I agree with quiplash's sentiment.

I saw this blog post by Melinda about Yahoo! personals and it seems Match.com works the same way.  Though I don’t know Melinda, I have to agree with her assessment that the Yahoo! personals contact “system” is pretty much dishonest and scummy. I also ran across this blog post which seems to indicate that Y! personals is going down. I can understand why.

I don’t know what used-car salesman thought up this system, but perhaps it’s time Yahoo! rethought it because it’s simply going to drive people away from them since their selection is dwindling and their restrictions and fees are high.  I know 99.9% for sure that I’ll be canceling my subscription just before my subscription runs out and my credit card gets charged again.  I hear sometimes they like to charge credit cards anyway, even after they cancel.  I’ll be on the lookout for that other little scummy trick of theirs.  Be warned, Yahoo!, don’t try it because I’m not stupid and I can defend myself.

So after that rant, let me explain the problem.

1. First you pay a fee from about $15-$30 to use their personals site per month.  Yeah, I can waste that kind of money on a dinner or something, but this service costs Yahoo! almost nothing.  I mean you can get magazine subscriptions for a year for the same price as a month of Y! personals, so it’s not really nearly cheap enough when you think about how they don’t supply much content except for some articles with dating tips and some very low transaction cost page loads and database hits.
   
2. WTF, I’m seeing advertising on my personals page? I’m paying $15-$30 a month to be advertised to? Yahoo!  You’re really douche bags of the highest order.  I don’t see advertisements on Flickr (which you also own) and I only pay $24.95 a year for that with much higher costs on your end. Maybe get someone from Flickr to help you pull your heads out, huh?  Oh, I forgot no one from Flickr would ever bother because Personals is a warmed over, stale, POS property for you–even if you’re making money because there are suckers born every minute.
   
3. So you say it’s about the network of quality people? Pffft.  Your network of quality personals is shrinking all the time.  You’re losing market share hand over fist and have fewer subscribers than 5-10 years ago.  Also a huge majority of people that are shown on the site are non-paid subscribers which means they can’t send anyone a real message or reply unless they pony up way more money than your pathetic service is worth.  I wouldn’t blame them for not paying up.  No one likes feeling like a sucker or having their emotions transparently played on in order to give some stale, manipulative company a free ride.   There are ice-breakers (which are a little sentence you can send for free) like “You caught my eye,” but they’re pretty much useless except as a tool you’re using to try and get everyone to pay your fees.
   

So basically, what do you actually offer that’s of any value compared to all the other sites out there?

1. You vet pictures and profiles before you let them go live so that it’s not only just a sex meat market.  This is nice, but other sites achieve the same goal better and more inexpensively.
   
2. You make people pay what is a rather high fee to use the service.  This keeps some scammers and people who aren’t that serious out.  On the other hand it also keeps out anyone who has a clue that your site isn’t all that great of a value and that they’re being overcharged and manipulated by you.
   
3. You have a large pool of people . . . though other sites probably have larger pools.  On the other hand,  someone who has paid their money can’t really communicate back and forth freely with whoever they choose.  Your supposedly large pool is full of people who can’t talk back to you.  There are a lot of inactive and unpaid people who can’t talk to you even if the other person has paid the fee.  The double-activation (as Melinda mentions) is just douchey.
   

I know you want people to pay, but manipulating them is evil.  Too bad Google, whose unofficial motto is “don’t be evil” doesn’t do personals.  They would never be this bad (even if they are sometimes evil-ish themselves).  I’ve even seen some sites that limit the emails for non-paids to a handful a week or something, which is certainly less evil and a better compromise to get those who really use it to pay while casual or non-users don’t pay for what they don’t use.  Plus this helps keep those casual users from ruining the service for those who pay (so they don’t feel like suckers).

K.  Enjoy your upcoming irrelevance, Yahoo!