General News

Craigslist has responded to public pressure recently by blocking access to its adult services section and replacing the link with the label “censored”.

Last month, the attorneys general from 17 states sent letters to Craiglist’s chief executive Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark, asking them to remove the section. Although legally Craigslist has been allowed under Federal Law and the Communications Decency Act to keep the ads posted, public pressure has mounted. Law enforcement officials have claimed that Craigslist has helped facilitate prostitution and human trafficking of women against their will.

But is the block a temporary move to appease the growing concern, or has Craigslist decided to make a permanent change?

This plays into the debate that has been around since the Internet began: when people can post anything anywhere, how much responsibility should a website take should those posts lead to criminal activity?

Craigslist has maintained their right to keep the section under the Communications Decency Act which preserves freedom of speech over the Internet, despite the growing concern of the public.

The popular website makes most of its money from ads, and is expected to bring in around $45 million this year. The personals classified ads cost about $10 to post and $5 to repost, and bring in a sizable percentage of revenue according to experts.

The recent move to block access was applauded by the Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, who organized the protest against Craigslist with 17 other attorneys general. However, he said he would monitor the site to see if this was a temporary move or more permanent.

For more information on this classifieds website, read our Craigslist review.

In late August CEO Greg Waldorf appeared on Fox Business News. You can check out the full segment below:



Some topics of conversation in the interview includes eHarmony's 10 year Anniversary and eHarmony's estimated $250 million in revenue last year. Investors look to take companies public when the cross the $100 million in revenues mark and Fox business asked Waldorf why they are not pursuing in taking eHarmony into the public market. His answer was that they are focused on running the business but it may happen in due time. He also hinted to the fact that since eHarmony has been profitable for a number of years now, they have no real need for the cash that a IPO would generate.

Another interesting piece of news is that eHarmony's iPhone Dating App is generating almost 10% of the website traffic (in the US). This was a traffic number I wasn't expecting since the app was just 2 weeks old at the time of the interview and it also has not been aggressively promoted. Waldorf also said they plan to add additional features to the mobile dating app in the future.

Waldorf also mention eHarmony's affiliation with the European dating service eDarling. eDarling operates in 8 European countries with the most popular one being the German dating site (eDarling.de). I have know of the connection for a while now but it is the first time that I have heard Waldorf mentioning it.

To find out more on this popular matchmaking service, you can read our review of eHarmony.

Some exciting updates and new features are coming to Dating Sites Reviews over the next couple of months. Some of the updates affect things more behind the scene, while others will be noticeable right away to returning visitors. To start things off, today we just completed the first set of updates.

The first thing you will notice is that we have fixed the web site width to that of a 1024 pixel wide screen. The reason for this is after examining our traffic logs we determined that almost 20 percent of visitors still uses this screen size. This meant going any bigger was out of the question. Before today, our site would flow from widths between 1024 and 1440 pixels. Why set a standard width for a web site? The main reason for us is, it allows us to format pages and articles easier since we can just assume the page will be a set size.

The biggest change to Dating Sites Reviews though is that we now track a lot more information about each online dating site and service. This means we can bring up this information anywhere on the site including not only in the actual reviews, but in our dating category lists (this has been a requested feature many times). When viewing our dating categories now, you will see a lot more information for each dating site:

I noticed that ChristianCafe.com was down around 11:30am this morning. It is now an hour later and the Christian dating site still appears to be having a problem.

When you visit the site you will get a number of errors depending on the browser you use. In most cases you will get a "Server not found" or a Timeout error message. These types of messages happen when no response is given by a web server to the request to view a web page from an internet browser.

When we get more news on this issue with ChrstianCafe.com I will update this post.

Update #1: As of 2:05pm EST ChristianCafe.com is back online and running fine. There is no word on what the problem was.

For more information on this Christian dating site, check out our ChristianCafe.com review.

Cougar dating has been a hot topic of conversation in the past few years, resulting in the emergence of cougar dating reality shows and tv series like Courtney Cox's Cougar Town. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, it refers to an older woman (usually over 40) dating a younger man. Think Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. But is this really a trend?

According to a recent study by Michael Dunn, psychology researcher at the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff, the cougar craze is "a myth". He maintains that after studying singles ads from 22,400 singles across the globe, he found no sizable evidence of women preferring to date younger men. In fact, the men also seemed to prefer to date younger women, not cougars.

This has sparked some controversy among those who have studied and written about the emerging cougar trend. Valerie Gibson, a Toronto-based journalist who was one of the first to write about cougars, claims that studies like this promote an "anti-cougar bias". According to a recent article in Time Magazine she said, "Society has always told us that the older woman who is still sexual isn't supposed to exist. We should be wrapped in a shawl baking cookies for our grandchildren and all that crap."

A similar study done in 2003 by AARP found that 34% of 40+ women were dating younger men, which seems to debunk Dunn's findings. It could be argued that because Dunn's study was based on online surveys from dating websites, the preferences listed don't necessarily reflect actual dating behavior. That is, though the majority of women who online date claim they prefer to date men their same age or older, a significant portion do date younger men.

A more interesting question that seems to have emerged from this study is, if there is a significant cougar dating population, why are they afraid to admit it when online dating? Perhaps this is something to investigate.

What do you do when you're a Stanford Business School graduate in the early '90s and you're searching for "the best woman in the world?" For Gary Kremen, the answer was simple: invent online dating.

The quest for a wife (and the financial security it would require to marry her) led Kremen to create Match.com, an idea that came to him after he realized how much revenue personal ads generated for his local newspapers. In 1993, Kremen founded Electric Classifieds Inc., the first company to provide online classified advertising, and in April of 1995, after raising $200,000 from investors, Match.com was born. Though the site's functionality was limited (it only allowed users to exchange messages and pictures via e-mail or fax),100,000 users registered with the site within its first 6 months. Now Match.com has over 1.7 million paid subscribers, and Web sites in 30 and 8 languages.

Kremen chalks up the wild success of Match.com to his "'relentless' work ethic." He ran the business from "a cramped, one-bedroom apartment that he shared with two roommates," often remaining in his pajamas while he "sat glued to his Sun workstation, designing Match's Web site and developing marketing strategies." Despite his hard work and the $1.5 million in venture capital he received, Match.com didn't initially pay off either romantically or financially for Kremen.

In 1997, much to Kremen's chagrin, Match.com's investors sold the startup to Cendant, a consumer-services company, for $8 million, and in 1998 the company was sold again, this time to IAC/InterActiveCorp (then still known as Ticketmaster), for $50 million. All Kremen got out of the transaction was a lifetime account on the site and $50,000 from selling his stock in the company.

Kremen was not discouraged, and in 2001 his perseverance was rewarded: Match.com partnered with AOL and MSN, which "brought in a large influx of people at a rapid pace," and in 2003 Match.com launched MatchMobile, its incredibly popular mobile phone service. 20,000 singles now register on Match.com every day, making it one of the largest and most influential online dating sites. It is consistently ranked among the top five online dating sites based on traffic.

Kremen finally found financial security after a judge awarded him $65 million in a dispute over the domain name sex.com in 2001, and after buying Electric Classifieds (then named Instant Objects) debt in 2004 so that he could retrieve its priceless patent. He held a foreclosure sale and sold the patent for $1.7 million.

Kremen's romantic goals were also met. In an age in which 1 in 5 relationships, and 1 in 6 marriages, are between people who met using online dating sites, and in which "roughly 74 percent of the 10 million Web users who are single and looking for a partner have turned to the Internet to find someone," Kremen met his match the old fashioned way - through a mutual friend.

Read the original article here. To find out more about this popular dating site, read our review of Match.com