Online Personals Market - Assignment Example

The most important reason for people wanting to meet others online instead of finding them in the real world is the increasing social acceptability of online meetings. This was however in turn prompted by the change of attitude of people towards online dating. The increased use of both subscribed and free online dating services with a huge variety of age groups have promoted the possibility of getting exposed to a wide range of people online. This also has prompted people to use online resources so as to meet others.

The online personal market has shown steady growth by 2005. It has been reported that 120,000 out of 2.2 million marriages that happen in the United States every year used to be between people who had met through an online personal site. After 2005, there had been substantial growth in the paid subscribers in the online personals market. These signs of growth make the online personals market structurally much attractive EHarmony has an evident competitive advantage in the market. The competitive advantage of eHarmony comes from its focus on serious relationships.

This focus has well catered to the faith communities which has not been dealt with by other conventional online personal sites. This advantage is reiterated as the company has been able to convert its registered customers to paid subscribers three folds than the industry average. The products like personality profile, matching algorithm, and guided communication provided by eHarmony also distinguished the company within the market. The serious competitive threats to eHarmony are from ‘free-Do it yourself sites’ and ‘Social networks’.

However, as the low credibility of ‘free-Do it yourself sites’ limit its scope and as ‘Social networks’ do not have options to directly express interest in a particular person, the seriousness of these competitive threats are limited. Similar competitors like ‘Match’ and ‘Yahoo Personals’ also pose competition for eHarmony. However, while the lack of proper resource backing holds back ‘Yahoo Personals’ from the competition, the market statistics suggest that the competition from ‘Match’ will also not affect eHarmony largely.