Dating Services

It's Just Lunch partnered with American Way In Flight Magazine to poll airline passengers about dating. One of the first question they asked passengers is, how long does it take them to decide on the first date whether they will go on a second date with the person?

• 13 percent would give their date longer than 1 hour.
• 22 percent usually gives a date 1 hour.
• 66 percent of respondents said in the first half hour of meeting a person is when they decide if they will ever go out with the person again.
• 16 percent said they decide in 5 minutes.
• A further 5 percent know right away.

During a conference call about the IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings report, the owner of Match.com and CEO of IAC, Barry Diller, mentioned they had been talking to Yahoo about the possibility of purchasing their dating site, Yahoo! Personals (see Story).

With this latest news article from Bloomberg it looks like Mr. Diller is not planning to make any new purchases anytime soon.

Diller said in an interview yesterday that he has no plans to make any major acquisitions ... Diller said he would rather invest in IAC’s businesses than acquire large media companies, which he sees as overvalued.

Diller also mentioned at the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Communacopia conference in New York, that IAC has too much cash at the moment but he doesn't see a better return than investing in their own businesses. At the beginning of July 2009, IAC had $1.61 billion in cash and $95.8 million in long-term debt. The New York based company had also repurchased $300 million in stock since August 2008. Since the beginning of this year IAC stock has risen 31 percent to close above $20.

In my opinion these statements by Diller while not mentioning Yahoo Personals directly, makes it clear he has no plans to buy the dating site. By purchasing Yahoo Personals he would be investing in the dating industry, but not directly into one of his existing businesses which is what Barry Diller says he plans to do.

For more information on the dating sites mentioned, read our Match.com review and our Yahoo Personals review.

Our new Speed Dating category is now available to all visitors. Speed Dating events or parties are usually held either online at a website or, in the "Real World" at a bar, restaurant or other entertainment location. Speed Dating offers singles a fast and easy way to meet 10 or more new people in a single night. At a typical event you go on short 3 to 6 minute speed dates with each participant of the opposite gender. After each short date you then score the person as someone you would like to either see again or not. At the end of the night, the host (or website) then gathers all the scores and if that same person wanted to meet you, your contact information would then be exchanged.

There are currently only 2 dating sites in the category. I added the Lavalife review because, at the beginning of the summer Lavalife started to offer online virtual speed dating nightly at 9 PM (use to be 8 PM) to its members (see Story). HurryDate is a new dating site which we reviewed specifically for this category. They offer both online and offline speed dating events and parties plus a dating website where members can go after the event to further communicate with their matches.

For more information about what Speed Dating is all about, visit our Speed Dating Services category.

To find out more about the dating services currently listed in this new category, read our review of Lavalife and our review of HurryDate.

Janis Spindel, a matchmaker by trade for 18 years, connects right minded singles. One way she does this is by holding match parties. These are not your run of the mill single events. A dinner party in August at Ms. Spindel's Bridgehampton home was for 10 bachelors from Manhattan which shared a 5 course meal with 20 single beautiful women. Women, if they meet the qualifications can attend the event for free, but men are required to pay $10,000 for the privilege.

Her matching service which only accepts men as clients is called Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking. Their annual fees start at $50,000 USD and can increase substantially depending on the client's location and bonuses like, if the client gets married. Ms. Spindel says she is worth the price,

If you want the Rolls Royce of matchmaking, you pay for it.

She has over 1,200 relationships and 800 marriages credited to her. Ms. Spindel has yet to hear of one of her marriages ending in divorce. She employees about 20 "scouts" which help find potential clients and matches all over the United States.

For the full story, visit 27East and you can find Janis Spindel's website here. For our complete list of personal matchmaking services (which cost a lot less money), check out our Matchmaking Services category.

The new OkCupid blog called OkTrends had an interesting first post which looked at members sending messages on their dating site. I was surprised by the fact that only 32 percent of first messages (the person who initiated contact) ever got a reply. This is less than a third of all first contacts, and this is on a dating site which is mostly free.

Based on crunching data from tens of thousands of sent messages OkCupid spotted a sweet spot on message length and the chance of a man or woman replying to your message. The first thing they found was that most single's first time messages are way too long.

Almost 16% of first messages are over 2000 characters (roughly 400 words), and the average is 743! At least in terms of using your time efficiently, your messages should be much shorter.

What they found is, on average for a man to write to a woman, a message should be about 200 characters in length. This will give him the best conversion rate of 17.1% based on the average amount of time it takes a man to write a message. For example at this message length the average male online dater can scan profiles and write 10 messages in 1 hour giving them on average, 1.71 replies to their 10 messages.

For women message length is even shorter. A message length of only 50 characters gives woman a conversion rate of 30 percent. This means they can send 11.4 messages per hour and expect on average to receive 3.42 replies from men. First contact message from women seem to more serve the purpose of getting the man to notice their profile, rather than convey any real information.

For the full dating advice article, read OkTrends and to find out more information about this dating site read our review of OkCupid.com.

An interesting press release went out claiming that the Chinese dating site Zhenai.com is now the largest in the world. Zhenai first started 11 years ago, in May of 1998 as a free dating site called 96333.com. In 2005 they rebranded as Zhenai.com (which means "cherished love") and now has about 20 million registered members and claims that daily, another 40,000 singles signup. Zhenai's largest demographic are singles who are 25 to 45 years old, who live in an urban area, and are white-collar professionals. More than 85% of these members have a bachelor's, master's or doctoral diploma. Zehnai expects its number of registered members to hit 30 million by the end of the first quarter of 2010.

Zhenai claims to be the world's largest dating site by surpassing Match.com which had 15,000,000 registered members and a daily increment of 60,000 new members in May of 2009 (Note: Match.com now claims 20,000 new members a day). The problem is Zhenai switched a few of Match.com's numbers around. Match.com actually claims to have had more than 100 million registered users between 2000 and 2008 (see Press Release). That doesn't even include the profiles registered in the 5 years from when Match.com first launched in 1995. In the Zehnai press release, they are using Match.com current number of members which accounts for 15 million. I believe Match.com defines a current member as someone who has logged in at least once during the last year. I have a feeling that Zhenai is including all registered members since the launch of their dating site and only used the lower Match.com current registered members numbers to highlight their claim that they are the largest dating site.