Too hard to summarize but this is a very interesting post on the economics of online dating sites.
Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating « OkTrends.
EDIT:
I got a flurry of traffic from The Atlantic because OkCupid took down the source link (above) at some juncture, most likely because they sold themselves to Match.com for a lot of money. Here’s a link The Atlantic provides with the cached content from the deleted post.
Having read this I believed it was very enlightening.
I appreciate you spending some time and effort to put this content
together. I once again find myself personally spending a significant
amount of time both reading and commenting. But so what, it was still worthwhile!