JDate

Reuters has a piece regarding some U.S. Rabbis who are using Jewish online dating services like JDate to help their single congregants. They are offering subscriptions in the hopes of them meeting someone from the Jewish Faith. The US Jewish community are concerned over their dwindling numbers. Some people have estimated that half of the Jews who married in the United States have married someone from a different faith.

Currently Rabbi Donald Weber of Marlboro, New Jersey and his wife (a rabbi in the liberal Reform Movement) have setup a fund and offer JDate subscriptions to anyone over the age of 18 and who are single, in their congregation.

Spark Networks, owners of AmericanSingles.com, Date.ca and JDate.com have released their 2006 4th quarter financials. There is some interesting numbers here for singles thinking about joining one of these dating sites. For the year end (Dec 31, 2006) American Singles had 80,519 paying subscribers and JDate had 74,775 paying subscribers. All of Sparks business ventures combined had a total of 217,276 paying subscribers, an increase of 10% when compared to last year. Of course none of these numbers include the members who use the site with a free membership.

I was surprised by JDate's numbers, they must be the largest Dating Site for Jewish singles out there.

Spark Networks also had another milestone on February 14th, 2007. It was their one year anniversary of its AMEX Listing. Look for them under the ticker "LOV". For more information on Spark Networks financial results check out this page.