Match

We closed the 2010 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award poll earlier this month with a total of 798 votes from visitors. The poll really was popular this year and it received over 10 percent more votes than last year while being available only for 3 months when compared to 5 months in 2009. I had hoped to start the poll in August or September but it wasn't online until October. Next year the plan is to have all the awards finished up by the end of December instead of running into the new year like we have always done.

It's interesting to see how the results vary from year to year in the Single's Choice award as the dating sites compete to be number one with singles. This award is sort of like the "Best Director" award at the Oscars, it is the most important. The reason the Single's Choice award stands out is it is decided by the public with votes, and not us. With our Editor's Top Pick awards we try to make an unbiased selection but, when you talk dating sites everyday sometimes the decision may not be as clear as we would like.

For 2010 we listed the top ten dating sites for you to vote on. The three dating sites which received the most votes will get an award, Gold for first, Silver for second and Bronze for third.

The recipient of the Gold 2010 Single's Choice Award is Match.com. Not surprising, this is the fourth year in a row that this dating site has won the Gold Single's Choice Award. Match.com continues to lead in the dating industry and this year they received over 37 percent of the votes. This is a huge eight percent increase over last year which shows Match.com is gaining in popularity and continues to be the one to beat. Match.com was also the winner of the Editor's Top Pick - Overall award as well.

The recipient of the Silver 2010 Single's Choice Award is eHarmony. This is eHarmony's third year to win this award and their popularity remains about the same at 20 percent of total votes. eHarmony is designed for singles with long term relationships in mind so it is not for everyone. With them winning Silver it shows just how popular and effective they are especially since they do all of the matching for you.

The recipient of the Bronze 2010 Single's Choice Award is Zoosk. Zoosk is a relatively new dating service and it is the first time they have appeared in the DSR Choice awards. This is a great accomplishment for them to receive an award this year let alone a Single's Choice award which is decided by votes. Zoosk received 94 votes which is almost 12 percent of the total vote.

This year's standings for the Single's Choice award for all dating sites in the poll are (click the dating site name to read our full review):

1. Match.com
2. eHarmony
3. Zoosk
4. PerfectMatch.com
5. Chemistry
6. Lavalife
7. Date.com
8. FriendFinder.com
9. SinglesNet.com
10. True.com

Once again, we would like to give a big THANKS to everyone who cast a vote this year in the Single's Choice Award.

After four years Match.com is still is our number one recommendation for singles interested in online dating. This is why they are the recipient of the Editor's Top Pick - Over All Award for 2010.

In North America Match.com is ideal for almost any single to join. There male to female membership ratio is almost at 50 percent and they have one of the largest active membership databases. Other attributes that may be deal breakers for a person like age, Religion and specific interests also are not a factor due to the large number of members Match.com has. Best yet, when you purchase a six month membership at Match.com, you are guaranteed that you will find a match within the first six months, or your membership will be extended an additional six months at no cost to you.

Match.com is not standing still either. Throughout 2010 they continued to innovate and add new features to make online dating not only easier but more successful for their members. For example, mobile dating applications were released for Android and Blackberry phones (the iPhone app was released in 2009) as well for the iPad. Partnerships also were expanded. Trusted companies like Yahoo! and Glamour magazine choose Match.com as the official destination for online dating on their respective websites.

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

This Year's Runner Up for this award is: Zoosk

It looks like Barry Diller will be turning over his CEO job at InteractiveCorp (IAC) soon to Match.com's Greg Blatt. Barry Diller will still remain IAC's chairman and their biggest shareholder. Greg Blatt has been in charge at Match.com since the beginning of 2009. There is no word yet who will take over at Match.com.

For more on the story, read the WSJ and to find out more about some of the dating sites IAC owns, read our Match.com review and our Chemistry.com review.

They may have been shy about trying online dating when the trend first started, but now Baby Boomers make up the fastest-growing demographic in the online dating market.

