Match Group

Online dating services are being used more and more by soldiers, especially those stationed overseas. This isn't to say, the service men and woman are just using dating sites to find love with other soldiers stationed nearby. They use dating sites to meet new singles close to where they live at home in the US.

Both eHarmony and Match.com report that their dating sites are being used by soldiers while they are serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. eHarmony also reports that from 2006 to 2008, percentage wise, the number of military personal who are using their matchmaking site increased by 56 percent. eHarmony research psychologist, Gian Gonzaga says:

The life-altering experience of going to war often focuses the romantic mind ... When you are reminded of your own mortality, the theory kind of boils down to, you remember what's most important to you, which is relationships.

The off duty soldiers increase access to military internet cafes and the low cost of the laptop computers has made it much easier for them to cultivate a long distance romance. Military service people also tend to take online dating more seriously and invest a lot of time in online communication than your average online dater in the United States. This means, these type of long distance relationships tend to last much longer and are more meaningful. Online dating is the soldiers only real way to create a romantic relationship with someone while they are stationed in a war zone.

For more on this story, read USA Today.

Here is another story from my draft folder. Back in February, PC World looked at the matching algorithms of attraction and the business models behind some of the more popular online dating sites.

Here are a few interesting statistics which emerged from their review of the industry as a whole:

• For 2009 the dating industry is expected to top $1.049 billion and is likely to grow at a rate of 10 percent.
• It is estimated with free dating sites, at least 10 percent of new accounts created each day are from scammers.
• With paid dating sites, on average 10 percent of members pay for the service and stay for less than 3 months.
• In November 2008, online dating traffic as a whole was over 22 million with males making up 52.4 percent of the total number of visits (females 47.6 percent).
• Average time spent per visit to the top 10 online dating sites in 2008 was 22 minutes and 27 seconds.

A lot of the information mention in the article we have talked about before, so I will only discuss any new details. What we did learn, deals more about the hardware needed to run a busy dating site and the process of matching. For instance (WARNING tech talk coming), eHarmony has over 4 terabytes of information on more than 20 million registered members, each who have completed the 400 to 256 profile questions (eHarmony's profile has gotten shorter over the years). After a user signs up at eHarmony, a 10 Gig Oracle database is used to match you with initially, a few members. Apparently the real matching takes place later when your answers are matched up with thousands of other users who have answered hundreds of questions. The whole process takes almost 1 billion calculations and is done in a batch operation at the end of each day. This is a lot of calculations to find matches for a single user. It also tells me that while the initial database is probably filled with the most current users who are using eHarmony now, the matches which you may be more compatible with, will be given to you in a day or so from the much larger database. To give you an idea of the size difference between the two, the main database is about 400 times larger. eHarmony also says a members actions and outcomes on the site is stored and used to help determine matches. The example given deals with your geographical limit you set when you first filled out your profile. If you say, set it to 20 miles, but the eHarmony matching system sees you are viewing members who live farther away, then your location limit will be adjusted. This is because, eHarmony will assume location of a match isn't a deal breaker for you (so only click on those long distance matches only if you really want to travel).

PerfectMatch.com (which has 5 million members) has a lengthy profile as well when compared to most other dating sites, but it still only takes about half of the time to complete when compared to eHarmony's. For their dating site, Perfect Match uses 5 web servers and a number of SQL server database servers. A number of other servers are also used to handle messaging and marketing needs. According to the company, PerfectMatch.com's matches happen right away, there is little to no delay.

PlentyofFish.com is also mentioned and the article. According to the author, POF wants to keep things simple when it comes to the profile and searching. The thing is, POF does have a Chemistry test which for some reason is not mentioned. Plenty Of Fish also has been promoting this fact lately due to their new Serious Member paid membership. Serious Members must take the chemistry and personality test to qualify. Hardware wise, we learned that Plenty Of Fish uses 3 web servers, 5 messaging servers and 5 database servers. Their database of user information is 200 GB. For the year the total cost to operate is only a couple hundred thousand dollars with the majority of the money spent on bandwidth.

