Dating Services

Recipient
eHarmony

The Editor’s Top Pick - Match System award for 2014 goes to eHarmony. Since 2001 when eHarmony’s first reported marriage happened there has been over 600,000 couples who have gotten married because they met on the dating service. On average within a year on eHarmony 71% of women and 69% of men will have met their future spouse and the average distance between these 2 people will be 20 miles. Within 1.8 years these couples will have been married. From these statistics eHarmony obviously has a powerful matchmaking system which works really well to create high quality and successful matches.

When you join eHarmony you need to complete 4 steps to be on the way to finding your long-term match. First, after joining as a free member you need to complete the Relationship Questionnaire. Once completed (this step will take about 1 hour of your time) you then need to review your first batch of matches that eHarmony sends you. When you determine which match(es) you wish to communicate with you then can decide if you would like to join eHarmony as a paying member. You can join in 1, 3, or 6 month increments for a small monthly fee. Once you purchase a membership you will be able to communicate with your matches through the guided communication process where you get to learn about your match through a series of questions, and by directly messaging them.

eHarmony recently had a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and they found that almost 4 percent of newlyweds in the United States met because they found each other on eHarmony. This works out to 438 marriages on average per day are the result of eHarmony’s match system.

Read our review of eHarmony for more information about this dating service or visit eHarmony directly.

This Year's Runner Up for this award is:Match.com

Recipient
Christian Mingle

For 2014 Christian Mingle is the recipient of the Editor's Top Pick - Christian Award. This dating site is the largest Christian oriented dating service in the world. With the tag line “Find God’s Match for You” this service offers all the features you would expect of a dating site but with the focus on Christian religions.

Christian Mingle is very popular in the United States and Canada. You can access the service either via your internet browser (on your laptop or phone) or by their brand new redesigned Android app. The app offers all of the dating features found on their website including browsing member profiles, creating your profile and uploading photos, chatting with members, and viewing lists like your favorites and who has viewed you. In your profile you can also specify what Church denomination you grew up with and what type of Church you currently attend. You may also specify how often you attend Church. One nice search feature Christian Mingle has is the ability to search for new members or recently updated profiles, since your last time you logged in.

Christian Mingle’s reputation is important to them. They are a BBB Accredited Business and have been a member since 1999. Their current rating with the Better Business Bureau is an A minus. Christian Mingle also cares what their members think and have answered most reviews about their dating app at the Google Play Store with thoughtful responses and tips so that the members can get the most out of their online dating experiences.

The free version of Christian Mingle allows you to create a profile, view your lists and search for members. To make contact with members via email or instant messaging your will have to upgrade your membership by paying a small monthly fee.

Read our review of Christian Mingle for more information about this dating service or visit Christian Mingle directly.

This Year's Runner Up for this award is: Christian Cafe

Recipient
Passion.com

The Dating Sites Reviews Editors Top Pick - Sexy Award goes once again to Passion.com. This intimate encounter dating service is part of the FriendFinder Network which also shares it’s member profiles with Adult FriendFinder. In the last 2 years Passion.com has had over 50 million members log into the service and on most nights you will find about 100,000 members online at any one time. Members on this adult site are pretty active as usually over 150,000 new photos are posted every week.

Passion.com offers a free membership which allows you to search and view profiles. To initiate communication with members you will have to pay for a membership (paying members CAN contact free members). A paid membership is also required to view full versions of photos and videos, participate in live video/text chatting and to join groups. Passion.com also offers a 3 month guarantee. If you don’t hookup with someone on the site in 3 months, Passion.com will give you an additional 3 months on your membership at no cost.

Read our review of Passion.com for more information about this dating service or visit Passion.com directly.

There was no runner up in 2014 for this award.

Online dating is a world of contradictions.

Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid, is responsible for one of the most successful dating sites in the world – yet he has never been on a date with someone he met online. There is nothing more human or more inexplicable than romance – and yet Rudder seems to have turned emotions into science and found a formula for love.

Christian Rudder is the man behind the OkTrends blog, which he recently spun into a book called Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Miraculously, though it's hard to imagine anything colder or more impersonal than numbers, Rudder has managed to find humanity in his work. In his hands, data becomes revelations about human nature.

Amongst his findings was the not-so-surprising news that, no matter how old men get, they always find 22-year-old women most attractive. Women, on the other hand, tend to be most attracted to men around their own age. Rudder also caused a flurry of media attention when he reported that people typically rate potential matches of their own ethnicity as more attractive than others.

Naturally, claims like those don't come without controversy or criticism. Some have accused Rudder of presenting a damaging reductionist view of human behavior. Others have said it's impossible to understand what people want from love and sex via a faceless website in an industry that has a bad reputation for telling lies.

