As the first platform for marriage and dating in China, Jiayuan has not had a good time in recent years. The constant public opinion turmoil has made people re-examine this online dating site.
01
"China's No. 1 Marriage and Love Stock"
The establishment of Jiayuan can be traced back to the blind date story of the founder Gong Haiyan.
Gong Haiyan, who was in her second year of graduate school at Fudan University at the time, registered as a member on a matchmaking website due to her parents' constant urging to get married, but after paying 500 yuan, she disappeared. This experience of being deceived also gave Gong Haiyan the idea of creating a serious dating platform for the purpose of marriage and love, so she taught herself to program, and with the 40,000 yuan she saved as a tutor during her studies, she really built a static dating website. In 2002, Jiayuan website was officially born.
The founding of Jiayuan is the most colorful story written by this legendary woman. From a rural girl, an accidental fracture with a "sky-high" treatment fee on her back, dropping out of school to work in the south, resolutely returning to her hometown to repeat her studies, being admitted to Peking University as a county champion, and accidentally founding China's first marriage and love platform Century Jiayuan during her graduate studies. Just like Lei Junshuang's literary life, which was hotly discussed some time ago, every Internet tycoon has his own legendary story.
The era in which Jiayuan grew up is the era of rapid development of China's Internet. Gong Haiyan combines the Internet with marriage and love, which cannot be beaten from a traditional perspective, but it has achieved unexpected results. According to public information, by the end of 2005, the number of members of "Jiayuan" had reached 320,000, and it was the top of Baidu's dating website for several months. At the beginning of 2006, it was rated as the first place in the dating website by iResearch Market Information. According to the prediction of relevant institutions, the size of China's online dating market will reach 653 million yuan in 2008, with a compound annual growth rate of 106.2%. According to Alexa's traffic statistics, the number of page views on Jiayuan's website is second only to Match, the world's largest dating website. In 2009, Jiayuan had more than 20 million registered members and a revenue of 80 million yuan.
On May 11, 2011, Jiayuan was listed on the NASDAQ in the United States, becoming the "first stock of marriage and love in China". However, according to public information, the company's share price has fallen all the way since the opening of $11 and has remained at about $5 for a long time, and the overseas secondary market is not optimistic about this business model.
In 2011, the variety show "If You Are Honest, Do Not Disturb" was broadcast, and this variety show with the theme of blind date between single men and women became popular, with an annual rating of 2.61%, and it became the variety show ratings champion of the year. Jiayuan also named this variety show, and cooperated with the variety show to select suitable guests among the website members to recommend to the program group. Taking advantage of the shareholder trend of "If You Are Honest, Do Not Disturb", Jiayuan has also become the largest blind date dating platform in China, which is hot for a while.
On May 13, 2016, Jiayuan and Baihe.com were merged and privatized and delisted, and the stock price stayed at $7.49.
02
"Dragon Slayer Warrior" Eventually Becomes "Evil Dragon"
Young people who are tired of the traditional blind date model and are eager to get married turn to online dating sites, thinking that they can reap a happy love and marriage, but find that chicken feathers are the norm in life. And many people believe that platforms such as Jiayuan should be responsible for this chicken feathers.
As early as 2011, a month before Jiayuan was going to go public in the United States, Liu Qing, a member of Jiayuan, posted an open letter to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, NASDAQ, Gong Haiyan, and Gan Jianping in the Tianya community, "You are not the matchmaker with immeasurable merits you advertise, you are a hotbed of liars. Jiayuan is not the 'real and serious marriage and love website' you advertise, it is a human scandal with lies everywhere!"
It is reported that Liu Qing met Liu Jiaguo, who was also a member, through Jiayuan, but later found that this person's identity and background were all forged.
In response to the incident, Gong Haiyan said: "Eight years ago, I founded Jiayuan because of my experience of being deceived on a blind date website, and from day one, our positioning has been serious. 」
Gong Haiyan, who founded Jiayuan because of the deception of a blind date website, should not have imagined that people would eventually become the most hated by themselves.
Liu Qing eventually lost the case, but since then, rumors about Jiayuan's fraud have been endless.
In 2017, Su Xiangmao, the founder of WePhone, committed suicide, which pushed Jiayuan to the forefront. According to his suicide note, Su Xiangmao and his ex-wife met through the Jiayuan website, from marriage to divorce, Su Xiangmao spent tens of millions of dollars for his ex-wife, but he didn't know that his ex-wife had a marriage history until his ex-wife divorced.