For information on some of the dating sites mentioned here, read our eHarmony review and our Perfect Match review.

We wrote recently about Match.com selling their European operations to Meetic (see Story). For the sale we knew that Match.com will receive 27 percent share of Meetic plus a 5 million euro note. What we didn't know is, according to Ross Williams, CEO of WhiteLabelDating:

There was a clause in the announcement that didn't make many of the headlines, but I think will tell you the direction IAC is going in: Match has the option to buy Meetic in its entirety in about three years.

This makes things interesting. Before I knew about this piece of information, I had thought Match.com had decided to maybe concentrate on the North American market like everyone else. If Match.com has the option to buy Meetic then this makes more sense in the long run for the two companies. I could never see why Match had decided to get out of Europe since revenue wise they were doing well and, they have numerous other partnerships in places like South America and Asia (therefore they are not just concentrating on North America). If the sale does go through then, Meetic's CEO and founder, Marc Simoncini, will still be the main shareholder with over 20% and 36% of the voting rights.

Visit Mad.co.uk for the full article called Love is in the air.

Since the start of the global recession, online dating services in the United Kingdom have grown 13 percent (September 2008 - February 2009). A total of 5 million singles from the UK are now using dating sites. This is 13 percent of the total UK online population. Genders are split evenly and heavy use members were online an average of 4 hours per month viewing and average of 23 pages a day. 65% of UK online daters are 35 or older. The most popular dating site in the month of February was DatingDirect (owned by Meetic, 1.6 million visitors), followed by POF (with 1.4 million) and then Match.com (1 million visitors).

Read NewMediaAge for more information on the story. Visit our DatingDirect review , our POF review and our Match.com review for more information on these dating sites.

Yahoo is shedding assets so they can concentrate on their core business. It looks like Yahoo! Personals may be on the chopping block. On Wednesday Barry Diller, CEO of IAC (which owns both Match.com and Chemistry) noted that they are talking to Yahoo about acquiring their dating service. This information was gathered from a conference call regarding the IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings report (we will discuss Match.com's earnings in another story). It is estimated that Yahoo! Personals could sell for around $500 million. This happens to be the same price that the Friendfinder Network sold in 2007 (see Story).

Interesting enough Match.com and Yahoo already have some dating partnerships. Yahoo has a number of dating sites for different parts of the world but, they really only actually run the one for US and Canada (as far as I can tell). The rest are partner dating sites. Match.com runs the Yahoo dating sites for the UK & Ireland, Germany and Taiwan. Find out more about Yahoo Personals partners by reading [story: Yahoo-Personals-Dating-Partners].

For more on this story read The Deal and for the full IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings Call Transcript visit Seeking Alpha.

Read our Yahoo Personals review and our Match.com review for information on these popular dating sites.

I found a recent article were the author asked the question, Are free dating site like Plenty of Fish good or evil? By this the author means, if hooking up has become so easy through free dating sites, does it affect relationships and marriages, and in the end, just add to the divorce rate. He then goes on and actually compares Plenty of Fish to a gun. The analogy he uses is, are free dating sites only bad when someone misuses it? He further expands on his analogy by comparing a safety of a gun to features like site registrations and paying membership fees.

The first thing I have to wonder is, why are only free dating sites under attack? Sure more scammers, etc.. can access free sites easier than paid dating sites since there is no real barrier to creating a membership but, does this have much to do with people cheating online? I would think affair dating sites like Ashley Madison, which actually promote cheating would be his target. It is not like spending $40 on a membership is a huge financial burden for anyone.

Comparing a dating site to a gun is a little extreme. I haven't read many newspaper stories were a dating site was used to kill somebody. Some people consider guns bad, even if they are not misused. Plus, almost anything can be misused and therefore bad in certain circumstances.

For the full article, visit Muncie Free Press. For more information on this free dating site, read our Plenty of Fish review.