eHarmony has made for itself the reputation of being the prime example of companies who don’t cater to homosexuals:
Some businesses still don’t cater to homosexuals, ignoring a potentially lucrative source of revenue, says Duke University economist Keith A. Bender.
One of the most well-known examples is eHarmony.com, even as California, the country’s most populated state, began performing same-sex marriages this week. The online dating Web site bills itself as a provider of what it calls unique measurements for compatibility that, according to a representative, do not cater to same-sex partnering.
“The research is based on six Ph.D. psychologists and 29 variables for compatibility called the compatibility matching system,” said David D., an eHarmony representative who refused to give his full name.
Read the rest of article, dated this morning, 19 June 2008
Keith Bender then said,
These companies are cutting out a certain segment of the population that they could be getting revenue from. Statistics I’ve heard say that around 10 percent of the population expresses some homosexual tendencies. One way to think about these businesses is that companies like eHarmony could increase their revenues by about 10 percent, assuming that the same rates of homosexuals as heterosexuals would take advantage of these kinds of dating sites.
Mr. Bender, that 10% statistic came from Dr. Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s and is very old and very, very wrong. It’s closer to 2.3%, among Americans. Read this National Center for Health Statistics report, dated 2002.
Here is eHarmony CEO Greg Waldorf’s answer to the matter: “It’s all about the money.”
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