another match.com observation...
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another match.com observation...
| Tue, 02-08-2005 - 10:30am |
Is this a match.com phenomenon? This has happened to me a couple of times already - my subscription runs out, and wouldn't you know, a couple of days later a great guy emails me. Now, I am tempted to renew, but I am becoming suspicious because this has happened before - I renew, and a couple of emails fly back and forth, and then, poof - great guy vanishes. Has this happened to anyone else? Do you think the wizards at match would go so far as to set up fake profiles and send out "bait" emails? LG - what do you think?
~dremer

Yes I've seen this as well -- and somewhat been caught by it. I am having a hard time now figuring out how profiles rotate and what provokes a lot of responses.
Before Match used to update based on newness of the profile/member and whether it was your time of the month (about once per month they'd push you to the top).
Now the rotation is much less clearly defined. I've had episodes of 1 or 2 emails/day for 2 weeks and then nothing for 2 months (so I don't think its a profile issue but more of a rotation or "same old face syndrome").
The only thing I can recommend is to figure out if you want to be really pro-active and jump in with both feet. I would never (based on what you've experienced - which I generally agree with) pay money to only contact one person.
It may work out better to just pay for a year and leave your profile active one month on and one month off. My current thinking is that might be the best rotation and because once when I came back after a month off I got hammered with traffic and winks/emails -- more than likely a side affect of sofs (same old faces syndrome).
I don't know whether Match pushes the un-subscribed higher in the listings - but it would certainly make sense. It would also make sense if Match let you send people credits somehow to respond (sort of like a collect call). If guys wanted to be sure the person they were talking to could respond you could charge a certain amount for the guy to allow the other person to email. Maybe Match has thought of this but figures their revenues would erode too fast.
>> Do you think the wizards at match would go so far as to set up fake profiles and send out "bait" emails?<<
Oh, I don't think they would do that. Sooner or later, it would get out that they were pulling that stunt, because computer geek people (ie, those that work for Match) would talk about it.
And man, can you imagine what would happen to their reputation if they were caught doing that?
No, I can't see them setting up fake profiles with studly dudes and dudettes and sending email to suck people back in.
What I do think is likely is something along the lines of what LG suggests- somehow profiles rotate up towards the top of the heap for the random display, and it might well be that recently-unsubscribed ones get priority to try and suck people back in.
In theory, the daily emails we get (assuming you get them) are matched to OUR profiles- in other words, those don't rotate, we just get the set of folks whose % matches to our profiles are the highest. Obviously when someone new joins, that should rotate them up to the top in our daily email if they match us a bunch.
Not sure about this theory though in the marketing game anything seems to be accepted!!
Wow... well I suppose it could happen, but man, if it is really going on then you have to figure sooner or later someone will spill the beans, and that company will have a major PR problem on their hands.
Who would use an OLD site that was known to be screwing with people's heads like that?