Contributed by: Editor on Wednesday, September 17 2008 @ 07:24 pm
Last modified on
eHarmony announced today that they have partnered with AOL Personals (which is in BETA). They will be offering their matchmaking services to American Online visitors along with dating and relationship advice through the “eHarmony Boutique”. The interesting thing here is AOL already has a partnership with Match.com. On the AOL Personals homepage both dating services share the same space. AOL tells visitors to use the Search for a Match option (which is powered by Match.com) to give you complete control over your searches and to use the Get Matched option (which is powered by eHarmony) to receive matches to compatible singles. I would be surprised if Match.com was happy about this new eHarmony partnership. They already have a sister site called Chemistry.com which competes with eHarmony directly.
The problem with AOL Personals is there is no added value. People interested in joining an online dating site would be better suited in becoming a member with one of these two dating sites directly instead of going through AOL. Once you start your Search for Matches or Getting Matched on AOL, you go directly to Match.com or eHarmony anyways. Sure there is an AOL menu bar across the top but it looks out of place with the design of the rest of the dating site. For this type of partnerships to work better, it would be nice to see better integration of the dating sites into the parent web site (in this case AOL). Color schemes and site designs need to match or at least flow together. Some added value features would also be nice.
This is the first case that I know of in which eHarmony has partnered with a web portal like this. They have obviously been looking for additional revenue streams and have decided on co-branding. Match.com has been doing this for awhile and have worked out over a dozen such partnerships in the last few years, all over the world.
Visit our eHarmony Review and our Match.com Review for more detailed information on these successful and popular online dating services.