Online Dating

Over the last few years PlentyOfFish has tried several different ways to monetize their members. They first offered paid virtual gifts back in December of 2008. It didn't last long though and was pulled after about a month. In March of 2009 PlentyOfFish then offered the "Paid Profile Upgrade". This upgrade called the "Serious Member Badge" was designed to showcase that the member was serious about online dating by displaying icons on your images and highlighting your profile. Prices ranged from $5.95 to $9.80 a month. By mid-2010 the Serious Member Badge also offered a few additional features including having their profile appear above others in search results.

Early this month PlentyOfFish started to offer a new regular membership. As far as we can tell this membership has replaced the Serious Membership along with the “privilege of upgrading” assessment which was supposed to weed out all those who were not serious about maintaining a long-term relationship. The new membership offers:

• The new and improved Ultra Match matching system
• Improved visibility on PlentyOfFish including higher placement in search results
• Find out if your emails were read or just deleted
• The use of profile themes
• Who has viewed your profile
• Unlimited virtual gifts through email
• Additional credits for placing gifts on profiles

Membership costs have increased slightly and range from $6.78 a month for a year to $11.80 a month for a 3 month term. There is no auto rebilling but memberships are also non-refundable. With these new membership changes the only thing that differentiates PlentyOfFish with most other popular paid dating sites is that they still allow all members to email and message each other for free.

With the new membership comes a new statistic. If you upgrade to the new membership it will improve your chances by 530% according to PlentyOfFish (I assume this is when compared to a free membership on the site). With the Serious Membership upgrade your chance of a relationship only increased by 230% 😉 (See Story).

I also notice the other week that the domain Plentyoffish.com now forwards to POF.com, this use to be the other way around. The URLs in the emails I receive from PlentyOfFish for matches etc. also use the POF.com domain though the email is still sent from customercare@plentyoffish.com. The site is still obviously called PlentyOfFish so I am not sure why they changed the primary domain at this point to just the initials. Maybe it will be easier to remember for the average user, or maybe there will be a name change in the future? (I really doubt this will happen)

The last thing that has changed is that the forums link is now back at the top of the PlentyOfFish dating site. We notice that this link first disappeared sometime last summer (See Story). The upgrade link in the forums though still points to the old “SERIOUS UPGRADE” page and not the new membership upgrade page.

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

Match.com launched in 1995, and the site's popularity is still on the rise. In the highly competitive world of online dating, Match.com consistently ranks highly in dater's minds, and for good reason: their trailblazing technology makes them a cut above the rest.

Codenamed "Synapse," Match's algorithm evaluates a diverse range of factors in order to match compatible singles. David Gelles recently took a look backstage at Match.com for FT Magazine, guided by Mandy Ginsberg, president of Match.com US, and Amarnath Thombre, a key engineer for the company, to discover exactly what makes the Match algorithm so special.

Ginsberg had personal experience with the trials and tribulations of online dating before joining the Match team. After divorcing her spouse shortly after leaving college, she joined JDate but had no luck finding a partner. Love later found her in the form of a co-worker from India, who won her heart despite being vastly different from the man she thought she wanted to marry.

"If I had laid out a criteria for what I was looking for, it would not have been a guy from south India," she told Gelles. "People are complex. You're constantly making trade-offs about who's too tall, too short, too smart and too dumb. People come in and tell us a bit about what they're looking for. But what you say and what you do can be different."

With that idea in mind, known as "dissonance" in academic circles, Ginsberg helped revolutionize Match's approach to online dating. "I might come in and say I'm looking for a nice Catholic guy between 30 and 40 who is non-married," she says. "But after weeks of looking at people, I might get an e-mail from a guy who has kids, and I might accept that." Taking into consideration the fact that most people don't know themselves as well as they think they do, the engineers at Match adapted the algorithm to pair users with potential dates based on a combination of what they say they want and what it seems they actually want based on their actions on the site.

Now, instead of taking user's preferences at face value, Match's cutting-edge technology relies on a variety of factors to match prospective partners. Stated preferences like age range and body type are taken into consideration, while the algorithm augments that information with the knowledge it gains from an intelligent examination of a user's behavior on the site. If a member's actions don't match their stated preferences, Match learns that those preferences are not entirely correct and that the member is open to meeting people who don't fit the original description. Synapse also looks at the behavior of similar users and factors in that information as well, in a process known as "triangulation."

As impressive as Ginsberg's contribution to online dating is, Match's amazing innovations would not be possible without its team of brilliant engineers, like Amarnath Thombre, whose story we'll look at next time.

For more information on this popular dating site you can read our review of Match.com.

