General News

The UK dating company, EasyDate, has purchased a number of dating sites recently. These include the Lesbian dating site, PlanetSappho.com (£200,000) and the Spanish language Granamor.com (£25,000). In an interesting move they have also signed a "try-before-you-buy" deal with the owners of the popular Flirt.com for 6 months. The reason behind the deal is Easydate wants to expand the Flirt brand internationally into the United States. Depending on the success of this venture over the next couple months, it could lead to the sale of the dating property.

Easydate has also entered into several dating partnerships with print companies, Associated Newspapers (for Metro) and National Magazine (for Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health magazines). They will be promoting two dating events in London sometime in September.

For more on the story, read the Herald Scotland. To find out some more information on one of the more popular EasyDate dating sites, read our Cupid.com review.

Just a quick note to those of you who use the TangoWire dating service. They have just launched a mobile version of the site. It is currently in Beta and over the coming weeks additional dating features will be continued to be added. To access the mobile version, all you need to do is surf to TangoWire.com on your phone. TangoWire will auto detect if you are using your smart phone (iPhone, Android, etc...) internet browser and switch to the mobile version of the site. This new version has been setup for easier navigation on the smaller screens offered by mobile phones.

For more on this dating service, you can check out our TangoWIre.com review.

The research company Ground Truth has stated that mobile dating has increased a total of 92 percent from the first week of June until the end of July. In the month of June there was a 31 percent increase alone followed by 46 percent in July. So who is seeing a lot of this traffic? According to Ground Truth it is the mobile-optimized dating site Flirtomatic. They received 65 percent of the total mobile dating traffic this summer so far. Other dating sites like Match.com came in as the 7th most visited dating site on a mobile phone. eHarmony was 17th (which is not bad considering eHarmony's iPhone App just launched). Ground Truth said part of the reason why there has been such an increase in mobile dating traffic this summer is because no one wants to be inside sitting at the computer. Singles enjoying the warm weather find it easier just to use their cell phone where ever they happen to be, to check out their online dating profile.

One other item noted by Ground Truth was that the average visitor to a mobile dating service spends 12 minutes and 44 seconds per week on the site.

For a list of dating site who offer dating through your cell phone, check out our Mobile Phone Dating category.

ChristianMingle.com launched a new faith-based content website late last month that is a destination designed to serve the Christian community. The website is called Believe.com and it allows Christians to obtain advice, insights and to interact with other community members. Believe.com also features:

sermons in written, audio and video formats from Christian leaders of congregations and organizations across the United States. Topics include encouraging relationship advice, raising children God's way, following biblical financial principles to successful stewardship and many more.

Additional notable features of Believe.com include a Prayer Wall and a searchable Bible. Christian Testimonials can also be found from other visitors and well known Christians that describe life changing experiences and how their faith grew as a result.

To find out more about the dating site, you can check out our review of ChristianMingle.

CEO of eHarmony, Greg Waldorf, hopes to be the market leader in the United Kingdom for paid matchmaking within the next 2 years. eHarmony UK launched 18 months ago and now ranks 11 overall in traffic to its dating service among UK singles. This equals to 1.79 percent of all dating traffic in the United Kingdom. While this is behind other paid sites like Dating Direct and Friends Reunited Dating they are gaining ground fast with over 1 million users since launch.

Their new TV marketing campaign should help too. With eHarmony's estimated $250 million earned in 2009, this revenue gives them a big advantage when it comes to spending marketing dollars for promoting their dating sites. Online dating is also on the rise. A internet research firm, comScore, says traffic to dating services (in the United States) rose over 13 percent in 12 months, ending in July. This outpaced normal internet use which rose 9 percent during the same time period.

For more on this story, check out The Guardian. For more information on the dating sites mentioned in this article, read our eHarmony review, Friends Reunited Dating review and our Dating Direct review.

To continue on our story about how 542 eHarmony Members Marry Every Day we dug up some more interesting statistics. Some of these fun facts are from the new Harris Interactive study while others were released by eHarmony to help celebrate their 10 year anniversary.

• By April of last year there had been over 400 million conversations on eHarmony since launch.
• By August of 2009 eHarmony had 30 million members register and had 30 million pictures uploaded.
• 43.99% of newlyweds who met through an online dating service were matched by eHarmony.
• 25.75% of newlyweds who met online (Social Network, Dating Site, etc...) where matched by eHarmony.
• It is estimated that currently there are 1,130,006 non-married, monogamous relationships started by eHarmony.

eHarmony also found that offline, Americans met their spouses 15% of the time through work and another 15% of the time through friends. The chances of meeting your spouse at school is only 9% and through your family only just over 4%. Bars and clubs came in at 5.4%.

To find out more about this popular online matchmaking service, check out our review of eHarmony.com.