match will stop paying the membership fee, so the site owner has no real incentive to help the user do anything but churn.
I mean, if I had the time, I would create a non-profit to do so.
And yes, there are probably small mom-and-pop types of businesses that just want to keep their status quo.
I believe I've heard a few years ago, that at least one country operates a dating service for their citizens. I can't find it now, but apparently the Tokyo Metropolitan Government just launched their own dating app, "TOKYO Enmusubi"
Same, although for us it was 2015. But that is 10 years ago (noooo I hate getting old), and to your point I can imagine it changing a ton in that time.
