This is the eHarmony Business Plan: They just need lots of members like Cathy, and they’ll be all set

Read why Cathy of S. Setauket, NY. is the perfect eHarmony customer. Those who run eHarmony must be so delighted to have customers like her.

I became a member back in 2007, and up until 2009 was regularly notified of matches, and able to retrieve information by computer. The last time I received anything from e-harmony was earlier in 2009. Yet each month they renew my payment, and you cannot e-mail them, tried their help e-mail which states at bottom of your bill each month after it has been deducted, if you need to contact us go to and gives e-mail. there you will find a web form to send us an e-mail with your specific inquiry. Do not respond to this e-mail.

Well, I know that tomorrow the 12th is the day they take the automatic payment, and I have gone to every site they have for hours tonight to inform them I still have no contacts, no e-mailed matches, and it has been months, the web site does come up but no such form to be able to write them. When I try writing my complaint in the little box, it comes back these are not familiar words, we cannot help. I am so frustrated, and upset that almost a year has passed and I spend 20.00 each month to get no type of connection, and no way at all to contact them. These payments have been deducted for months and months, and I have nothing for it. and no way of talking to someone a real person to help me. (June 11, 2010)

Do you like this article? Post a comment on Facebook

What others are reading right now

Comments 12

John wrote:
So… going over months and months of posts, I definitely see a gradual change in people’s complaints, and your posts.

It started off with making recommendations on how to tweak the questionnaire, or answer questions while communicating, increase matches…

As time went by, I see more and more negative articles – and less and less solutions how we can work the existing system despite its shortcomings. Or… maybe it is just me.
Posted 28 Jun 2010 at 6:47 pm ¶
eharmonyblog wrote:
I hear you, John. Scott Grey, what do you think? Do you agree? Has the blog run its course?
Posted 28 Jun 2010 at 8:04 pm ¶
Uncle Fester wrote:
This blog stopped being useful at least two years ago.
Posted 28 Jun 2010 at 9:40 pm ¶
john wrote:
No… I did not mean to imply that the blog ran its course. There is plenty more to discover and share with others as it comes to eH.

I just think it has taken a more negative turn. That is less of ‘how we can make eH work for us’, and more of ‘eH is terrible – let us just get our money back’ posts . . .

Looking at eH and other dating sites, they have made little changes and grown little over time. Fernando continues to harp about that their methodology is terrible, but his only solution is to implement his 16PF5 or whatever on a different site.

Yet, we live with eH. We have eH here and now. So we either use it, or turn away and become despondent as far as online dating goes. If statistics are true, soon majority of developed nations’ people will be find their dates and mates online – it will be the norm, not the exception. People will be amazed at couples who hooked up at a bar or a social gathering.

Furthermore, this blog is still in an exclusive niche market. There are no comprehensive eH resource, not sponsored by eH, out there. That makes it unique and powerful. This blog has the ability to be both positive and negative without reprecautions.

Do not dump out the gold from your pan, just because it is sitting under some silt… continue panning.
Posted 29 Jun 2010 at 9:21 am ¶
Fernando Ardenghi wrote:
I do not know if the story of Cathy is really true, but the problem she describes is common to all actual online dating sites.
Owners and C-level executives of major online dating sites are more worried in attracting, converting and retaining subscribers with automatic renewal of their subscriptions and other credit-card billing trickery, than offering a good compatibility matching method.

eHarmony is a 10 (ten) years old site. During last 10 years eHarmony Labs could not prove its matching algorithm can match prospective partners who will have more stable and satisfying relationships than couples matched by chance, astrological destiny, personal preferences, searching on one’s own, or other technique as the control group in a peer_reviewed Scientific Paper.

Which is the purpose of eHarmony Labs? It is only a smoke curtain, a bluff. Lots of PhD’s draining huge salaries.

Have you seen that eDarling (eHarmony owns 30%) is eHarmony rebranded and improved for some European countries like Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland. ?

The new proposals like the ones offered by the new PlentyOfFish Marriage predictor, eDarling, 12like/VisualDNA, IntroAnalytics, MatchMatrix, Moonit, LittleHint, MatchMatrix and similars, are not better than the old ones. Because they only use different versions of the Big5 or other proprietary models instead (like Chemistry or PerfectMatch) to measure personality traits.

They are all like placebo, because they are delivering ON AVERAGE 3 to 4 prospective mates as highly compatible persons per 1,000 persons screened, in exactly the same range as searching on one’s own, with a high percentage of false positives, like gun machines shooting flowers.

It seems Investors, Owners and C-level executives of major online dating sites does not understand that:
WorldWide, there are 5,000 -over five thousand- online dating sites
but no one
is using the 16PF5 (or similar like 15FQ+) 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!

All major paid Online Dating sites are old and in decadence losing traffic since January 2009, 18 long months losing traffic. They had been resting on the laurels of past glories since years. It is not due to the traction of Facebook, it is the Online Dating Fatigue Phenomenon due to Obsolescence of Dating Sites offering Compatibility Matching Methods.

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
Posted 29 Jun 2010 at 7:58 pm ¶
john wrote:
@Fernando, you are so focused, you cannot see the forest from your 16PF5 tree.
Posted 29 Jun 2010 at 8:57 pm ¶
Fernando Ardenghi wrote:
@John

Which forest John?

