Partnerships

The Australian media company, News Digital Media, has partnered with Match.com. This partnership will result in the integration of the Match.com.au dating site into news.com.au, Australia's leading news portal. Match.com's main dating site competitor in Australia is Fairfax owned RSVP. This new deal will give Match a big competitive boost against RSVP, whis is currently the largest Australian dating site.

For the full news post, read MediaBizNet. For more information on Match, read our Match.com review.

Back in September 2008 AOL Personals partnered with eHarmony, giving AOL users two choices for online dating. AOL users could choose Match.com for a more general online dating experience or eHarmony for a more in-depth personality matching approach.

Earlier this month People Media announced a partnership with AOL. This niche online dating service provider will give AOL Personals six additional dating communities which focus on African Americans, Catholics, Christians , Jews, Single Parents, and Seniors. One of People Media's sites serving African Americans is called BlackPeopleMeet.com.

I didn't realize People Media had grown this much in the last few years to attract a partner like American Online. With this in mind, we have started a review for BlackPeopleMeet.com.

Here is the full press release about the American Online and People Media partnership.

This is a story from a couple of weeks ago that got lost in the shuffle. In December MyShape.com partnered with eHarmony. MyShape provides customers with a selection of clothes based on your bodies key measurements, along with your fashion tastes. Business has grown quickly for MyShape and since last year their customer base grew 5 times. Currently they have over 500,000 customers and in September repeat business was 50 percent. With these statistics in mind, eHarmony decided to add a date planner section to their eHarmony Advice website. MyShape's date planner role is to help people figure out what to wear on dates.

For more information on this popular dating site, read our eHarmony review.

I was doing some Yahoo! Personals research and came across some interesting information. Yahoo! Personals has 13 international sites and I had always thought they were all based on the U.S. and Canadian Yahoo dating websites. I was wrong. It looks like some of the international dating sites are actually partnered dating sites. Basically what this means in the dating world is the underlying dating site is actually run by another company. The dating service itself still retains the other partners logo and general theme of the website (in this case Yahoo). Partnering like this is not necessary a bad thing since the partner usually are experts and already successful in their field. Both partners benefit with the relationship, with each endorsing the other.

From what I can tell, Yahoo! Personals for the UK & Ireland is actually the Match.com UK dating site. Yahoo! Personals for Germany and Taiwan is Match.com as well. Yahoo! Personals France, Italy, Brazil and Spain is part of the Meetic Network of European dating sites. I would also question the Japan, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan Yahoo dating sites.

This leaves just the US, Canada and the Australian Yahoo dating sites being actually owned and run by Yahoo. The Yahoo dating site for Australia though, is partnered with eHarmony Australia. On Yahoo's main dating page you have the choice of going directly to Yahoo Dating to search for singles or visit eHarmony Australia to let them find your matches for you. This is a similar idea to AOL's partnership with eHarmony (See Story).

I guess I was more surprised than anything else. I had always figured Yahoo being so big that they would have created and run their own dating sites for these countries.

For more information on Yahoo! Personals, read our online dating review.

UPDATE: Wow, I must of been reading eHarmony's mind! They released a press release yesterday (which I just saw today, Nov 12) announcing eHarmony Australia and Yahoo's partnership.

The young men lifestyle portal, AskMen.com announced an alliance with Match.com this week. While not yet available on the Ask Men website, Match will offer readers access to their singles database through a quick search form. This will enable visitors to view profiles and pictures on AskMen.com before registering with the dating service Match.com.

Match.com has been partnering with a number of websites lately to help generate more members. This allows them to target markets with better results than traditional internet advertising. AskMen.com readers are typically young single men who are employed and, have no dependants. This is a perfect target market for Match. eHarmony is another popular dating service which also has been doing similar partnerships (their latest with AOL). eHarmony also has been taking this a step further by buying up some of the more popular independent wedding and dating websites.

Visit Marketing Week for the full story. For more information on Match.com, read our dating review.

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.