Not to mention the constant stories of outrage we hear over surveillance of citizens' Internet activities, or of exhaustion over companies using personal data for marketing purposes. In a world where privacy is increasingly a concern, studying the habits of OkCupid users may seem like a misinformed choice. And if that seems like a misinformed choice, imagine the backlash after telling OkCupid users that they'd been experimented on.

In 2014, the discontinued OkTrends blog returned from a long hiatus with a posted called “We Experiment On Human Beings!” The response felt predictably fierce to most of us, but Rudder maintains he was surprised by just now negative the public's reaction was. To him, it was merely the cost of admission: users get a free site, and in return they share their data.

To his credit, Rudder is happy to admit that the facts shared in his book are only “tiny windows looking in on our lives.” Data science is interesting, but not perfect. Ultimately, he believes his purpose is good and that the end of furthering social science fully justifies the means.

With over 29 million members, a buzzed-about blog, a #1 dating app, and more than 14 million followers across the social sphere, it's safe to say Zoosk knows a thing or two about online dating.

Using their dating expertise and data gathered from studying nearly 4 million messages and 430,000 profiles, the gurus at Zoosk curated the hottest trends of 2014 and made a few predictions for the new year.

Which online dating trends left us lonely in 2014 and which ones got us (digitally) hot and bothered? What does 2015 have in store? Check out Zoosk's infographic here, and some highlights below.

Messaging

In 2014, singles were least responsive between 2pm and 3pm, presumably because they were either deeply entrenched in work or snoozing off a post-lunch food coma. Men were most active in the morning, between the hours of 9 and 10am. Women, on the other hand, were night owls. The majority of their interactions occurred between 10 and 11pm.

Prediction: Moving into 2015, Zoosk predicts that our 'always on' culture will result in instant interactions all day, every day.

Photos

2014 saw a bunch of trends where photos were concerned. For men, outdoor photos increased messages received by 19% while selfies decreased messages received by 8%. For women, the trend was reversed – selfies increased messages received by 4%, while outdoor photos decreased messages received by 40%. For both men and women, posing with a friend or animal proved problematic, but full body photos increased messages by a whopping 203%!

Prediction: Duck face and bathroom selfies are out, along with mirror photos. Enlist a friend to take your full body shot instead.

Profiles

Honesty reigned supreme for men in 2014. Profiles that included “divorce,” “separate” or “my ex” received 52% more messages. On the other hand, sharing too much too soon scared off potential dates for women. Profile mentions of “divorce,” “separate” or “my ex” received 4% fewer messages.

Prediction: Zoosk predicts we'll all be over surprises in 2015. More and more daters will rely on technology to verify user authenticity.

Technology

Traditionally, online dating has rested on a foundation of surveys. Some are longer than others, but the end goal is always the same: categorize daters based on (possibly meaningless) questions. 2014 was no exception to the trend.

Prediction: Online dating will be about the opposite of “Do what I say, not what I do” in 2015. Instead of relying on your self-reported answers, dating services will increasingly learn your preferences based on your actions.

If you are among the 150,000 Tinder users in Ireland, your chances of finding a match are only one in a hundred - or about 1% - according to a new study.

Researchers for Ipsos MRBI, who surveyed people living in Ireland who say they use Tinder, discovered that dating app users’ chances for finding someone they click with are not that much greater than randomly meeting people at bars and pubs. In fact, the odds may be less favorable with apps, likely because there is the perception of browsing through a seemingly infinite number of eligible singles each time you log on to the app, making commitment seem unappealing. The more choices you have, the less willing you become to settle for just one person.

There is an addictive quality to apps like Tinder, according to its own figures. The average Tinder user spends between an hour and 90 minutes using the app every day, logging in 11 times. There are also an estimated 50 million active users of Tinder, compared to 864 million active Facebook users and 300 million active Twitter users – proving that the dating app has as much power to hold users’ attention as the major social media platforms.

Part of the reason for its low percentage of matches might be Tinder’s demographic, at least in Ireland - preferred mainly among fickle twenty-somethings who log on to the app several times a day. Only 12% of Irish Tinder users are between ages 35 and 44, and for those between 45 and 54, the number goes down to 3%.

Men are also less picky than women when it comes to saying yes to a dating app match. According to the study, they are three times more likely (46%) to swipe “like” on a woman’s profile whereas only 14% of women say yes to a man’s profile. The study also shows however that women invest a little more thought and time - women spend 8.5 minutes reading profiles on Tinder each time they log in, compared to a man’s 7.2 minutes (which are spent swiping).

So what does this mean for daters? The U.K. might not be much different from Tinder users all over the world. There is an accessibility and ease to the app, which has made it extremely popular and given its users a lot of options when it comes to meeting new people. But just like flipping through magazine pictures, sometimes it’s easier to just look at more photos than to reach out and contact someone, even if you find them intriguing. The real test is – can Tinder translate to real-world relationships?

Maybe your chances are about the same on Tinder as they are at your local bar. But until you reach out to try and meet in real life, you won’t know.