Online Dating Sites Are Lying To Us (Maybe)

EHarmony claims in television and online ads that 2% of people who got married last year in the U.S. met through their site. Earlier this year, a Match.com media kit boasted that twelve marriages and engagements a day could be credited to their site. And Marcus Frind, chief executive and founder of Plenty of Fish says his dating site brings about 100,000 marriages a year.

For those of us who are proponents of online dating, these statistics — at first glance — seem promising. But are they really reliable, or are they — as Mark Twain once said of all statistics — just lies? 50% Of Women Regret Marrying Their Husbands

The Wall Street Journal has done some investigating and what they've found might surprise you: eHarmony's statistic gathering methodology is flawed, Match.com doesn't even use its own twelve-a-day statistic anymore, and Plenty of Fish doesn't remember where they got their statistics in the first place.

In the case of Match.com, the company proudly claimed twelve marriages a day in a fact sheet designed to attract advertisers. But when David Evans, of the Online Dating Insider blog, made some calculations using other numbers from the fact sheet, he found that it would take an average of 1,369 Match.com dates to get married. Not long after, Match.com stopped using the statistic. Online Daters Sue Company Because Of Inability To Find A Match

Marcus Frind, of Plenty of Fish, says that his site creates 800,000 relationships a year, according to exit interviews with departing members. Based on a certain study that Frind "found somewhere online," that equals out to about 100,000 marriages a year. But when asked by the Wall Street Journal what study that was or who it was conducted by, Frind admitted that he couldn't recall.

As for eHarmony, the company has twice hired Harris Interactive to conduct online surveys with respondents recruited through a massive online panel. The most recent of these surveys, conducted in 2007, found that 237 people a day got married after meeting through their site. Comparing their statistics against those from the Centers for Disease Control on marriage, they came to the conclusion that 2% of U.S. marriages could be traced back to them. Survey: Most Americans Married By 40

But while eHarmony's numbers might sound scientific, their methodology may be majorly flawed. After all, those who are willing to respond to questions about online dating most likely spend more time on the internet than other people and therefore have a higher success rate with online dating. And while Harris Interactive tries to make adjustments for such user-based biases, there's no way to guarantee their adjustments really work.