Closed

InformationWeek has a press release from True.com that is called "TRUE.com Increases Advertising Spend to $75 Million, Reflecting Positive Corporate Growth ". I had to laugh at the title. When is growth meassured by the amount of money you spend on advertising. It isn't even money they have spent yet, just forecasted too.

Date.com, Amor.com and Matchmaker.com (all owned by Avalanche, LLC) will soon be available in multiple languages. Enlaso will be doing the translation services for Avalanche. They offer enterprise language solutions to companies who not only need translation services but business and cultural perspectives as well. In the press release they mention "localizing" the dating sites, I wonder if this means a redefining of the profile depending on the country and the culture? Match.com International does this with great success, they ask dating profile questions that are more relevant to where you live (see The Issues with International Online Dating).

By the end of 2008 all 3 dating services will be translated and localized into Spanish, Portuguese and German and by 2010 there will be another 15 languages added. With online dating growth leveling off in North America, Avalanche is looking to international markets to help grow its subscriber base. Since 1997, Avalanches largest dating site, Date.com, has had more than 20 million members worldwide.

There is nothing official that I could find on their site yet but it looks like LoveHappens is closing its doors. About.com and a few other sites have reported this (plus it is mention in a few confessions on the site). Here is the email that was sent out:

Dear LoveHappens member,

After much consideration we have decided to end the LoveHappens service. You may continue to use LoveHappens until May 31, 2008. After May 31, 2008 you will no longer have access to LoveHappens. We hope you enjoyed using LoveHappens as much as we enjoyed making it for you and we wish you love and success in the future.

The LoveHappens Team

I can't say this is 100% true since there is nothing mentioned by the LoveHappens Team on the website. I have to wonder if it is just someone spoofing LoveHappens email or maybe it is a marketing ploy by LoveHappens to garner some publicity?

LoveHappens is a mid level dating service that is not doing to bad in traffic. Alexa currently ranks them 5,848 most popular site, which is pretty good when you consider the millions of websites on the internet. On the other hand Compete does have them averaging a million unique visitors per month last summer and it looks like in the last few months they have only been getting around 300,000 unique visitors. That is quite a drop.

Another site that recently closed its doors was Single Parent Love Life, see story here.

ZDNet posted the results of ad spending by dating sites for quarters 1 to 3 in 2007. These figures are compiled by Nielsen. It looks like the top ten dating websites in ad spending where responsible for 91 percent of all dating site advertising. Of the over $350 million spent in ads, Match.com spent 40 percent of it or $145.5 million. eHarmony was second at $88.1 million. Since 2006, Match.com has almost doubled their ad spending while eHarmony had cut theirs by 16%. It would be interesting to see how this affected membership numbers.

The other sites that made the list in which we have dating reviews for includes, Yahoo! Personals at the sixth position with $14 million, PerfectMatch.com at position number 8 with $13.4 million and finally, Lavalife with $6.1 million at number 9.

A few other things to note is, these numbers includes both internet and TV advertising. Match.com and eHarmony have successful TV marketing campaigns which probably eats into at least half of the total amount they spent. I also have to wonder if Match.com's numbers (which really are the numbers of their parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp) includes Chemistry.com (who is also owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp). It was around Q3 of 2007 when Chemistry was spending a lot of money on those eHarmony attack TV ads.

Perfect Match has released a new Facebook application called "What's Your Personality Type?". This application is based on Perfect Matches Duet Total Compatibility matching system and allows users to find out their own personality types to help find out who they may be compatible with on Facebook. These personality types include Romantic Impulsivity, Personal Energy, Outlook and Predictability. There are 7 true and false questions for each type to answer before you get your results.

As far as Facebook dating applications are concerned, it is fairly simple and doesn't allow you to access your account on PerfectMatch.com or its members. If the application becomes popular I could see Perfect Match putting more effort into it. Right now it is just more of a marketing tool for their main dating site.

For more information about Perfect Match, please read our review.

The Chicago Tribune has a story about some of the research going on to find out how attraction works between people, both gay and straight. The author takes a look at 4 aspects of this. These aspects are DNA matching with the online dating site ScientificMatch.com (see our other story on them), how physical attraction and evolution works, if there is a love hormone and finally, how your brain effects love.

More and more dating sites are pushing how they have the science and research behind their match system. eHarmony, Chemistry and Perfectmatch are the big 3 who promote their matching system and the science along with their relationship experts. All of these sites post a summary review of how their matching systems work as quoted by the experts. None as of yet (that I am aware of) have actually gone in great details on how their system works and made the research public to back it up. We also need peer reviews of these matching systems from an independent source to begin to fully trust these matching systems. We talked about this in a story we previously did where Chemistry may be one of the first sites to start actually doing this.