General News

Kudos to Match.com for listening to their members.

On their official blog Match.com talks about the latest release of their popular iPhone dating app (version 1.8.1). Apparently the new version included banner ads at the bottom of the app interface. Match.com members complained about it and Match.com listened to their feedback. Five days after the release of the new version, all ads were removed from the iPhone dating application.

In the post Match.com also mentions that members using matchMobile has doubled in the last six months. I am not surprised by this statistic. The new mobile dating apps are a great way to access the dating site and I I wouldn't be surprised if usage doubles again in another 6 months.

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

Well, we have completed point number 2 from our Dating Sites Reviews - New Features and Updates! story. The Dating Site Top Ten lists have been redone. They now are completely dynamic ranking each dating site and/or service at the point when the visitor views the page. All dating services are also included in the rankings with the exception of ones that have gone out of business or have as yet been categorized.

While we were at it, our full Online Dating Site Reviews list was upgraded as well. Instead of the entire catalogue of categories and dating services being displayed, we now offer a convenient dropdown control on the page that allows visitors to view each dating site category separately on one page.

Stay tune for more updates. We plan to finish our new advance Dating Site Search Engine by the Christmas Holidays.

eHarmony.com is having a free communication event and it starts today! The event is 10 days long and will run to Sunday November 14th ending at midnight (Pacific Time).

For this event, members will be able to create a profile, review matches and be able to connect with those matches using the eHarmony Guided Communication process. At no point will you need a credit card. The only things not included are Fasttracking the guided communication process, eHarmony Mail and viewing of members profile pictures.

This current free communication event will be eHarmony's 30th. The last one occurred in October (see Story).

On a related note, eHarmony Canada is also having free communication event. It is a month long and it starts Nov 1st and ends Nov 30th at midnight.

To find out more about this online dating site designed for people looking for long-term relationships, you can read our review of eHarmony.

In a Ted talk video by David McCandless which looked at the visualizations of charting data, one of the many graphs they showed was one of when people breakup according to Facebook status changes. The chart (as displayed below) is based on over 10,000 Facebook status updates. David McCandless and his team scanned for status updates with the terms "broken up" and "breakup" and then mapped it out by how often they occurred by date.



So when do most people breakup? The two biggest peaks occur just before spring break and two weeks before Christmas. Mondays also appear to be the most common day of the week that people breakup. There is also a rise in breakups just before the summer holidays. The season with the lowest amount of breakups is summer and the lowest day of breakups recorded by far was Christmas.

For more on this story, read MathiasMikkelsen.com.

On Wednesday, October 27 IAC reported their third quarter financials for 2010. For the company as a whole, revenue increased 25 percent to $421.7 million when compared to the same period last year. Compared to last quarter revenue is up $18.8 million or almost 5 percent.

The company's Match segment which includes the dating sites Match.com, Chemistry, People Media and Singlesnet saw revenue grow 31 percent from $81 million in Q3 2009 to $106.2 million in Q3 2010. IAC reports that about half of the revenue growth was thanks to organic growth in Match.com US and the People Media network of dating sites. The rest was from Singlesnet and the partnership with Meetic in Latin America.

As a result of IACs positive financial news, shares in the company rose nearly 6 percent to $27.94 in afternoon trading on October 27.

For the complete public financial IAC Q3 2010 report read this page. For more information on the dating sites owned by IAC, read our Match.com review and our Chemistry review.

Related Story: Match.com Second Quarter 2010 Financials

According to FriendFinder Networks Inc in a press release on Thursday, they have raised $551 million in debt financing. Any further details of this transaction were not disclosed.

For more on the story read the press release and to find out more about one of their dating sites, read our [staticpage: 010000100-FriendFinder FriendFinder review].