Online Dating

I am not sure if I missed this before when PlentyOfFish starting offering a new paid membership but I noticed today this statement from their upgrade page:

PlentyOfFish will automatically continue your subscription for the same period and amount as your current upgrade.

PlentyOfFish previous memberships never automatically renewed, so it looks like PlentyOfFish changed their position on this point.

For more on this dating site you can go ahead and read our Plenty Of Fish review.

The online dating site Christian Cafe has received a lot of media attention lately. Sam Moorcroft, the founder of ChristianCafe.com, was first on the radio for the Boundless Show as an online dating expert. This episode of the show took a look at behind the scenes of online dating. Sam and his wife Polly was part of a round table discussion in which a panel of online daters got to ask him a number of questions. You can find a pod cast of the show here on iTunes.

Next, Sam was on a Canadian Christian TV show called Full Circle. He appears around the 6:00 minute mark and discusses the history of Christian Cafe and how to best succeed in online dating. A former host, Denise, was also on the show with her husband whom she met on Christian Cafe. To view a video of the show you can visit Full Circle.

For more information on this online dating service please check out our review of ChristianCafe.com.

Match.com (Match.ca in Canada) is now powering online dating at Yahoo! Canada. Yahoo in the United States has been using Match.com since May of 2010 (see Story). Previously Lavalife had partnered with Yahoo! Canada to provide online dating to their visitors (see Story).

To find out more about this dating site you can check out our Match.com review.

The Jewish New Year just happened and I noticed that JDate has more to celebrate than Rosh Hashanah. They just released the results from a survey by ResearchNow (an independent research company) which shows that JDate is responsible for 52 percent of all Jewish marriages that started online. From the survey of 948 married Jewish internet users they also concluded that 63 percent of the online dates originated at JDate, this is many times more than the leading competing dating services. The survey also showed that 76 percent of Jewish internet users who used an online dating site to find love, became a member of JDate.

For more information and statistics you can read this post from the JDate blog. To find out if this dating service is something you would be interested in you can also check out our review of JDate.

FriendFinder Networks announced September 12th that they have acquired BDM Global Ventures which owns JigoCity. JigoCity is similar to the popular Groupon website which offers visitors local daily deals. JigoCity has about 150 employees and has offices in China, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and the US (Los Angeles). JigoCity has about 1 million members. Revenue in July for JigoCity was $600,000 and in August it was $1.1 million.

The acquisition cost FriendFinder 1.6 million in shares and about 6.4 million in warrants with exercise prices ranging from $5 to $18 per share.

For more on the story you can read the press release.

CBS new late-night dating show called "Excused" started last week on Monday September 12th at 11pm. The thing that differentiates this show from other dating shows like "The Dating Game" or "Blind Date" (same creators) is that at the shows core there is an online dating site. The dating site is Jazzed.com. This year old service was launched by eHarmony (see Story) to help them compete against the more general oriented dating sites which typically younger singles use.

So how does the show Excused make use of the dating site? Every contestant on the show will have an online dating profile on Jazzed.com. This profile and references to the information on the profile will be used throughout the show to help match up the contestants. The twist here which Jazzed.com and TV executives hope brings in a large audience is that viewers will be able to go online and view the contestants profiles as well. Just like any other profile, viewers (who become members) will then be able to send emails or instant messages to the contestant if they choose and even potentially date if the attraction is reciprocated.

For more on the story you can read Ad Age and for more details on one of the online dating sites mentioned, please check out our review of eHarmony.