eHarmony Blog.com

Dear Diary,

Two years ago, a friend and I had this one-month-old blog about eHarmony. We haven’t settled on a website page layout, we haven’t settled whether we’d buy a domain for it, and we haven’t settled on site advertising.

So I signed the site up with Google AdSense, Amazon Associates and Commission Junction. eHarmony advertised exclusively with Commission Junction back then. (That’s the “CJ” in the numerous promo codes you find all over the web. 20% off the 6 month plan is hardly a deal.)

And… just like 1 out of 5 people who take their infamous questionnaire, eHarmony denied us a cut of the online dating billions. Commission Junction told us our application to become an eHarmony affiliate was summarily refused by eHarmony.

They gave no explanation. So, just like another eHarmony reject, we were left to wonder. Was it the name of the blog? Was it because our posts weren’t praiseful enough of the service? Was it because we wrote about tips, tricks and hacks on eHarmony? Was it because we published text from the site that we thought would be useful to eHarmony users, without asking permission (such as the list of canned questions, the list of MH/CSes, the boilerplate text in a Final Message, and so forth)?

We thought for a quick moment, then we decided we’d rather call a spade a spade, and write what we think is useful to people. And we’d look really ridiculous if we showed advertisements to other dating services.

The decision quickly came to give the site a unique advantage.

On one hand, sure, the site can’t pay for its own hosting, can’t afford commercial community website software, can’t afford to license materials (such as images), and can’t afford to pay other sites to link to it. Those things would be nice, I think, and would make the site more popular.

On the other hand, being a non-commercial informational publication gave our authors a lot of journalistic legal rights. (This is what another friend told us.) Nothing says “for educational purposes only” more than a plain webpage with no ads or no means to earn from the content.

This site’s editors have used this to utmost advantage when we write to other blogs, asking permission to republish their posts and articles. How many of these bloggers, who don’t even know us from before, would have given us permission to republish their work, if they saw Google AdSense ads around our articles? For free? I doubt many would.

So what was it that we wanted to be, right in the beginning? One, a guide to the Guided Communication process. Two, a realistic review of eHarmony.

Through the hundreds of posts, we try to cover the breadth of opinion on what eHarmony does (or what eHarmony is), then lean towards the constructive. From the beginning, we didn’t want to become an eharmonysucks.com or a ‘eharmony is a scam’ site. (It’s hard to resist sometimes.) I guess you can call us a fan site, who aint afraid to suggest, complain, and criticize.

So, in hindsight, I’m glad that eHarmony kicked us to the curb two years ago. If I had had to write things like,

eHarmony spends tens of thousands of dollars every year to support academic research into human compatibility. eHarmony then takes their latest scientific findings and incorporates them into their personality profile. It is unlike anything you have seen before…

the site would have died in an early age.