It seems you do not understand that the 16PF5 test is the KEY to open the door and leave the infancy of compatibility testing.

Do you know why very few people can design a quantitative method to compare one 16PF5 pattern to another?
The answer is so simple.
Because the ensemble (whole set of different valid possibilities) of the 16PF5 (or similar like 15FQ+) is ………. 10E16 = 10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10

and World Population is nearly 6.7 * 10E9

6.7 * 10E9 / 10E16 == 0.67 * 10E(-)6 == 0.67 micro part.

World Population is less than 1 micro part of that ensemble. You can not use a regression equation to compare similarity between quantized patterns!
Posted 29 Jun 2010 at 9:45 pm ¶
john wrote:
Dear Fernando, to further entertain you before I rest my case (which you aptly confirmed by your post), answer this questions – what is the most important statistics for me, on any and all dating site? How big is the most important set of members for me?
. . .
You see, your solution, methodology and everything about your theory can be validated. Yet, it means absolutely nothing to me, as it . does . not . exist. eHarmony does. Is it perfect? Far from it. We all realize that – some more than others. But, it is still the best of all available solutions in their class – until your solutions becomes reality.

Furthermore, we are the wrong target market. You should be hitting dating site news aggregators, or industry magazines/sites – most importantly investors into your business idea.

I hope I clarified the tree vs forest problem to you.
Posted 29 Jun 2010 at 9:58 pm ¶
Fernando Ardenghi wrote:
@John

I had understood -in 2003- first and better than anybody the “online dating sound barrier phenomenon”, but it took several years to me to understand that sometimes you can not launch anything new without destroying pre-existent proposals.

I am most interested in destroying the actual entire Online Dating Industry for serious daters than launching my own project.

I have a 4 pillars strategy:

1) Researchers: Since 2005 I had been heavily contacting Academics. Nobody could be conducting research without my knowledge. All the new and fresh research is over my desk.
Nearly all the Researchers know who I am.

2) Investors: I had been contacting them since 2001. They had been fascinated by social networking utilities and mobile applications but very few had invested in online dating sites. So I had contacted the ones which invested in Engage, Be2 and others and said “hey, you had wasted your money”.
Nearly all the Investors know who I am.

3) Actual competititors and newbies: I had contacted all of them and they are very comfortable attracting, converting and retaining subscribers with automatic renewal of their subscriptions and other credit-card billing trickery, than offering a good compatibility matching method. They really do not want to innovate. PlentyOfFish Marriage predictor, eDarling, 12like/VisualDNA, IntroAnalytics, MatchMatrix, Moonit, LittleHint, MatchMatrix and similars are really the same stuff already available, a new garbage.
Actual competititors and newbies know who I am. I really want to be a headache, a pain in the neck for those management teams.

4) Blogs & News: Every time any Investor, Owner or C-level executive of major online dating site is interviewed, I will be posting a comment saying the entire Online Dating Industry for serious daters in 1st World Countries is a HOAX, performing as a Big Online Casino, with low successful rates.

It is matter of time. Soon or later. I will not stop until destroy the entire Online Dating Industry.

The Online Dating Industry needs a major earthquake, a major cataclysm to extinguish those large dinosaurs (Match/Chemistry, eHarmony/eDarling, PerfectMatch, True, Be2, Parship, Meetic and others) that all they did until now were scamming paying members with marketing and credit card billing trickery.

Fernando Ardenghi
ardenghifer@gmail.com
Posted 30 Jun 2010 at 12:52 pm ¶
john wrote:
Tell you what, make that happen and I will be one of the first to sign up, unless I am in a relationship already.
Posted 30 Jun 2010 at 4:23 pm ¶
Elizabeth R wrote:
Legislation. That’s what will reform the marketplace. Make it illegal for dating services to:

1. renew subscriptions automatically as a default setting.
2. renew subscriptions automatically without a reminder email and popup three days beforehand.
3. not display a phone number on their storefront or their website front page.
4. etc.

That’s it!
Posted 30 Jun 2010 at 5:49 pm ¶
eharmonyblog wrote:
John, to be honest, it’s getting harder and harder to be a fan of dating sites. Stories like http://eharmony-blog.com/1817 are hard to forget, and positive news coverage like http://eharmony-blog.com/1951 come by less and less often. Little known fact: In 2007, eHarmony has turned into Machine Learning. The trouble is, they don’t talk about or report any measured improvements in matching efficacy.

One of our changes this year is that we “pinned” an “EHB, on your side” article at the bottom of the front page. What’s your feedback of this? Do you like it? Is it drawing complainants into the site?

When the Archived tab came out, the blog gave it enormous coverage, so the blog tries its best.

That said, I do have several success couples news clippings among my drafts. I’ll post a bunch of them this month and next month.

Trivia: http://www.expressnightout.com/content/2009/06/bio_in_perfect_harmony.php is the LATEST success couple story featured in the news. Nothing followed, as far as I know.
Posted 04 Jul 2010 at 8:34 pm ¶

eHarmony Blog.com

Start a new discussion »