Dating Services

After seeing the Lindsay Lohan spoof TV ad (see Story), I decided to post some of the other higher quality eHarmony mock commercials I have found online. The only one I am missing is the parody commercial from Saturday Night Live called Me-Harmony.

Here is one called eHarmonize:

Here is one from The Daws Brothers called Lowered Expectations:

Note: Unfortunately the source to the video and/or image which once was displayed here has since been removed by the authors for an unknown reason.

Here is 3 separate skits from the television show MadTV:

For a more serious look at this online dating service, read our eHarmony review.

We wrote recently about Match.com selling their European operations to Meetic (see Story). For the sale we knew that Match.com will receive 27 percent share of Meetic plus a 5 million euro note. What we didn't know is, according to Ross Williams, CEO of WhiteLabelDating:

There was a clause in the announcement that didn't make many of the headlines, but I think will tell you the direction IAC is going in: Match has the option to buy Meetic in its entirety in about three years.

This makes things interesting. Before I knew about this piece of information, I had thought Match.com had decided to maybe concentrate on the North American market like everyone else. If Match.com has the option to buy Meetic then this makes more sense in the long run for the two companies. I could never see why Match had decided to get out of Europe since revenue wise they were doing well and, they have numerous other partnerships in places like South America and Asia (therefore they are not just concentrating on North America). If the sale does go through then, Meetic's CEO and founder, Marc Simoncini, will still be the main shareholder with over 20% and 36% of the voting rights.

Visit Mad.co.uk for the full article called Love is in the air.

We were sent word of the most recent changes and feature updates that have happened to WealthyMen.com over the last few months. These changes in part are a result of a user survey conducted by WealthyMen.com over the past year to find what type of new features members wanted to see implemented on the dating site.

The new changes concentrate on member profiles, searching and fraud detection:

Profile

• Updated and simplified user registration pages.
• More options to profile for ethnicity and religion.
• Added more photo slots to profile gallery.
• Ability to block other members communication.

Search

• New advanced search feature.
• Reorganized search results.
• Expanded number of profiles visible on search results.

Fraud Detection

• Added steps to encourage verifications.
• Created proprietary fraud detection software.
• Added more staff to fraud detection team.
• Improved customer service operations and training.

The result of these updates so far has seen an increased number of verified members and more male members signing up. It is good to see WealthyMen.com concentrating on fraud detection. While I haven't heard of any problems on this dating service, all popular and successful dating sites suffer from scammers to one degree or another. Sugar Daddie and Wealthy dating sites have been among the first dating services to implement member verification. This verification usually is for photos and income level though sites like WealthyMen.com have started profession and education verification as well. Usually to receive verification, members need to email or fax in a number of documents. While not 100% fool proof (I doubt we will ever see anything that is), it is a good step, and users which see a profile has been verify, have less to worry about.

Other sites like eHarmony offer to verify information and/or do criminal background checks which is an excellent idea but little is known how in-depth these checks are. The other thing that sites like eHarmony need to do is offer this service for free (or part of the membership package). Currently eHarmony charges for their RelyID service. Once it is free, I am sure many more members will take the time to verify their information.

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

Since the start of the global recession, online dating services in the United Kingdom have grown 13 percent (September 2008 - February 2009). A total of 5 million singles from the UK are now using dating sites. This is 13 percent of the total UK online population. Genders are split evenly and heavy use members were online an average of 4 hours per month viewing and average of 23 pages a day. 65% of UK online daters are 35 or older. The most popular dating site in the month of February was DatingDirect (owned by Meetic, 1.6 million visitors), followed by POF (with 1.4 million) and then Match.com (1 million visitors).

Read NewMediaAge for more information on the story. Visit our DatingDirect review , our POF review and our Match.com review for more information on these dating sites.

Yahoo is shedding assets so they can concentrate on their core business. It looks like Yahoo! Personals may be on the chopping block. On Wednesday Barry Diller, CEO of IAC (which owns both Match.com and Chemistry) noted that they are talking to Yahoo about acquiring their dating service. This information was gathered from a conference call regarding the IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings report (we will discuss Match.com's earnings in another story). It is estimated that Yahoo! Personals could sell for around $500 million. This happens to be the same price that the Friendfinder Network sold in 2007 (see Story).

Interesting enough Match.com and Yahoo already have some dating partnerships. Yahoo has a number of dating sites for different parts of the world but, they really only actually run the one for US and Canada (as far as I can tell). The rest are partner dating sites. Match.com runs the Yahoo dating sites for the UK & Ireland, Germany and Taiwan. Find out more about Yahoo Personals partners by reading [story: Yahoo-Personals-Dating-Partners].

For more on this story read The Deal and for the full IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings Call Transcript visit Seeking Alpha.

Read our Yahoo Personals review and our Match.com review for information on these popular dating sites.

Craigslist is in the news again about their Casual Encounters section of the classifieds website. The last story in March was about a Chicago Sheriff who sued Craigslist for being one of the largest source of prostitution on the internet (see Story).

The New York Times takes a look at Craigslist, specifically the Casual Encounters section.

Like bathhouses and sex clubs, the Casual Encounters section caters to the erotic underbelly of society, where courtship gives way to expediency and anonymity is a virtue (or at least a turn-on). The section was introduced in late 2000 and is available in all cities served by Craigslist, for users gay and straight, male and female. The ads range from prim to raunchy; a good number of people include photographs of precisely what they have to offer.