Dating Services

eHarmony here in the United States will be having a free communication weekend (FCW) starting this Friday May 28th, 2010 and ending in the late evening of Monday May 31st, 2010. As the name suggests, free communication weekends allow free members of eHarmony not only to create a profile and review matches, but to use the guided communication process to communicate with other members. This guided process allows matches to ask and answer questions so they can get to know each other better. In the fourth step, once you become more familiar with you match you can then go ahead and write your first mail message. eHarmony has found this communication approach greatly increases the chances of a successful long term relationship. Fasttracking the communication process to mail and profile photos are not included in this promotion for free members.

This FCW is happening on the Memorial Day holiday weekend so you can expect eHarmony to be the place online for singles who are serious about finding a long term relationship, to be.

This will be the 25th eHarmony free communication weekend with the last event occurring late in March (see Story). eHarmony waiting almost 2 months before having this free communication weekend.

Check out our review of eHarmony for more information on this popular matchmaking service.

Singles interested in the United Kingdom Free Communication Weekend, read this eHarmony News Story.

Singles interested in the Canada Free Communication Event which is 10 days long, read this eHarmony News Story.

I knew change was a foot on Yahoo! Personals.

I was visiting the site this morning and all was normal and then just a couple of hours ago we were sent official word that Match.com is now the exclusive online dating site for Yahoo in North America. We had hints of this possibility back in May of 2009 when the CEO of IAC (owners of Match.com), Barry Diller mentioned that they were in talks with Yahoo about acquiring their personals service. Yahoo and Match are also no strangers to partnerships. The dating sites for Yahoo UK, Germany, Taiwan are all partnerships with Match.com in Europe. Granted the Match.com European Operations were bought by Meetic last year but these partnership deals were in place long before the sale. It also looks like the partnership with eHarmony that Yahoo Australia had is over with Match.com taking the helm.

For current members of Yahoo! Personals, you will be experiencing a transition period. You have 3 options to choose from:

Markus, the CEO of Plenty of Fish, posted on his blog with word that they have updated their Chemistry Test. They now use a new and more advanced predictive statistical model which now will give you a list of 30 matches that you are most likely to end up dating and falling in love with. He mentions that they spent year's collecting dating from POF members of who they dated, who they broke up with, and who married. With this information in hand, Plenty of Fish used it to create a model which generates better matches than before for the average user.

As with the older test at Plenty of Fish, the new Chemistry Test still measures 5 dimensions of personality. They are Self-Confidence, Family Orientation, Self-Control, Social Dependency and Easygoingness. These factors were determined by POF to be essential for building a successful long-term relationship.

To find out more about this dating site, read our review of Plenty of Fish.

Quepasa.com is a social network website with over 13 million members that services the Latino online community. According to Compete their traffic has increased 5 times to 275,000 unique visitors a month, over the last 6 months. Last week an announcement was made that Quepasa has partnered with the dating site Zoosk to make their service for singles the primary option to all of Quepasa members. This partnership benefits both companies. It gives Zoosk a large, new, and relatively untapped singles market and it gives Quepasa an additional revenue generating service.

Members of Quepasa can expect the dating service from Zoosk to go live by the end of this month.

To find out more about the dating site you can read our Zoosk review.

Earlier this month Spark Networks released their first quarter earnings for 2010. Revenue in this quarter overall dropped 12 percent to 10.5 million when compared to the same period last year. When compared to the last quarter in 2009, revenue dropped 5 percent. Net income for this quarter was $929,000. This is a 3 times increase over the same period last quarter of $311,000. Average paying subscribers for the whole company was 169,833. This is an increase of 1 percent when compared to quarter 1 of 2009.

Spark Networks dating sites that fall under the Jewish Networks banner (made up mostly of JDate) had revenue of $7.1 million. This is a decrease of 7 percent when compared to quarter 1, 2009. Some good news is found here because subscribers did increase 10 percent too 93,235. The last time JDate had this many subscribers was back at the end of 2007.

The other important division for Spark Networks is their Other Affinity Networks (the MingleMatch sites). For this quarter they earned $3 million which is a 10 percent decrease when compared to the same quarter last year. Subscribers were up though, by 6 percent to 68,124.

For the full 2010 Q1 release visit Spark Networks News Room.

Related Story: Spark Networks Fourth Quarter 2009 Financials

eHarmony was featured on Nightline last night. In the first part of the video they show an eHarmony research team watching a couple though multiple cameras having dinner. The video then goes on and relates a few facts about the eHarmony dating service:

• The eHarmony profile has 320 questions.
• On average everyday eHarmony is responsible for 236 marriages in the US.
• Over 100,000 babies have been born as the result of these marriages.

An interview of eHarmony's CEO, Greg Waldorf, is then conducted which focused mostly on asking questions about eHarmony's mathematical formula they use for matching members together. The host also asked Mr. Waldrof about skeptics of online dating and how eHarmony convinces them that it does work. Mr. Waldorf points to all of their success stories and by the fact you can contact them directly. Singles interested in eHarmony, can visit their Facebook Fan page to talk to these couples and get any questions of theirs answered. In the last part of the interview, Nightline talks to eHarmony researchers about how they study relationships and what they look for in a successful one to help continue to improve the formula eHarmony uses for matching.

Here is ABCs Nightline Formula for Love video about eHarmony:

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.

To find out more about this dating service, read our eHarmony review.