Dating Services

People Media was recently purchased by Match.com's parent company IAC (see Story) which prompted me to look for further information about this company. They were founded in 2002 and now have almost 4 million unique visitors with 550 million page views per month, when you combine all of their dating sites traffic together. As a comparison, Match.com had roughly 5.5 million unique visitors last month. ComScore lists 6 of People Media's dating sites in their top 50 dating site list. BlackPeopleMeet is People Media's largest online service which averages over 167 thousand visitors a day and just shy of 1 million unique visitors in a month. 44 percent of BlackPeopleMeet members are male and 56% are female. This is pretty close to the average of People Media's top 10 dating sites gender ratio of 47 percent Male and 53 percent female.

People Media also currently has existing partnerships with the Steve Harvey Morning Show and AOL Personals, to power a number of their dating communities.

To find out more information, including traffic stats broken down by individual dating site, read the People Media 2009 Advertising Kit.

I found a press release that announces the partnership of DatingHeadshots and Honesty Online to be a little over the top. In the first sentence they compare Justin Timberlake being sexy to the two dating companies new partnership. 😲

What the two companies are now offering is a complete Verification Package. On the photo side you get a professional photographer and a photo shoot. Government ID is checked to ensure the person who ordered the photos is the one at the photo shoot. Afterwards the person can then complete the Honesty Online verification process. This process uses information from your past to verify the person's identity by asking you multiple choice questions. A more thorough background, job and education check can also be completed at an additional cost.

This is an ideal merger of these two services, having your photos and background information being verified together. Plus, with the photos you get recent professional shots that helps give a strong first impression. Unfortunately I went to both sites and could not find any additional information on this partnership or service. I have a feeling it may be more money than people are willing to spend. It is also unclear on the Honesty Online website which dating sites use their services. I know they have a Facebook application but, it does me no good to get a verification package if I can't show myself as being verified on my favorite dating site.

Spark Networks Jewish dating site called JDate got a nice bit of publicity in The New York Times last week. The paper publish an article about a JDater's success story in their Fashion & Style section.

After a 13 year marriage, a 48 year old man named Ron James decided to get right back into dating. In the same month as his divorce he joined JDate.com. In the beginning months, every night for 2 or 3 hours he searched for woman between the ages of 30 and 50, and who lived within 50 miles of his apartment. He kept his profile full of energy but not head strong. In 18 months Ron emailed between 500 and 600 women, in which he dated almost 50 of them. This many dates was expense since, he had to pay for the date and usually commute an hour into New York City. This was all done on a modest salary. What Ron ended up doing to save money was stacking first meet dates. Every other Sunday he would have dates with as many as 3 women. He kept the date times spread apart and at different locations so he could "retain some sense of integrity".

Here is another story that has been in the hopper for a while.

Back in November 2008, Match.com updated the interface of their dating site and for the Profile Editor (see Story). The editor has an easier flow than the previous one with more Web 2.0 features. This means less reloading of the page in the web browser as some of the content is streamed when needed. An example of this is the auto filling of certain profile questions, that are based on your previous answers. My only small complaint so far is the list of sections to the left . When you click on the About Me section (as seen in the image on the right), the sub sections like Appearance and Interests appear. These clickable sub sections of the profile are in smaller lettering. To identify these as sub sections they need to be shifted or indented to the right like a tree structure. With the way it looks now, something doesn't look right.

Last month Match.com updated their profile process with new questions, and answers to existing questions. If you are a returning member and have an existing but old profile, look for the new icons that identify New Questions and Updated Questions while editing your profile. They icons appear when you hover your mouse cursor over the questions. New questions can be found in the sub sections under the About Me Profile section. The Get to Know Me sub section is almost completely new with the Lifestyle and Interests sub sections receiving a few new questions as well. Some of the new question also contain pictures. While having pictures as part of the profile questions is not ground breaking by any means, it does help breath a bit of life into the profile creation process.

The other thing which I notice when I was online at Match.com is they are advertising the fact that adding a picture to your profile will attract 15 times more attention than a similar profile without a photo. Most dating sites say your chances of contact is 10 times greater. I wonder what the real answer is?

For more information on this dating site, read our review of Match.com.

Consumer reviews on the internet for products and services usually receive more negative posts than positive, since most people satisfied with a product or service tend to be using it rather than writing reviews. It is probably the same for reviews of employers. I found a website called Glass Door which allows visitors to review their current and past employers. The website currently has over 26 thousand companies listed, with most of them being publicly traded. The site is new and is in beta so most companies do not have a lot of reviews yet.

A reviewer can list their job title, the Pros and Cons of the employer and Advice to Senior Management. They also rate the company on 8 different attributes (which is then averaged to a 5 bar rating) and also select if they approve or disapprove of the company CEO.

There are not a lot of employer reviews for dating site companies but, here are a few I found reviews for:

Congratulations to ChristianMingle, they recently announced that they had passed the 2 million member mark. This religious dating service was launched in 2001 and has grown into one of the largest niche Christian dating services on the internet with thousands of singles joining every day. Of course when you join, you wouldn't have access to 2 million singles actively looking for a date. This number reflects the total number of members who have joined since the dating site launched. What this number does illustrate is, ChristianMingle continues to grow and prosper. This makes it a good dating site for a person to join if they are looking for someone of a Christian Faith and/or who believes in Christian values.

A quick check on internet traffic analyzer website, Compete, shows that of all the niche Christian dating sites we have reviewed, ChristianMingle receives the most unique visitors, by far every month. Here is graph of their monthly traffic over the past year:

This year in May, ChristianMingle received over 650 thousand unique visitors. This is almost twice as many visitors as in May, 2008.

For more general information on this dating site, read our review of ChrisitianMingle.