It has been about 3 months since eHarmony has had a free communication event. Well the wait is over! In the United States and Canada eHarmony will be having a free communication event from September 2nd to the end if day on September 5th. September 5 also happens to be Labor day in the US making it the last long weekend of summer (FYI Canada also celebrates Labour Day at the same time).

So what is a free communication event? As the name suggests all members of eHarmony will be able to communicate for free during the promotion. New and existing free members will be able to create a dating profile, receive matches, and use the guided communication process to communicate with those matches at no cost. The only thing not include is viewing of members profile pictures and Secure Call communication.

This will be eHarmony's 35th free communication event with the last one occurring last spring in May (see Story).

To find out more about this matchmaking service you can take a look at our review of eHarmony.

Plenty of Fish is looking to hire a Database Administrator (DBA) so if you are interested in the job and have the qualifications you should comment on their blog. Markus also released a few statistics about his dating site and what the DBA will be up against. Last year alone Plenty of Fish sent out 5.5 billion messages. This works out to about 15 million a day. He also noted that Plenty of Fish's Behavioral Matching Engine deals with almost 20 billion pieces of data from their 30 million plus registered users that is stored in their database.

What this all boils down to is POF needs some heavy duty hardware to run its website and a DBA that knows how to optimize databases and SQL statements.

For more information on this free dating service you can read our PlentyofFish.com review.

How have marriage and divorce changed over the years?

In 2009. the United States Census Bureau surveyed 39,000 households in an attempt to get a glimpse into the evolution of marriage and divorce in America. The results from the Survey of Income and program Participation (SIPP) were just released, and FlowingData.com used their findings to create visual charts of the state of America marriage. You can see the original graphs here, at their website.

Their primary finding concerns the ages at which men and women choose to marry. "In 1986," says FlowingData.com, "nearly three-quarters of women from 25 to 29 years old had married at least once, while in 2009, only about half of women in the age group have married."

In each survey year - 1986, 1996, 2001, 2004, and 2009 - the graph shows the same trend: the lowest percentage of married people fall into the 25-29 years bracket, and the percentage steadily increases through each successive age bracket until it peaks at "55 and older." The huge disparity seen in the 25-29 years category between the 1986 graph and the 2009 graph is almost completely gone by the time participants had reached the 55+ group, where the points from the two graphs nearly intersect.

In most age and race groups, according to the survey, a "lower percentage of people were married in 2009 than in 1986. However, in some groups, such as those 55 years and older, a higher percentage of people were married in 2009 then in 1986; although the differences are quite small." The SIPP results also confirmed that, in 2009, it was no longer particularly uncommon for someone, either male or female, to be married more than once.

Divided into ethnic groups, the survey found that, though in most cases fewer marriages happened for each age bracket in 2009 than in 1986, marriage in both years increased at a fairly steady rate (regardless of race) as age increased. The lowest percentage of married people for all ethnic groups fell in "25-29 years," and the highest in "55 and older." The greatest differences between 1986 and 2009 are seen in the 25-29 age bracket for all races.

And what of the infamous seven year itch? According to this survey, the idea of the seven year itch isn't completely accurate, but it isn't far from the truth either. "The median marrying age for men is 24.5," reports FlowingData.com, "and median divorce age is 32.0. For women: 22.3 and 30.1, respectively."

For the first time this year shipments of tablets and smartphones exceeded those of desktops and laptops. According to the Flurry blog, 2011 is also the year that the daily time a user spends on mobile applications exceeded that of normal internet browsing (both on the desktop and smartphone). They came to this conclusion while compiling internet usage data from Alexa and comScore, and comparing it with their own data that they track for mobile application usage.

In June, 2010 the average user spent 64 minutes a day on the web and 43 minutes a day using mobile applications. By December of that year web use jumped to 70 minutes and mobile application use went up 23 minutes to 66. By June, 2011 web use has risen to 74 minutes a day but, mobile app use surpassed that and has reached 81 minutes a day. According to Flurry, this means that the average user now spends daily 9 percent more of their time using mobile apps than browsing the web.

I was initially surprised by these numbers but after thinking about it they do makes sense as mobile applications have come a long way in only 3 short years of popularity. When looking at these numbers from Flurry it looks like that more people now use mobile applications than browse the web. That is not the case, many more people still use the internet than mobile apps, it's just that those who have both tend to use their mobile applications more. Still, these numbers are interesting and it shows that dating sites need to take into consideration not only allowing their members to access their service by the web but by mobile applications as well.

For dating sites who offer a dating mobile application please read our Match.com review and our eHarmony Review.