General News

We have had our compare dating site feature up and running for a few weeks now. Our dating sites compare tool is integrated right into our dating site search tool. Once you select the criteria for a dating site and perform a search, you now have the ability to check off any dating site in the search results and compare them.

You can compare as many dating sites as you wish but we only show up to 4 on any one page. Dating sites when compared are displayed top to bottom (side by side) to make it easy to look across the page and compare each feature of all the services. A list of features are displayed on the left with the name of the dating sites across the top and bottom. A checkmark will be visible in the feature row if the service supports the feature. If the feature is not supported then a minus sign or a blank will be present. Compare results can be sorted and you can remove any dating site from the results once you have disqualified it to make comparing the other services easier.

We keep track of many features dating sites offer. This includes things like if there is a guarantee or coupons offered, to what regions and languages the site is available in. We also list if the dating site is designed for a particular person in mind like seniors or someone from a specific faith. Mobile applications are also listed along with the type of relationships the site is designed to create (i.e. casual, long-term, marriage, etc.). Using our new compare tool now makes it much easier for singles to see a side by side comparison of any dating site we have reviewed.

Check out the following page for examples of some of the more popular dating sites being compared with each other.

It was a "Midsummer Night Affair" at the Hudson Terrace, a trendy Manhattan nightclub, earlier this month, as 400 men and women seeking sugar daddy/sugar baby relationships flooded the venue in hopes of meeting a match. Despite the $40 entrance fee for women, and the $80 cover for men, hopeful sugar daddies and sugar babies packed into the party, sponsored by the sugar daddy dating site SeekingArrangement.com.

Perhaps it's the recession, or maybe it's just that the stigma of these sorts of agreements is lessening more and more with every passing day, but it seems as though sugar daddy arrangements are more popular now than ever before. A recent article in the Huffington Post, which profiled several men and women in this kind of arrangement, attributed the sugar daddy's rising popularity to the soaring cost of higher education.

"I was thinking about going on Match," one 25 year old student says, "but I needed help financially. I guess what finally pushed me over the edge was that I needed help to pay off my loans from school." The work of two anthropology graduates at George Washington University revealed similar findings: of the 100 participants in their study of sugar daddy culture, more than half reported that the money they received was paying for their education.

Brandon Wade, the CEO and founder of SeekingArrangement.com, has also noticed the growing popularity of the site with students. "Over the past few years, the number of college students using our site has exploded," he says. "College students are one of the biggest segments of our sugar babies and the numbers are growing all the time." Wade considers this a public service, a unique opportunity for individuals to form mutually beneficial relationships, and it seems that many of the site's male members agree.

"Most of these young women have debt from school," says a sugar daddy who goes by the name 'Jack' and describes himself as a 'humanitarian.' "I guess I like the college girls more because I think of their student debt as good debt. At least it seems like I'm helping them out, like I'm helping them to get a better life."

Many have called these arrangements prostitution, but Wade is quick to defend them. "The media loves to use the term prostitution, but I'm adamantly against that," he told the Wall Street Journal. "There is chemistry involved in these relationships. It's not a one-time exchange of money for sex." In fact, he believes that sugar daddy/sugar baby agreements have the potential to be healthier than other relationships, because both parties are immediately upfront about what they want from the relationship and what they are offering. When each person's expectations are clearly stated, the potential for romantic disaster is significantly lessened.

Some, like a girl referred to as 'Jennifer' says, see both a practical and a romantic side to the sugar daddy phenomenon. "I realize I'm not going to have it forever," she told the Huffington Post. "While I've still got it, I'm going to milk it for all it's worth. I mean, maybe I'll get swept off my feet. Really, anything could happen."

So what do you think? Is the sugar daddy culture a thinly-veiled form of prostitution, or an acceptable and mutually beneficial agreement made between consenting adults?

For similar dating services you can take a look at our Wealthy Singles Dating category.

Update 2020-03-30: Good news. POF has announced a new feature called POF Live that allows live video broadcasting to other users including private one on one sessions.

Update 2019-07-09: Please note that POF has since removed the video chat functionality from both their app and website.

After dropping IM for about a year in 2009, PlentyOfFish recently started to offer audio and video chatting. This has been a feature request for a while by many members. To use the new feature you must have Adobe Flash player version 10.1 or higher installed on your computer as well as the required hardware which includes a webcam or microphone.

To start an audio or video chat all you need to do is click the chat link underneath a members thumbnail photo. Once your request to chat is accepted you can then click on the audio or video button found at the top of the chat window.

