Eharmony Examination

What kind of a platform business is the online personals market? What kind of network effects (direct, cross-sided, positive, and negative) does it leverage? How structurally attractive is it? The online personals market is a specific niche of social networking, and it is a sole-sponsor, proprietary platform business. In terms of network effects, it could be seen as a one-sided network (users can instigate an interaction, or can have someone else instigate an interaction with them), but is better described as a two-sided market with men on one side, and women on the other (with the exception of homosexual sites which are clearly one-sided markets). Within this, there are both direct and cross-sided network effects. For direct, there are small positive effects (as a man, you want enough men on your side to attract women on the other side), but primarily negative effects (the more people on your side, the more competition you will have finding a match). For cross-sided, there are positive effects (the more of the opposite sex there are, the more likely you will find a match), and negative effects (if there are too many people on the other side, it may be hard to search through the noise to find an actual match—not to mention that there can be liars, frauds, and other undesirable people on the other side of the network). To examine the attractiveness of the industry structure, a five forces analysis will offer us insight. First, we can consider buyers’ power. In this case buyers (prospective daters) do have some power in that there are a plethora of other options online (from Match to free sites), as well as any number of venues in the real world. However, since they are individual consumers, they do not have scale power and must accept prices. Further, there is an overall opinion that meeting the right person is very hard, and thus there is a significant willingness to pay for a quality service. Second, looking at the competitiveness of rivals, it is clear