According to a recent article in Time Magazine, online dating sites have seen a surge in memberships of those 50+ looking for love. At Match.com, memberships of those aged 50-65 has increased 89% in the last five years. And on JDate.com, members in the 50+ age group jumped 40% in only one year. In fact, its parent company has a website dedicated specifically to the Boomer market called SingleSeniorsMeet.com, and is its fastest-growing property.

Dr. Helen Fisher, anthropologist and consultant for Chemistry.com, notes that Boomers are the perfect candidates for online dating. They have met most of the people in their network of friends and business colleagues, have limited time, and don't usually go to bars, so the Internet is becoming a more appealing way of meeting new people.

Female Boomers seem to be making the most impact, according to Fisher. She states, "Women are powering into the job market; they have more disposable income so they can walk out of bad marriages...The expectation now is that older people are going to date, and remarry."

Baby Boomers have also had more experience with long-term relationships than younger online daters, and are therefore more certain about what they want in a relationship, which works for online dating. According to Match.com, 71% of members 50+ are divorced and 11% are widowed.

"Many Boomer daters sign up for online dating post-divorce or after a long dating hiatus," said JDate spokesperson Arielle Schechtman. "They are busy professionals, so being able to learn about potential dates online, on their own time schedules, makes online dating more valuable to them than to other age groups."

For more information on the dating sites mentioned in this post, please read our Match.com review, Chemistry review, and our JDate review.

What do you do when you're a Stanford Business School graduate in the early '90s and you're searching for "the best woman in the world?" For Gary Kremen, the answer was simple: invent online dating.

The quest for a wife (and the financial security it would require to marry her) led Kremen to create Match.com, an idea that came to him after he realized how much revenue personal ads generated for his local newspapers. In 1993, Kremen founded Electric Classifieds Inc., the first company to provide online classified advertising, and in April of 1995, after raising $200,000 from investors, Match.com was born. Though the site's functionality was limited (it only allowed users to exchange messages and pictures via e-mail or fax),100,000 users registered with the site within its first 6 months. Now Match.com has over 1.7 million paid subscribers, and Web sites in 30 and 8 languages.

Kremen chalks up the wild success of Match.com to his "'relentless' work ethic." He ran the business from "a cramped, one-bedroom apartment that he shared with two roommates," often remaining in his pajamas while he "sat glued to his Sun workstation, designing Match's Web site and developing marketing strategies." Despite his hard work and the $1.5 million in venture capital he received, Match.com didn't initially pay off either romantically or financially for Kremen.

In 1997, much to Kremen's chagrin, Match.com's investors sold the startup to Cendant, a consumer-services company, for $8 million, and in 1998 the company was sold again, this time to IAC/InterActiveCorp (then still known as Ticketmaster), for $50 million. All Kremen got out of the transaction was a lifetime account on the site and $50,000 from selling his stock in the company.

Kremen was not discouraged, and in 2001 his perseverance was rewarded: Match.com partnered with AOL and MSN, which "brought in a large influx of people at a rapid pace," and in 2003 Match.com launched MatchMobile, its incredibly popular mobile phone service. 20,000 singles now register on Match.com every day, making it one of the largest and most influential online dating sites. It is consistently ranked among the top five online dating sites based on traffic.

Kremen finally found financial security after a judge awarded him $65 million in a dispute over the domain name sex.com in 2001, and after buying Electric Classifieds (then named Instant Objects) debt in 2004 so that he could retrieve its priceless patent. He held a foreclosure sale and sold the patent for $1.7 million.

Kremen's romantic goals were also met. In an age in which 1 in 5 relationships, and 1 in 6 marriages, are between people who met using online dating sites, and in which "roughly 74 percent of the 10 million Web users who are single and looking for a partner have turned to the Internet to find someone," Kremen met his match the old fashioned way - through a mutual friend.

Read the original article here. To find out more about this popular dating site, read our review of Match.com

From an article over at Madison.com about seniors and how popular online dating is with this demographic, they talked briefly about Match.com. In the piece, Match.com's public relations coordinator, Jaklin Kaden, stated that over 6 percent of Match members are 60 years old or older. For Match members 50 or more, this statistic jumps to 22 percent.

To find out more about this dating service, read our review of Match.com.