To find out more about this dating site you can read our POF.com review.

China's leading dating site, Jiayuan.com has roughly a million users a month now who pay for the privilege to exchange messages with other members. The messages can be paid for by either the sender or the receiver. Their second quarter earnings this year almost doubled to $12.9 million when compared to the same quarter last year. Jiayuan listed on the Nasdaq back in May and since then their stock price has jumped 21 percent (as of last Friday). This is very good especially when you compare it to other Nasdaq listed Internet companies from China (most have fallen).

Jiayuan never relied heavily on advertising on their site as a source of income. In 2008 advertising made up only 15 percent of their revenue. Online advertising is a very competitive market with slim margins and for this reason at the start of this year Jiayuan decided to drop advertising from their dating site completely. Supporting a sales staff and the way it affected the user experience just did not make it profitable. Paid messaging now accounts for 80 percent of their revenue with the other 20 percent generated from in-person events and a premium service members can use to hire a human matchmaker.

For more on the story you can read the WSJ.

As an employee at i2, a ­supply-chain management company based in Dallas, Amarnath Thombre was tasked with finding the most efficient ways to transport products around the country. Now, as a key engineer for Match.com, Thombre is revolutionizing the online dating industry.

Thombre, a native of Pune, India, attended the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay before taking an advanced degree in chemical engineering at the University of Arizona. Though his experience hadn't specifically prepared him to enter the world of online dating, Mandy Ginsberg, his former co-worker at i2 and current president of Match.com US, saw potential in Thombre when she needed to overhaul the algorithm behind Match's pairing process.

"I brought over a bunch of people who I thought could help solve one of the most difficult problems out there, which is how to model human attraction," Ginsberg told David Gelles for FT Magazine. Her choice proved to be a wise one, and Thombre's expertise, along with a team of 9 math whizzes, proved to be exactly what the company needed to update the Match algorithm.

The Match algorithm, also known as "Synapse," learns about its users in a way that is similar to the way the human brain learns, Thombre says. "When you give it stimuli, it forms neural pathways," he told Gelles. "If you stop liking something, those shut off. It's learning as you go." This innovative idea is similar to the groundbreaking technology used by sites like Amazon, Neflix, and Pandora to recommend new products, movies, or songs based on a user's preferences. But when it comes to matching people based on their potential love and attraction, however, things get significantly more complex.

"With Netflix, people are constantly rating movies," Thombre explains. "But there's only one The Godfather, and you rate it once. Even if you like The Godfather, The Godfather doesn't have to like you back. The whole problem of mutual matching makes the problem 10 times more complicated."

To solve this problem, the Match algorithm gives variables different weights, according to how users behave. "For example," Gelles writes, "if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them."

So far, Ginsberg and Thombre's changes seem to be working wonders. Since the implementation of the updated algorithm, "Yes" ratings on the site's Daily5 feature have increased over 100%, and more than half of e-mails sent on Match originate from matches recommended by Synapse. The future looks bright for the Match algorithm.

Read the original FT Magazine article here. For part 1 on this story you can read How Match.com Makes A Match.

For more information on this online dating site you can check out our Match.com review.

Spark Networks has reported their second quarter financial results for the year 2011. Revenue is up by 17 percent to $12 million when compared to quarter 2 of 2010 and up 9 percent when compared to the last quarter. This is the largest quarter over quarter growth in 6 years and the third consecutive quarter growth in a row.

Jewish Networks was responsible for $6.73 million of revenue. This is an increase of 1 percent when compared to the same quarter last year. The Other Affinity Networks saw revenue reach $4.7 million. This is an increase of 68 percent when compared to Q2 2010. General Market Networks revenue continued to fall with revenues of only $153,000. This is a decrease of 48 percent. Revenue from Offline & Other Businesses was $449,000.

Average paying subscribers for the Jewish Networks rose 1 percent to 90,094 during quarter 2. Other Affinity Networks surpassed Jewish Networks for the first time ever and reached 96,071 average paying subscribers. This is an increase of 50 percent. General Market Networks subscribers fell again to 3,485. They saw a 46 percent decrease when compared to the same quarter last year.

I have been seeing a lot of Christian Mingle TV commercials lately so I am sure this marketing endeavor is partially responsible for the large increase of subscribers that the Other Affinity Networks is seeing.

For the full 2011 Q2 release visit Spark Networks News Room.

Related Story: Spark Networks First Quarter 2011 Financials