According to a popular online dating website, “At Match we’re proud that every day 160 members leave us … as couples.”
That does sound pretty good. But how did they get that figure? Fortunately, thanks to trading standards laws, there’s a handy footnote explaining.
According to a poll of 1000 people who had ended their memberships of the website, 17% said it was because they had found a partner on the site (and so no longer needed it). Multiplying this figure by the 344,681 people who left the site in one year, and dividing by 365 to get the average per day gives you 160 (rounded to two significant figures).
Assuming the poll was representative (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), that seems a reasonable enough extrapolation. I could raise the slightly pedantic objection that when they say ‘every day’, they mean ‘on an average day’, but that doesn’t really bother me that much. However, there are other numbers we can get from that poll as well. For example, 5,500 people leave the site every week without having found a partner there. Or you could just take the simplest figure of all: five out of six memberships end without having resulted in the love that most members are presumably hoping for when they join.
At this point, it could be interesting to speculate a little about the other reasons people might leave. One that doesn’t directly involve any deficiency in the service would be if the person leaving had found a partner by some other means, and so had no need of the site any more. I admit this is unlikely. Cruel stereotypes and my own prejudice tell me that people who are trying to find partners on the internet aren’t going to have much luck finding them any other way. However, for now, I’ll charitably assume that this happens as often as people finding a partner through the site. That is to say, it applies to 17% of cancellations, or about one in six (if nothing else, this makes for tidy numbers).
Armed with this assumption, we can now claim that two-thirds of people who join the site leave it just as single as when they joined.
But what if that assumption is wrong? In all honesty, it doesn’t matter much. If the assumed figure is too high, then that just means the proportion of people who leave the site single is more than two-thirds.
But what if it’s too low? Well, in that case, members are being charged money for a service that is less likely to find them what they are looking for than they were to find it for themselves anyway. I think that’s probably even worse.
Interestingly, just how much this service will cost is not advertised. The front page invites you to “register for free to meet new people today”, but this does not get you a functional service. Further down the page it explains that this will allow you to view other people’s profiles, but you will have to pay to be allowed to actually contact any of these people. Presumably once you’ve registered and feel that you are committed to the endeavour (and have spotted some other members that you really want to meet) it will then tell you how much it’s going to charge you for this dubiously useful service.
All in all, I can definitely see why they went for the “160 people a day leave as couples” figure.