Dating Services

Minyanville took a look at Spark Networks latest financials (see Story) and decided to do an article on it. Spark Networks as a whole is not doing very well but JDate has been holding its own in the recent downturn of the economy, even with the advertising budget lowered by $150 thousand. JDate is really the only viable online dating solution for someone who wants to date someone within their own Jewish faith. One thing they mentioned which might get JDate members attention is that apparently they may be considering lowering subscription fees which were last raised back in April 2007 (see Story) to bring in more members.

One thing the article talks about, which I disagree with, is that the subscription model for online dating is not viable any more due to free dating sites. While their example of a free site like Plenty Of Fish has seen increase visitors of 69 percent according to Compete.com (not 100% like the article suggests) most other free dating sites have been either losing visitors or just holding their own. With the recession over the 6 month mark, I think a lot of the popular paid dating sites are doing remarkable well by keeping roughly their current visitor levels, while sales in other industries plummet. Subscription based dating is not going anywhere, and these sites have their place in the dating industry, just like the free dating sites.

For the full article, read Minyanville (Note: I experienced problems viewing this page in IE 8). For more on the dating site, read our Jdate.com review.

The news story of a federal suit by a man claiming he was deceived by Match.com (see Story) is now making headlines on TV news shows. Good Morning America did a piece about a man named Barry who is thinking of being part of a proposed class action lawsuit against Match.com. After using Match.com Barry felt "undesirable and rejected" since he received few responses to his winks and emails. The original federal lawsuit filed by Sean McGuinn

... alleges Match.com perpetrates fraud by returning inactive or canceled members in search results of seemingly dateable people.

He believes he was actually sending e-mails to ghosts of Match.com's past.

Match.com is definitely serious about the mobile market. Yesterday Match.com announced the availability of a application for the new Palm Pre which can be found now on the Palm Pre App Catalog (U.S. only). Now Match.com members with this cell phone can online date on the go by communicating and searching for other members. They can even edit their profile and receive wink and email notifications. Palm Pre's location-based capabilities can also be used that allows a unique search feature. You can find other Match.com member's in your area (this is not enabled by default).

Match.com has been in the general mobile phone dating market for a few years now with a product called MatchMobile. It was recently revamped with a new updated interface and features. Last March, Match also announced their iPhone Application (see Story) which has near identical features as their application for the Palm Pre.

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

Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch got in contact with Greg Blatt, the new CEO of Match.com to get a comment regarding the recent New York federal court suit filed by Sean McGinn (see Story) According to Blatt in a statement he made to OPW:

Match.com’s continued success depends upon the success of our members in making online connections and turning them into meaningful relationships offline. The allegation that we would deceive our subscribers by encouraging them to connect with inactive members therefore makes no sense and is contradicted by our 14-year record and the hundreds of thousands of members who find someone special on Match.com every year. We understand that finding romance, offline or online, can at times be emotional and personal, and we wish Mr. McGinn well in his search. But his lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend it vigorously.

It is true, Match.com for the most part does not let you know when you are searching that the dating profiles you are viewing are from paying members or not. The only time you can tell for sure is if the member has the Profile Highlight feature (it is highlighted in red). Most other paid dating sites (like eHarmony) operate the same way. What Match.com does do is attempt to return the most active members on the site that fit within your search criteria. Most active users are either the ones paying for the service to find a partner or new to the service looking to see what Match.com offers. What Match hopes with this strategy is when a paid user messages a new user, it will entice them to signup.

Despite how this suit goes, I bet Match will speed up the process of getting the new Platinum Membership out to all markets (Story). It's almost like they saw this suit coming since the Platinum Membership allows paid members to receive messages from any member they have contacted, whether or not they are a free or paid member of the dating service.

On Tuesday we reported that Plenty Of Fish was down for over 10 hours. Today we found out why. Late Monday a power outage made POF go offline. With the website already down, it was decided that it was a good time to upgrade the core database server (both hardware and software) which hadn't been touched since 2005. Users of the dating site should see significant increase in speed of the site loading, especially during peak times.

We also found out that there is an upgraded scheduled for image serving. Nearly 10,000 images on average are served per second on POF and they currently have over 200 million images stored. Will we see additional downtime next week while this upgrade is performed? Markus didn't mention any but we may see one if moving image servers doesn't go off without a hitch.

We have had a run of press releases over the last week or so dealing with dating services. I found one for eHarmony in which they have chosen to use the fraud-fighting technology called the Interceptas platform, from Accertify. eHarmony reviewed several fraud detection systems and found the platform from Accertify would enhance their fraud-fighting capabilities the best. Interceptas is a tool for e-commerce websites and it:

provides comprehensive fraud-fighting tools and components in a single, integrated system that allows merchants to integrate more data into the fraud-fighting process for improved screening success. The platform can be used to manage a variety of data management challenges across the enterprise. In addition, its automated workflow features strengthen fraud defenses and reduce the manual effort involved in fraud protection.

Incereptas is just one of the many systems eHarmony uses for a multi-pronged fraud protection strategy.

For more information on the dating site mention in this article, check out our eHarmony Review.