Dating Services

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.

On March 4th, 2010 Spark Networks reported quarter 4 earnings for 2009 and their year end results (which was on Dec. 31, 2009). Revenue for the fourth quarter was $11.1 million which was a decrease of 16% from the same quarter last year. Spark Networks reported a lost for this quarter of $9.6 million and for the full year, a net loss of $6.4 million. Total revenue for 2009 was $45.4 million; in 2008 it was $53.7 million. CEO Adam Berger is quoted in the press release about this the losses:

It’s no surprise to anyone following us this past year that 2009 was extremely challenging for us as revenue declined by 21% with nearly half of the decline coming from our highly profitable Jewish Networks segment ... We accelerated our cost cutting program to offset the revenue decline but were unable to overcome the $8.9 million contribution1 decline and ended up suffering a $5.7 million decline in Adjusted EBITDA

Average paying subscribers for Spark Networks was 168,646 for quarter 4 2009 which is a 5 percent decrease when compared to quarter 4 in 2008. For the full year, average paying subscribers was 166,267. This is down 11 percent from 186,957 in 2008.

While Jewish Networks revenue fell 11 percent to $7.1 million, their subscribers grew by 4 percent to 90,567 in quarter 4. Average paying subscribers for General Market Networks (Spark.com and others) was 9,594. This is a decrease of 58 percent when compared to the fourth quarter of 2008. The Other Affinity Networks (MingleMatch) had better subscriber news and posted a 4 percent increase in subscribers to 67,725 during quarter 4 2009.

While Spark Networks continues to struggle, their balance sheet shows as of December 31, 2009 cash and cash equivalents of $6.2 million with no outstanding debt.

For the full 2009 Q4 release visit Spark Networks News Room.

Related Story: Spark Networks Third Quarter 2009 Financials

Recipient of Gold
Match.com

Recipient of Silver
eHarmony

Recipient of Bronze
Yahoo! Personals

We closed the 2009 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award poll last month (Feb. 18) with a total of 705 votes from the public. This is over 100 more votes than last year's Single's Choice Awards. It is good to see people participating in the poll since ultimately it is online daters like yourselves who decide which service becomes the popular one to use. Plus, singles who visit our site and are new to online dating use our awards as a tool to indicate which dating sites to try out first.

As with last year we listed the top 10 dating sites for our visitors to vote on. The top 3 voted dating sites got an award, Gold, Silver and Bronze. The one thing we did different this year was we added a second question to our poll asking which free dating site would be your top choice for an award. To find out the answer to this question, check out this story.

The recipient of the Gold 2009 Singles's Choice Award is Match.com. This is the third year in a row that this dating site has won the Gold Single's Choice Award which shows Match.com continues to be the market leader in online dating. Match.com has a proven record of success and many members worldwide who know if you want to be serious about finding a partner, Match.com is the leading dating site to join. This year Match.com received 2 percent more votes than in 2008 for a total of 201 (29% of the total vote).

The recipient of the Silver 2009 Singles's Choice Award is eHarmony. This is eHarmony's second year to win this award. They earned 22 percent of the votes (same as last year) which was 153 total votes out of 705. The dating site with the famous matching system certainly had a number of changes this year. There was new features added, profile tweaks and a successful Facebook fan page.

The recipient of the Bronze 2009 Singles's Choice Award is Yahoo! Personals. Yahoo also won this award last year as well except they slipped 2 percent this year and ended up with 11 percent of the total vote, which means they had 74 votes. While Yahoo may have taken 3rd place they still run a first rate dating service. All you have to do is log into their dating site to find out why.

This year's standings for the Single's Choice award for all dating sites in the poll are (click the dating site name to read our full review):

1. Match.com
2. eHarmony
3. Yahoo! Personals
4. Chemistry
5. Lavalife
6. SinglesNet.com
7. PerfectMatch.com
8. FriendFinder.com
9. True.com
10. Date.com

We would like to give a big THANKS to everyone who participated this year in the Single's Choice Award.

The United States and Canada have more than 85 million baby boomers (people over 50) and over 25 billion are single. To help these singles navigate the world of relationships and online dating, SeniorPeopleMeet.com recently launched a free online magazine. Senior singles will benefit from articles on love, dating and relationships. They can also expect advice and guidance from marriage and family therapist Dr. Terri Orbuch.

Readers of this senior dating online magazine can expect regular updates and an online interactive experience as well. Polls are available to users and you can submit your dating related question online for Dr. Terri Orbuch.

To find out more about this dating site read our SeniorPeopleMeet.com review.