Online Dating

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

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.

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.

Two years ago, New Jersey created the Internet Dating Safety Act. Now, New York State has done the same by creating a very similar act designed to make online dating safer for its single citizens. New York State now requires online dating services to post internet dating safety tips on their websites along with the fact if any criminal background checks are done on members.

“Japan's Fukui prefecture has the nation's biggest share of dual-income households, the highest ratio of working women, and the lowest unemployment rate. What it doesn't have is enough babies.”

With those arresting leading lines, Aki Ito, a reporter for Bloomberg News in Tokyo, opens “Japan's Government Plays Matchmaker,” an article that details an interesting new initiative that’s about to be launched in the island nation.

Introducing…the Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café, the government’s new online dating site for Japanese singles. The idea of government-sponsored matchmaking might sound crazy, but Japan is not the first country to set up a service with the intention of encouraging and aiding the love lives of its citizens. The Social Developmental Network of Singapore, for example, runs LoveByte, a Web site that doles out dating advice and has a search function that allows registered users to find other single users.

The Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café is a unique solution to a potentially-devastating problem Japan now faces: “At 1.34 children per woman, Japan's fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, well below the 2.1 that is considered the minimum for a developed nation to maintain a constant population.” According to census data, 32 percent of Japanese women between the ages of 30 and 34 were unwed in 2005, a figure that is more than twice the number from 15 years earlier. As an increasing number of Japanese women postpone marriage, or decline to marry at all, the country’s birthrate is dropping to a dangerously low point with serious financial consequences.

Approximately “23 percent of the population is over 65, the highest ratio among the 62 countries tracked by Bloomberg,” which means that the “ranks of pensioners are swelling” while “the pool of workers and consumers is shrinking.” To combat this problem, Japan’s Democratic Party promised to lessen the burden of child rearing by offering families a monthly allowance of 13,000 yen ($150) per child and abolishing the fees for public high school. Naoto Kan, the current Prime Minister, also supported relationships and procreation in his former job as Finance Minister by encouraging his employees to leave work at 6 p.m. to go on dates.

The Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café will go above and beyond traditional online dating sites and Japan’s previous efforts to increase the country’s sagging birthrate by offering money or gifts to couples who marry partners they met using the site’s services. While government-sponsored matchmaking is an interesting idea, critics of the scheme note that “the central government's previous attempts to nudge up the birthrate have not met with success.”

So what do you think, readers? Should governments attempt to play cupid for their populace, or should they steer clear of citizens’ love lives?