Dating Services

Right on the heels of Valentine's Day, eHarmony will be having a free communication weekend which will run from Friday February 17th to Monday February 20th. This promotion is available to all members in the United States and no credit card is required.

With the increased popularity of online dating during this romantic week and eHarmony's reputation of creating relationships that are long-term and which often lead to marriage, you can expect this service to be bustling with new members eager to meet their matches. All you need to do is spend some time and create your profile. Once completed, you will receive your first matches that you then can start to communicate with. Features not included during free communication events are photos, Secure Call or Skip to Email.

By our estimation, this will be eHarmony's 37th free communication event with the last one happening during the New Year celebration (see Story).

To find out more about this popular dating service designed to find you a long-term relationship, you can read our review of eHarmony.

Here is a short video clip of Sam Moorcroft, the CEO of ChristianCafe.com being interviewed about his dating service and why more Christians are turning to online dating to meet their soul mate.

Note: Unfortunately the source to the video and/or image which once was displayed here has since been removed by the authors for an unknown reason.

In the video they also talk about other popular dating sites and why there are some disadvantages to using a large generic dating site if you are looking for someone of the same faith.

For more on the story you can read CBN. ChristianCafe.com is a service dedicated to connecting Christian singles together for marriage. If you are interested in this service you can check out our Christian Cafe review for more information.

Plenty Of Fish is reporting that they had over 300 million monthly visits to their Android and iPhone apps last month. I am not sure if they mean they had 300 million visits to their respective app pages on iTunes and Android Market or if members used the apps on their phones a total of 300 million times (probably the latter, but how can you visit an app, I thought you used an app).

Plenty Of Fish is also seeing mobile traffic increasing by 3 percent every week with 40 percent of all United States signups now coming from mobile phones and tablets. iPads saw an increase of usage by 88 percent alone from December 2011 to January 2012 (must be those Holiday presents). All this traffic equals to over 3 billion page views a month coming from mobile apps. Wow, that is a lot! I never expected such a large percentage of signups would come from mobile devices already.

I guess the iTunes PlentyOfFish app description needs an update though, as I write this post it currently states that Plenty Of Fish has over 145 million monthly visitors and 38 million users.

To find out about this dating service and their mobile apps you can read our Plenty Of Fish review.

According to Dan Slater, an expert in the business of online dating, the answer may be "yes."

The recent online dating industry conference in Miami, Florida saw a range of participants - from the major corporote players like IAC, the owner of Match and OkCupid, to the indie industry-disrupters like Plenty of Fish and Grindr. Every company thinks they know exactly what the future will hold for the industry - what's going to die out, what's going to be the next big thing - but who really has a handle on where online dating is going?

Day One of the conference began with a keynote address from Gary Kremen, the founder of Match.com, the Internet's first mass-market dating site. Match was, and still is, a hugely successful venture, but the climate is changing and online dating sites must adapt with it.

In 2007, Alex Mehr and Shayan Zadeh did exactly that, by creating a dating site that was modeled on social networking sites. Mehr and Zadeh launched Zoosk as a third-party dating app for Facebook, and by 2012 it had reached nearly 5 million unique visitors and had climbed to the top of the U.S. Rankings of online dating sites. Zoosk's success begs the question: Is the Match model dying?

"One of its former employees," writes Slater, "who spoke to a packed conference room in the afternoon, believes that Match and its kind--i.e. traditional dating sites, which, by the way, currently account for most of the industry--have seen their day." Brian Bowman, the former VP of product development at Match, has created a new dating application called TheComplete.me in hopes of giving the online dating industry the upgrade it needs.

Rather than giving users a static profile, TheComplete.me will tap into the sites that members use every day, like Netflix, Picasa, or Amazon, to create a dynamic picture of who each user is. The idea is to create a profile that evolves with you, and is a more complete and personalized representation of who you are than the anonymous profiles used by traditional dating sites.

Taking dating in this direction means major changes for the ideas of privacy and transparency. "If online-dating culture advances to the point where the person you're hoping to date has an expectation of transparency," says Slater, "or, in Bowman's words, 'authenticity,' openness will become the new norm."

The idea is still in its infancy, but it's big news for the online dating industry and may be, in the near future, big news for you.

SeekingArrangement.com announced last Friday the launch of their anonymous phone calling feature. The service is called ICALLU which allows members to talk over the phone to each other without revealing their phone number to the member they are calling. Registering for this calling feature is free to members. A member's profile is marked as "phone verified" when they have gone through the registration and verification process (using SMS). Pricing for this service is currently 99 cents a minute ($1.99 for international calls) for the member who initiates the phone call.

SeekingArrangement.com decided to go ahead and offer this anonymous phone service after their research showed that 55 percent of their members have indicated that they are concerned about privacy. 32 percent of members also have already had a negative experience from giving out their phone number to a stranger.

For more information on this story you can read the press release. For similar dating sites to SeekingArrangement.com you can take a look at our Sugar Daddy dating category.

We wrapped up the 2011 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award poll today. It ran from October 1st, 2011 and ended today, January 30, 2012. We almost reached 1000 votes, the most we ever have had. In total we had 987 voters who answered 2 questions. The first being which paid dating site would you recommend for the "2011 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award". The second question asked which free dating site you would recommend.

The annual Single's Choice Award is our most important award we give out. This is because it is voted on by you. Collectively our visitors spend many more hours online with these dating sites compared to what it is possible for us to do. We do have our own opinions as well which is why we have the Editor's Top Pick awards. These awards are based on our own experiences as well as the comments we receive from visitors throughout the year.

For 2011 we listed the top eight 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 2011 Single's Choice Award is Match.com. We also gave this dating site the Editor's Top Pick - Overall award as well. Match.com received 331 votes, which is 33.5 percent of all votes. Most other dating sites in the poll only were voted on about 8 percent of the time which makes Match.com almost 5 times more popular than most other sites.

The recipient of the Silver 2011 Single's Choice Award is eHarmony. eHarmony has won this award 4 times in a row. They had 22.5 percent of the vote which works out to 222 votes. eHarmony's match system is as popular as every with users which is also why they were the recipient of the Editor's Top Pick - Match System award as well

The recipient of the Bronze 2011 Single's Choice Award is Badoo. This up an coming social dating site made great strides in popularity in only one year to be able to earn the bronze award. While they only had under half of the votes than what the winner of the silver award received, Badoo did get a respectable 95 votes, which works out to almost 10 percent of all votes.

Here are this year's standings for the Single's Choice award for all dating sites in the poll.

1. Match.com
2. eHarmony
3. Badoo
4. Zoosk
5. Chemistry
6. Date.com
7. PerfectMatch.com
8. Lavalife

Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote for the 2011 Single's Choice Award. Our visitors in 2012 will appreciate knowing which dating services are the most popular.