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Match.com in Australia (Match.com.au) has been in operation for 15 years now. They launched back in April of 2002 after buying out Soulmates Technology. To celebrate this milestone they have released some Aussie statistics about Match.com:

• More than 80,000 profiles are viewed every day.
• Everyday 16,000 winks and messages are sent. This equals to 6.5 million communications a year.
• 67% of Australian singles have never been married.
• 59% of members are looking for a non-smoker.
• 90% of members are okay with a partner who drinks on occasion.
• Gold Coast members are 45% more likely to have children than those members from Sydney.
• 64% of men are looking for a partner who has some tertiary education. With women it is 71%.

To find out more information about this dating site, read our review of Match.com.

The other eHarmony dating sites had their free weekend at the end of May. eHarmony Australia is celebrating theirs this weekend. Starting today, Friday June 11th and until Monday June 14th, 2010 eHarmony Australia (eHarmony.com.au) is having their free communication weekend. During this time all members of eHarmony Australia will be able to communicate with each other at no cost (with no credit card required). This 4 day event is happening during the Queen’s Birthday holiday which makes it ideal for singles to try out the dating site as it will be extra busy this weekend. Fasttracking the guided communication process and profile photo's are not included in this promotion.

The last free weekend at eHarmony Australia was 4 months ago on Valentine's Day. Check out our eHarmony review for more information on this popular Australian dating service.

The Australian website Smart Company did an interview with the vice president of international marketing at eHarmony, Sean Cornwell. In the interview he was asked several questions which resulted in him giving us some new information and statistics about eHarmony in Australia.

eHarmony.com.au was launched in November 2007. In those 2 years, the matchmaking site has had over 650,000 single residents of Australia register. In the first quarter of this year (2010) they saw 123,000 additional people create profiles on eHarmony Australia. Part of the huge growth this year is due to a bigger marketing budget. By late 2009, eHarmony felt they had enough Australian members in which they could properly promote their service through the media.

eHarmony offers singles a chance to receive high quality matches. Singles who sign up to eHarmony will receive between

five and a maximum of seven compatible matches every day.

These matches offer the best chance for a relationship to develop, but it is still up to members through communication to see if there is any sparks or chemistry between them. eHarmony believes it is more important to receive quality matches than to receive a large number of matches that have little chance of creating a successful relationship.

For more information about this dating site, read our review of eHarmony.

The custom of arranged marriage is very popular in India but in countries like the United States and Canada it is not popular. In North America when a match could not be found locally, families from India and other Asian countries sometimes resorted to using newspaper classified sections to find a potential suitor for one of their children. This practice has now changed thanks to online dating. Dating sites like Shaadi.com have matched more than a million South Asian couples and now parents are logging on to find potential matches for their children. Many parents find "religion, mother tongue, residency status, education, caste or class, astrological sign and diet" important attributes in a mate for their child. Shaadi.com does keep track of this information within member profiles which makes it easy for parents to find matches. Roughly 20 percent of profiles on Shaadi were created by parents looking for a partner for one or more of their children. The average age of a profile is in the range of 26 to 35.

In Canada Shaadi.com has become so popular that they have opened up their first North American center in Mississauga Ontario in March of this year (close to Toronto). The greater Toronto area is home to more than 700,000 South Asian Canadians making it ideal for a matchmaking center. Shaadi also has started to promote their new center not only online, but off as well through billboards and other physical media to better reach their target audience.

To find out more details about this dating site, check out our review of Shaadi.com.

In mid March, Match.com announced a partnership with Yahoo!7 in Australia. Match.com will be the exclusive dating partner to Yahoo's Australian news and search portal as well as Yahoo!Xtra for New Zealand. You can now reach the new partnered dating service by visiting Yahoo!7 Dating or by clicking on the "Dating" menu item available on the Yahoo!7 home page.

Currently on the Yahoo!7 Dating page visitors have access to both the old dating service and the new Match.com partnered service. The original Yahoo!7 Dating will close it' doors in June, 2010.

The BBC World Service commissioned a survey which polled about 11,000 internet users from 19 different countries. The results of the study concluded that 30 percent of people who use the internet feel that the online world is a good place to find a partner. Education played a factor in this survey as well. For those people who have completed high school, 28 percent believed that dating sites worked. When compared to adults who did not finish high school, a higher percentage, 36 to be exact, thought going online was a good place to find a date.

When looking at internet users from different countries, Pakistan came in at the highest at 60 percent, followed by India at 59 percent. British participants in the survey came in at 28 percent. This was followed closely by the French at 27 percent. Americans were fairly low at 21 percent.

The overall result from this survey is fairly close to a similar statistic from another story that roughly 30 to 40 million singles in the United States use online dating sites or social networks to look for love. This is about 1/3 of single Americans or 33 percent.

For more on this survey, read the eCommerce Journal.