free vs paid sites

Recently the IAC, had acquired a new rotten fish, Speeddate. They can not innovate any more and acquire online dating companies in order to lower high acquisition costs from paid online dating sites (they can not abandon the attracting, converting and retaining marketing stages; the automatic renewal of their members's subscriptions with dirty credit-card billing trickery).

Free/freemium online dating sites like PlentyOfFish and OKCupid are only marketing tools useful to send prospective customers to paid online dating sites like Chemistry and eHarmony.
When free users got tired of free sites, they migrate to a paid one.


Revenue of IAC Personals (Match, Chemistry, OKCupid, Meetic, ParPerfeito, MeeticAffinity, SinglesNet, People's Media Communities, DateHookUp and others) is in the range of USD750 million.
Revenue of eHarmony' sites (USA, Canada, Australia, UK and Brazil) is in the range of USD250 million.

Revenue of IAC Personals + Revenue of eHarmony' sites == USD1,000 Million == USD1B

Revenue of PlentyOfFish Media's sites (PlentyOfFish, eVow and several dating sites powered by a white label dating company) is in the range of USD40 million.

USD40million / USD1,000 Million == 4% of market (in revenue).
PlentyOfFish has the traffic but others receive the money.

Anyway the market remains enormous for new players.

The IAC instead of acquired Speeddate, they should had put USD10 million and develop a new compatibility matching site to replace Chemistry.

"2 Million active daily registered users in the US
550,000 active daily registered users in the UK
450,000 active daily registered users in Canada"
"Signing up approximately 1 million new users every week. Only about 7% of them are paying us."
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NO INNOVATIONS SINCE YEARS IN THE ONLINE DATING INDUSTRY.
C level executives are cooking barbecues under the water (selling smoke) and not paying attention to latest research from Academics which could be beneficial for the Online Dating Industry. Wasting precious time with Matchmakers which should be obsolete. 
Actual matching algorithms used by eHarmony, Chemistry, PlentyOfFish and others, even behavioural recommender systems, can not be improved, they need to be discarded NOW. Because they are in the range of 3 to 4 prospective mates as selected / recommended / compatible for dating purposes per 1,000 members screened in the database. They all 3 are performing the same for serious daters, with a high percentage of false positives, like gun machines firing flowers.
They can not break the online dating sound barrier!
You do not need to improve a piston engine when you need a jet engine to break sound barrier.

That range convergence phenomenon is what I had called "the online dating sound barrier", in 2003, when I had discovered than problem, 10 long years ago.

WorldWide, there are over 5,000 -five thousand- online dating sites
but no one is using the 16PF5 (or similar) to assess personality of its members!
but no one calculates similarity with a quantized pattern comparison method!
but no one can show Compatibility Distribution Curves to each and every of its members!
but no one is scientifically proven!

I had reviewed over 55 compatibility matching engines intended for serious dating since 2003, when I had discovered "the online dating sound barrier" problem.

Breaking "the online dating sound barrier" is to achieve at least:
3 most compatible persons in a 100,000 persons database.
12 most compatible persons in a 1,000,000 persons database.
48 most compatible persons in a 10,000,000 persons database.
100 times better than Compatibility Matching Algorithms used by actual online dating sites!

The only way to achieve that is:
- using the 16PF5 normative personality test, available in different languages to assess personality of members, or a proprietary test with exactly the same traits of the 16PF5.
The ensemble of the 16PF5 is: 10E16, big number as All World Population is nearly 7.0 * 10E9
- expressing compatibility with eight decimals, like The pattern 6.7.6.8.9.6.7.7.8.7.2.5.8.7.3.4 is 92.55033557% +/- 0.00000001% similar to the pattern 7.7.6.8.8.7.6.5.8.7.4.5.7.7.3.4
Using a quantized pattern comparison method (part of pattern recognition by cross-correlation) to calculate similarity between prospective mates.

That is the only way to INNOVATE and revolutionize the Online Dating Industry.

High precision in matching algorithms is precisely the key to open the door and leave the infancy of compatibility testing.
It is all about achieving the eighth decimal!
With 8 decimals, you have more precision than any person could achieve by searching on one's own, but the only way to achieve the eighth decimal is using analysis and correlation with quantized patterns.


Without offering the NORMATIVE16PF5 (or similar test measuring exactly the 16 personality factors) for serious dating, it will be impossible to innovate and revolutionize the Online Dating Industry
All other proposals are NOISE and perform as placebo.