Business

Match.com successfully refutes eHarmony supremacy claim

Thanks to media mogul Barry Diller, eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren has to eat cake over claims that his site is No. 1.

A self-regulatory body that investigates advertising claims on behalf of businesses agreed with allegations by Diller’s Match.com that competitor eHarmony was making false claims about ranking No. 1 when it comes to getting people hitched.

The National Advertising Division, an arm of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, asked eHarmony to stop claiming “No. 1 most marriages,” “No. 1 most satisfied marriages,” and “No. 1 most enduring marriages,” the agency said on Wednesday in a scathing 19-page report.

NAD adjudicates about 150 advertising claims a year and boasts a compliance rate of more than 95 percent, said Linda Bean, director of communications. Companies that refuse to comply with NAD’s rulings are referred to the Federal Trade Commission, she said.

eHarmony said it “respectfully disagrees with much of NAD’s analysis,” but that it will “take NAD’s recommendations into consideration in our future advertising.”

Match.com had argued to NAD that eHarmony’s claims came from a study that was flawed, including alleged ties by the authors to eHarmony.

The study in question, by Professor John Cacioppo, of the University of Chicago, found that 25.04 percent of its respondents to an online survey said they had met on eHarmony, versus 24.34 percent who met on Match.com.

Match.com argued that even if it agreed with the methodology, the gap reported by Cacioppo wasn’t large enough to let eHarmony claim the No. 1 spot.