Dating Services

FriendFinder Networks expected to raise $50 million in gross profit from its IPO which started trading May 11, 2011 on the Nasdaq under the "FFN" ticker symbol. The company expect shares to go for around $10 and plan to sell 5 million. The money raised from the IPO has been earmarked to pay down their debt.

FriendFinder Networks stock price currently sits at $5.67 per stock and it has been as low as $5.32 per stock in the past few days.

To find out more about dating sites owned by FriendFinder Networks you can read our review of Passion.com and our review of FriendFinder.

Related Story: FriendFinder Networks Plans To Revisit Public Offering

When Dr. Gian Gonzaga and the research team at eHarmony decided to conduct a study on the relationship between divorce and the way couples meet, they found themselves confronted with a couple of hurdles to clear:

• Online dating is a relatively new phenomenon - it's been around for a little over a decade, and only been popular for the last 7 or 8 years. That's not a significant amount of time for a large number of couples to meet, marry, and then separate, and the sample size would likely have been too small to create an accurate study.
• One method of running the study would be to simply sample the American population at random, hoping that a significant number of people who had gotten divorced met their former spouses on an online dating site. The research team would have to hope that, through sheer luck, they would find a large enough number of people who had A) Married in the last decade, B) Met their partner on a particular online dating site, and C) Gotten divorced from that person. But surveying the entire population of the United States is far from practical, and leaves too much to chance.

Instead, the eHarmony team, aided by Opinion Research Corp., "identified an online panel of 4,000 people who had been married to AND divorced from that person in the last 15 years," with a focus on marriages that began between 2005 and 2009. Though their final sample size was small - only 506 people - their findings are still interesting. In most cases, "the expected number of divorces was very close to the actual number of divorces...observed in the sample," which means that "it didn't really matter how you met your spouse, you were just as likely to get divorced." The most notable results from the study showed that:

• People who met on eHarmony were 66.6% less likely to get divorced.
• People who met through school were 41.1% less likely to get divorced.
• People who met at a bar were 24% more likely to get divorced.
• People who met through unspecified other means were 16% more likely to get divorced.

Their findings are food for thought, but the eHarmony team acknowledges that they are far from definitive: "We realize the numbers of eHarmony divorces is pretty small and this is only one sample of divorces. We don't know if these results will replicate in another sample or generalize to all marriages. Those are important limitations to this study that need to be acknowledged. We're already working on replicating these findings to address these limitations."

It is also important to remember, as Dr. Gonzaga notes, that studies like these show only WHAT happened, not WHY it happened. "How you met your spouse is only one of many reasons for why a couple eventually ends up unhappy or divorced," he writes. "Many relationships that start off shaky end up lasting a lifetime. Others that have a great foundation still end up in trouble. How you meet is only the starting point. You, and your spouse, control where you end up."

Read the original post here and for more details on the matchmaking service which conducted this survey please read our review of eHarmony.

Last month Jiayuan.com applied to list on the Nasdaq. Well, on May 11th Jiayuan.com (China's largest dating site) opened for trading under the symbol DATE at $11 per share. At one point it reached $11.62 a share but by end of trading it had fallen 4.4 percent to close at $10.52 per share. As of writing this post one share of the company is worth $10.68 US dollars.

From the IPO Jiayaun said they raised $78.1 million from 7.1 million American depositary shares.

For more on this story you can read .

A dating site for singles 50-plus called OurTime.com was launched the other day by People Media. People Media is owned by IAC which also owns the popular dating services Match.com and Chemistry.

OurTime.com launched with over 1 million profiles in its database. These profiles were gathered from some of IAC's existing dating sites that had singles which matched a number of criteria, including being over the age of 50. Combining all of these profiles into one dating site makes OurTime.com one of the larger services online to cater this niche.

Singles visiting OurTime.com can expect the members to be more interested in long-term relationships and companionship rather than marriage. Members tend also to be more traditional in their thinking and much happier with their personal lives when compared to someone younger.

For more on this story you can read the press release. At the moment we do not have a review of OurTime.com but for a similar dating service you should check out our Senior People Meet review.

Update: Our new review of OurTime.com is now available online.

According to the blog "Breaking the online dating sound barrier”, the dating site Plenty Of Fish only accepts users from Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, France, Germany and Italy. I did try creating a new user from China and I didn't have any problems (I had the account deleted), so POF must check the IP of the user to see what country it is from before they allow them to register.

The other bit of news about Plenty Of Fish is, it now supports 4 languages. Before now the site was only available in English. As of a few days ago French, German and Spanish versions can be accessed with an Italian version coming soon. This means any text from the user interface (menus, links, etc.) along with all help and information pages are available in the language. The only thing that doesn't get converted is any text a user may have typed for profile fields like the About Me section.

For more information on this story you can check out Fernando's Blog and to find out more about this dating site you can read our Plentyoffish.com review.

Does where you meet your spouse make a difference in how happy the marriage is and if the relationship lasts?

According to a marriage study conducted for eHarmony in December of 2010, online dating is currently the 3rd most popular way for newlyweds to meet (following work/school and friends/family), and eHarmony is now responsible for nearly 100,000 marriages per year in the United States. Bringing couples together is an admirable occupation - but it doesn't mean much if the relationship isn't built on a strong foundation that can stand the test of time. In the words of eHarmony's Dr. Gian Gonzaga: "my colleagues and I aren't doing our jobs correctly if all we do is bring people together.... It's not about creating a lot of relationships; it's about creating a lot of good relationships."

With that idea in mind, Gonazaga and his team asked themselves the question posed at the start of this post. Does where you meet your partner have an effect on how happy you are in your relationship, and whether or not the relationship lasts? After failing to find any studies that investigated the matter, Gonzaga and his researchers decided to take matters into their own hands, in conjunction with Opinion Research Corp.

RELATIONSHIP SATISFACTION

The first study, an online survey of 7,386 adults who married within the last 5 years, examined relationship satisfaction. Participants were asked how they met their spouse, and were then directed to use the Couples Satisfaction Index, a well-known test developed at the University of Rochester, to measure their relationship satisfaction. eHarmony users scored well: couples who had met on the site were more satisfied with their marriages than couples who had met on Match.com, via friends or family, or at a bar or other social gathering. Couples who had met on eHarmony also reported higher relationship satisfaction than those who had met through their jobs or at school, but the difference was much less significant.

KEEPING THE SPARK ALIVE

Participants in the study were also asked if their relationship had "lost the spark," as a loss of chemistry between partners is often a precursor to relationship dissatisfaction. Once again, people who met on eHarmony fared well: couples from the site were least likely to feel that the magic was gone from their relationship.

But what about the major issue of divorce? Does how a person meets their spouse have any relation to the likelihood that they will get divorced? eHarmony researchers asked people whether they or their spouse had ever seriously suggested separating or divorcing, and it turns out that the "proportion of couples who discuss divorce doesn't differ widely across the various ways couples met." eHarmony couples were the least likely to discuss divorce, but the numbers were not statistically different from couples who met at church/place of worship, work/school, and through family/friends. There were, however, "statistically significant differences between the eHarmony couples and those who met at bars/social events and those who met on Match.com."

Talking about divorce is, of course, only an indicator of divorce - it is not a divorce itself. To get a clearer picture of the link between divorce and the location where couples met, eHarmony conducted a second study. Read on to hear more about what they found.

For more information on the dating site which conducted this survey please read our eHarmony.com review.