On December 16, 2019, the Ministry of Education released the "Top Ten New Words in Chinese Media in 2019", including "pig killing plate". The explanation of this entry is: it refers to fraudsters who use dating as a means to gain the trust of the victim, and then wait for the opportunity to pull them into scams such as gambling and financial management to defraud the victim of money.
Marriage and dating platforms such as Century Jiayuan are the hardest hit areas of pig killing.
In 2020, a female master's degree graduate from a prestigious university in Beijing met a man at Jiayuan, and only 4 days later, the man defrauded her of 750,000 yuan in the name of investing in electronic money, including a loan of 550,000 yuan and 200,000 savings saved by Beipiao's 8 years of hard work.
In addition to being involved in the quagmire of fraud and pig killing many times, Jiayuan has been punished for violating the Consumer Protection Law and false propaganda many times.
Since the beginning of 2024, Shanghai Huaqianshu Information Technology Co., Ltd., the company of Jiayuan's website, has received four fines from the Shanghai Yangpu District Market Supervision and Administration Bureau, with a total fine of nearly one million yuan. Although this amount is only a drop in the bucket for Jiayuan, it still reflects the problems of Jiayuan.
According to the Qichacha platform, the reason for the latest punishment (April 2) is that the staff of Jiayuan provided false blind date information in the sales process to encourage consumers to buy high-end customized membership services. Jiayuan's induced consumption behavior can also be queried on the black cat complaint, and deceiving consumers to induce them to consume and sign contracts is one of the main complaint directions of consumers.
03
Marriage and love platform chaos
Jiayuan's various problems are not the shortcomings of his family, reflecting the chaos in the marriage and love platform industry.
At this year's 315 party, Jiayuan's "throwing bait to screen whether customers have money" was named by CCTV 315 party. Coincidentally, Jiayuan is not the only marriage and love website that has been named, and marriage and love companies such as Zhenai.com and Love Class have also been named.
In the investigation, the reporter of the 315 party found that in the training of employees of marriage and love companies, "throwing bait" is the first step in the matchmaker's work, that is, to create virtual characters through deceptive words to attract consumers. Screening customers is also the focus of matchmaker's work, in the name of verifying customer information, to understand the income of consumers, to determine the intention of customers. It is worth noting that there is no uniform standard for the pricing of the services of these dating websites, but the pricing is arbitrary by the staff.
The traditional marriage and love platform represented by Century Jiayuan is too "old-fashioned" for Generation Z, and Generation Z, who has grown up with short videos, chooses live blind dates and marriage and love social software to make friends for the purpose of marriage and love. However, "routines" are everywhere.
According to Justice Network News, the online anchor and the female guest made friends through live broadcasts, singing and "fooling" the male guests in the live broadcast room, and constantly deceived the victim into swiping gifts in the name of "blind date and friendship". According to the online anchor Sun, he has a WeChat group, and there are also many anchors and female guests in the group, which are specially used to carry out live blind date fraud on single men. When the anchor is ready to start broadcasting, he will ask which female guest is available in the group, and then the two cooperate to cheat the gifts. In order to prevent the male guests from reporting to the platform after discovering that they have been deceived and causing the anchor's account to be blocked, the anchors often ask the female guests to add the male guest's WeChat first, pretending to appease them for a period of time.
And the social software represented by soul, tantan, and Qingteng Love, there are not a few pig killing plates. Scammers package their identities, forge rich and handsome personalities, conditionally screen the targets of fraud, get closer to each other through various means, and finally bind them in the name of "making money together" to commit fraud.
Coincidentally, the blind date of the princess who exploded not long ago also "collapsed". Here's what happened: On March 30, on the stage of "Wang Po Says Media", a man took the stage and exchanged WeChat messages with the girls on stage, and then the man's wife exposed the fact that the man was married on the Internet. "Wang Po" herself responded: "Don't join in the fun if you bring your own script, leave the opportunity to those who really want to make friends." ”
According to the China Statistical Yearbook (2022), as of 2021, there were about 239 million single people over the age of 15 in China. In the context of such a large number of singles, the marriage market will always be hot. Whether it is a marriage platform, a live blind date, a dating software, a matchmaker or the most traditional blind date model, it all comes from people's marriage and love needs. Whether it's a blind date with a clear price, or a fast matching algorithm mode, I just hope that everyone will have less routines and more sincerity!
Love trading is not easy to do, and it is understandable to want to make money, but you can't lose your sincerity and conscience. This sentence is given to all dating platforms.
It is also hoped that the platform represented by Jiayuan can return to the essence of "matchmaker", strengthen supervision, and create love opportunities for single men and women who really want to get rid of singles.