Dating Services

Plenty of fish launched a new dating website called eVow early this September. It is a service which allows singles to find long term relationships only. Instead of focusing on providing matches like other dating sites which specialize in long term relationships and marriage, eVow plans to allow searching of their profiles. This is the main selling feature of the site at the moment.

In less than 7 days of operation, more than 100,000 people signed up to eVow (thanks to being advertised on POF). The site is currently free but there is a plan to make it a paid dating site soon. New features are also planned for the site which took just under 30 days to create (from when programming started).

You can expect a review of this new relationship site to be available soon.

For more on the story read the POF Blog and to find out further details on the largest free dating site in the world, read our Plenty of Fish review.

I noticed that ChristianCafe.com was down around 11:30am this morning. It is now an hour later and the Christian dating site still appears to be having a problem.

When you visit the site you will get a number of errors depending on the browser you use. In most cases you will get a "Server not found" or a Timeout error message. These types of messages happen when no response is given by a web server to the request to view a web page from an internet browser.

When we get more news on this issue with ChrstianCafe.com I will update this post.

Update #1: As of 2:05pm EST ChristianCafe.com is back online and running fine. There is no word on what the problem was.

For more information on this Christian dating site, check out our ChristianCafe.com 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

ChristianMingle.com launched a new faith-based content website late last month that is a destination designed to serve the Christian community. The website is called Believe.com and it allows Christians to obtain advice, insights and to interact with other community members. Believe.com also features:

sermons in written, audio and video formats from Christian leaders of congregations and organizations across the United States. Topics include encouraging relationship advice, raising children God's way, following biblical financial principles to successful stewardship and many more.

Additional notable features of Believe.com include a Prayer Wall and a searchable Bible. Christian Testimonials can also be found from other visitors and well known Christians that describe life changing experiences and how their faith grew as a result.

To find out more about the dating site, you can check out our review of ChristianMingle.

To continue on our story about how 542 eHarmony Members Marry Every Day we dug up some more interesting statistics. Some of these fun facts are from the new Harris Interactive study while others were released by eHarmony to help celebrate their 10 year anniversary.

• By April of last year there had been over 400 million conversations on eHarmony since launch.
• By August of 2009 eHarmony had 30 million members register and had 30 million pictures uploaded.
• 43.99% of newlyweds who met through an online dating service were matched by eHarmony.
• 25.75% of newlyweds who met online (Social Network, Dating Site, etc...) where matched by eHarmony.
• It is estimated that currently there are 1,130,006 non-married, monogamous relationships started by eHarmony.

eHarmony also found that offline, Americans met their spouses 15% of the time through work and another 15% of the time through friends. The chances of meeting your spouse at school is only 9% and through your family only just over 4%. Bars and clubs came in at 5.4%.

To find out more about this popular online matchmaking service, check out our review of eHarmony.com.

Wow, there has been a lot of eHarmony news lately. Here is some more dealing with the marketing and media side of the business.

Industry insiders are reporting that eHarmony has reached out to a number of media agencies including Omnicom Group, WPP, Publicis Groupe and Interpublic Group of Cos. It looks like they are shopping around with their rather large marketing account. According to Kantar Media, eHarmony "spent a total of $85.4 million in domestic measured media in 2009".

For more on the story, read Advertising Age. To find out other details about this dating site you can check out our eHarmony review.