Since people keep asking me about this (three different times just yesterday) and since it’s gotten a fair amount of mainstream press coverage, I’m going to take a few moments to lay out my former-insider-view/personal thoughts on the match.com lawsuit accusing them of using “date bait” to keep subscribers paying longer.

From the AP Story in USA Today:

A recent lawsuit against Match.com charged the matchmaking service with sending a female employee out on a date with a male subscriber as “date bait” to keep him signed up. Another lawsuit against a personals service offered by Yahoo Inc. accused the Internet portal giant of creating fake profiles to entice subscribers.

Match.com denied the allegations and obtained an affidavit from the woman in question, who declared she never worked for the company. Yahoo refused to comment.

In the Match.com lawsuit, filed Nov. 10 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, plaintiff Matthew Evans made the “date bait” allegation against Autumn Marzec. He also accused the site of using fake profiles and sham e-mail “winks” from potential matches to keep him subscribed. Match.com, which claims more than 15 million members, offers a basic subscription for $29.99 a month.

Marzec said in a signed affidavit that she has never been employed by Match.com or its parent company, InterActive Corp., and has not worked for them as a contractor. On Monday, Match.com demanded that Evans dismiss the lawsuit, which it called a “totally baseless attack.”

Personally, I strongly suspect the lawsuit is utterly without merit. Match and Yahoo Personals are targeted because they are successful companies with deep pockets whom the plaintiff assumed would pay him to go away before reputational damage set it.

I worked for Match.com for almost 2 1/2 years as their Information Security Manager. I have also compared thoughts on this with other former employees who would also have been well-positioned to know about anything like this going on.

First, if proven to be true, it would be extremely damaging to the company, if not the whole industry. When a company is #1 in its industry, the last thing it wants to do is poison the pool. The employees and management at Match were definitely aware that anything we did that might be perceived as unethical would hurt the company, whatever the short-term benefit.

Second, the behavior and/or cover-up that’s alleged would have created a huge paper trail of tax & HR documents which would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to conceal without breaking the law on taxes or money laundering.

Third, the suit alleges access to customer email. Until fairly recently, Match didn’t have copies of people’s mail . I looked at the sight the other night, and while they do seem to have on-site email now, we did not store or otherwise capture any user email in spring 2004. Of course, I’m not sure how a user’s email traffic would have been useful in this regard, but that’s beside the point–I’ll assume it is under the principle that anyone can a design a system they cannot break themself.

Fourth, the sort of use patterns this would produce (lots of contacts with lots of people over an ongoing period of time) was something that my team analyzed and I can say for certain that a female subscriber with the sort of email patterns that are alleged would definitely have caught our notice. The number of women who used the “broad net” approach to finding men was extremely low and we identified them and evaluated their validity almost immediately upon their commencing to contact a large number of users simultaneously since they were generally fraudulent accounts.

Fifth, consider how difficult it would have been to keep something like that a secret. The highly gregarious type of person you would need to hire for something like “date bait” would be the absolute last person you would want to hire for a job which required keeping secrets. Throw in the number of marketing, technical, security, HR, legal, and accounting staff who would have had to be in on it for the dates to be set up and the money transferred and the whole thing would have to be huge. Ben Franklin was on to something when he said, “Three can keep a secret if two are dead.”

Sixth, the costs just don’t make sense any way you slice them: For $20/month (average subscriber revenue), she’d have to retain a couple hundred sub’s a month just for it to break even. Figure the retention rate is going to be under 100% and the numbers get even worse–at 75% retention, we’re already talking about 10 dates/day, every day of the month. That’s breakfast, lunch, dinner, a couple of coffee breaks, happy hour, dancing, plus three other events. And with all those meals, she’s going to be too fat to have much luck keeping guys around after a few weeks ;-) .

Think about it logically. If we had the sort of predictive analysis that would allow us to retain wavering subscribers with date bait, we wouldn’t have needed to use it. The whole thing presumes data we didn’t posess and predictive skills that, if we did, would have made us so much better at member retention than we were that we wouldn’t have needed “date bait.”

If the goal were to keep people on the hook as subscribers, why would she go out on multiple dates? Even at one date per victim, the economics don’t work. One date & dump would have to be standard operating procedure given that the economics are already way out of line for the amount of revenue this would produce.

From my perspective, nothing about the alleged “date baiting” makes sense except that it’s a nuisance suit.