Dating Services

Since Zoosk received $30 million in funding in December (see Story), their dating site traffic has increased by 3 times according to Compete's estimate. In the graph below it shows that in August of 2009 unique visitors had just crossed the 500,000 mark for Zoosk. In January of this year they had reached 2.7 million unique visitors.

It looks like Zoosk is spending at least some of the money they raised on advertising to increase traffic to their dating site. In an interview with Online Personals Watch, Alex Mehr, CEO Of Zoosk also mentions that their dating site has just reached 50 million members. Just 5 months ago Zoosk members numbered around 40 million. That is a lot of growth, which goes to show how using Facebook and its users to spread information about the dating site has really worked for them.

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

I was surprised when I learned that 80 percent of members at the dating site Mate1.com have never been married and have remained single. On the flip side this means on average at Mate1, 19% of men and 21% of women have been divorced. When you look at the data by country Ireland comes out on top at 94 percent for men and 91 percent for women who have never been married. Let's look at the data for other Countries:

• United States - 76% of men and women have never been married.
• Canada - 86% of men and 79% of women have never tied the knot.
• United Kingdom - 88% of men and 80% of women.

One other thing that I did find interesting was for all countries, there was always a higher percentage of men who were never married than women. Also, since Mate1 has such a high percentage of members who have never been married this seems to suggest that Mate1 members are more likely to be in their twenties and thirties.

For more on the story (including data for other countries) read Date Daily and to find further details about this dating site, read our review of Mate1.com.

Christiancafe.com is a Canadian success story. Eleven years ago today (February 26, 1999) they officially launched. Since then the dating service has successfully matched Christian singles in the United States, Canada and around the world.

One of the best things about this Christian owned and operated dating site is, it offers singles a ten day free trial which gives you almost full access to the service. You can search, view profiles and pictures, and email other members. You can do this all without giving your credit card. Most dating sites offer a free trial but put limits on the trial (like no emailing) which can make the free membership almost useless.

For more information about this dating service, check out our review of Christiancafe.com.

Happy Birthday ChristianCafe.com!

It looks like the rumor was true (see Story), Match.com released a press release yesterday which confirm that they have made a deal to acquire the dating site Singlesnet.com. Financial terms of the deal have yet to be released but Match CEO Greg Blatt did state that Singlesnet will continue to be run largely as a standalone business. Adrian Ong of Match.com will be taking over the helm from the previous owner of Singlesnet, Quinn Lipin. Mr Lipin will still continue to work for Singlesnet.com as an executive.

Singlesnet was once the most visited dating site in the USA back in December 2008. Since then traffic has slowly declined with a major drop happening in February 2009 from 7 million unique visitors to just under 5 million.

The Editor's Top Pick - United Kingdom Award goes to the dating site, Match.com UK. This is the first year for an award specifically given to a United Kingdom dating service. We decided to offer one this year as our UK readership has increased substantially. Why is UK.Match.com the winner of this award? You can read below to find out.

First off, Match.com in the UK had a busy year in 2009. We saw a partnership deal between Meetic and IAC (who owns Match.com) which saw the handing over of the Match.com European operations to one of Europe's biggest dating service, Meetic. By consolidating services between the 2 companies, not only did the 2 companies save money, which could now be spent in other important areas, but overall customer service and satisfaction increased as well. Match.com UK also went in a new direction with marketing. They hired a new advertising agency named Mother, and have spent according to some estimates over £6m on advertising in the United Kingdom over the last year. There new ads are smart and have informed the public on what Match.com offers. This has resulted in an increase in quality traffic to the dating service. A prime indication of how well a dating service is doing, is by how many members they have.

Match.com also continues to research relationships and love, to see what attitudes, personality traits and expectations are compatible or not between people. This research is not only used to improve their matching tools, but to educate Match.com members as well. Visitors to the dating site can view their latest research study called "The LoveGeist Report 2009". The data in the report is the result of a study of over 16,000 people. Included with the report is an interactive map which allows you to view the summary results of the report by regions in Britain.

There are about 3 popular dating services in Britain and we feel the UK version of Match.com comes out on top. For singles who wish to meet the love of their life, there is no better spot to start than Match.com.

Read our review of Match.com UK for more information about this dating service or visit Match.com UK directly.

This Year's Runner Up for this award is: DatingDirect.com.

I found an article which talks about the trouble with web traffic numbers. I have talked about this issue before but it is interesting to see it from the point for view of a large dating site like OkCupid. In January comScore reported that OKCupid had 735,000 unique visitors in January, 2010. This was an increase of about 200,000 from a year ago according to comScore. Sam Yagan, OKCupid chief executive stated that:

... comScore was significantly undercounting the site’s traffic.

For proof he gave the author of the article, Carl Bialik a Google Analytics report for OkCupid which showed almost 4.3 million unique visitors last month. This shows that comScore's estimate is off by 600 percent. All I can say is I am not surprised. Web traffic estimates from these types of traffic sites are usually way off the mark. For example our review site is vastly under estimated as well, in most cases over 4 times as much. The other statistic in which Sam Yagan mentioned was that during a normal day in February (Feb 18th I believe) they had 270,000 unique logins to their dating site. With almost a couple hundred thousand people logging in during a 24 hour period, this makes comScore's estimate of 735,000 unique visitors in a month seem laughably low.

Read more about this topic on the WSJ Blogs. To find out about this dating site, read our review of OKCupid.