Dating Services

In mid March, Match.com announced a partnership with Yahoo!7 in Australia. Match.com will be the exclusive dating partner to Yahoo's Australian news and search portal as well as Yahoo!Xtra for New Zealand. You can now reach the new partnered dating service by visiting Yahoo!7 Dating or by clicking on the "Dating" menu item available on the Yahoo!7 home page.

Currently on the Yahoo!7 Dating page visitors have access to both the old dating service and the new Match.com partnered service. The original Yahoo!7 Dating will close it' doors in June, 2010.

According to Date Daily, Mate1.com has launched their 1st annual video contest called "Inglourious Daters". All interested participants need to do, to enter this contest is, make a video about their online dating experiences.

There are a total of 7 prizes:

• 1 Grand Prize of $1000
• First place ($500) and second place ($200) in 3 categories. The categories are "Most Romantic", "Most Popular/Viral" , and "Funniest".

A panel of Mate1.com dating experts will decide the winning videos from the contestants entries based on their viral strengths and entertainment value. The contest will run from March 10, 2010 to June 20, 2010 and is open to people 18 years of age and over.

You can find out more information and rules about this contest on Mate1's Facebook page found here. For more information on the dating site itself, read our review of Mate1.com.

eHarmony will be having a 4 day free communication weekend (FCW) starting this Thursday March 18th, 2010 through to Sunday March 21st, 2010. This promotion will be available on both the United States and Canadian eHarmony dating sites.

These free weekends are a great time to join eHarmony to try out the service. As a member during a free communication weekend you will get to review all your matches and communicate with them at no cost. This enables you to try out most features of the site for free, including the guided communication process and emailing, and all without a credit card. These weekends are notoriously busy for eHarmony so they are great way to quickly meet some new singles in your area who are interested in a long term relationship.

This will be the 24th eHarmony free communication weekend with the last event occurring on Valentine's Day (see Story). During this promotion FastTrack and viewing members photos are not available to free members.

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

The dating site Plentyoffish.com can now be found in another music video. The first time this happened was for a song called "Available" by Flo Rida last summer (see Story). Now the Lady Gaga video for the song "Telephone" (featuring Beyonce) has Plentyoffish.com being used by one of the women guards in the video.

The dating site is not the only obvious product placement in the video. You will find Lady Gaga getting her Verizon mobile phone confiscated by jail guards and strangley enough, her eating Wonder Bread in the video as well.

You can find the new video LadyGaga.com. Warning the video is a little strange and has sexual content.

We noticed that eHarmony has shut down eHarmony Marriage. eHarmony Marriage was launched on February 6, 2006 as a service to help couples fix a struggling marriage. As of November 2009, eHarmony had removed all links to eHarmony Marriage on their dating site and as of last week, the domain "marriage.eHarmony.com" now gets redirected to eHarmony Advice.

eHarmony Marriage was an interesting concept that I guess didn't take off. At one point back in December of 2008 we notice that eHarmony Marriage only had about 1,000 visitors a month (see Story). This number is not large, especially when you consider eHarmony the dating site receives millions of visitors a month.

The main way I found eHarmony promoted the marriage service was through the dating site itself. If a user picked "separated" or "married" as their current relationship status when filling out a profile, they would then be asked by the website if they would like to learn more about eHarmony Marriage (see Story). With the closure, I guess if a marriage has reach the point of someone searching dating sites for singles, it is beyond the point of them wanting to fix the marriage.

eHarmony is not out of the marriage business all together. In 2008 they bought the popular websites Weddingbee (see Story) and Project Wedding (see Story).

For more information on this dating site, read our eHarmony review.

The owner of DateHookup.com, Dustin, wanted to find out if sending a Virtual Gift with your mail message to a member would increase the chance that the member would reply back. He took about 1 million first contact messages from last month (first contact refers to the fact that the member hasn't communicated with the person before) and compared the ones which included a virtual gift with ones that did not.

He found out that it did greatly improve your chances of getting a response. Your average mail message sent on DateHookup without a gift will have a 14 percent chance of getting replied to. With a virtual gift your chances nearly double to 26 percent. It sounds like if you really like the person, it would be stupid not to include a virtual gift to increase your chances of a reply.

I was surprised at the results. I figured that virtual gifts would improve the chance of someone replying, but not by almost 100 percent. Another thing I was surprised about was the actually reply percentage of 14 to 26 percent. I do not know the overall average reply rate, but if an equal number of virtual gift messages were compared with messages without virtual gifts then it would be 20 percent. This means 80 percent of all messages sent that are first contacts go unanswered. Is this reply percentage rate (which feels low to me) a DateHookup problem, or does this average reflect most dating sites which operate similar to DateHookup? I bet this average reply rate is similar across most free sites.

For more on the story visit the new DateHookup Blog. For more about this dating site you can read our review of DateHookup.com.