Dating Services

It appears that AshleyMadison.com has been doing very well this last year. According to Fox Business they have doubled their membership from 1 million to over 2 million. This online service is geared toward people looking for one night stands and they specialize in married men and woman looking for affairs.

This Canadian based dating service has seem huge growth numbers in the United States with the state of California seeing the highest at over 200%. New Jersey and New York also saw great numbers with membership jumps of 172% and 155%. Pennsylvania and Florida saw high numbers as well. This is in part do to the increased exposure of this site on TV talk shows like Montel, Ellen and Dr. Phil where marriage, infidelity and divorces are hot topics.

One rather unique concept that Ashley Madison does (now days) is their dating service is based on a credit system instead of a monthly payment system (like Lavalifes use to be). Basically this means signing up as a member is free but if you wish to contact someone (not including winks) you need to purchase credits to perform the task. You pay for what you use. The other unique thing Ashley Madison allows which I think all dating services should is, it is free for guest members to reply to any mail message from a full member. This is a perfect way to increase communication between members of a paid dating service.

Match.com launched the Insiders' Guide this week. It's a place where you can get free, reliable advice from current Match.com members. Before I checked it out I thought it would just another online dating advice magazine that most dating services have, except it is written by members. Even this is not a new idea, since for a few years now FriendFinder already has an online magazine that allows for member submission. Plus, Match.com already has an advice magazine called happen.

When I logged into Match to check the Insiders Guide (accessible from the top members menu) I was pleasantly surprised. While the information given was nothing new or ground breaking the presentation of the dating tips was very well done. Everything is animated and the 7 dating tips are presented in videos by Match.com members. While the videos are playing tip bubbles pop up reinforcing the members message. I think a lot more people will take the time to view the dating tips in this type of format instead of reading a dating advice article that contains the same information.

I thought there would be more tips, but the ones they have are explained in detail and there probably is one or two tips here that someone who hasn't been into online dating for more than a year could use. Other season daters probably don't need to visit the guide. With only 7 tips available I am sure Match.com has a few more on the way if it becomes a popular destination for their members.

For more information about Match.com, please read our review.

It appears that Jangl is going out of business according to Mashable, but nothing has been posted on their website yet. Most readers of this dating reviews site and blog may not know what Jangl is. They offer text and voice messaging and chatting to dating and social networking websites. Jangl is pretty popular and had numerous large websites as clients. I am not totally sure how much they charged the companies using their service (if anything) but from my understanding is they made most of their money from audio ads inserted into the voice calls and text ads inserted into text messaging. Obviously this revenue model did not pan out since they are closing.

In a blog post one of the founders of Jangl, Michael Cerda, talks a bit more of the demise of Jangl. He also stated his opinion that Jangl:

... needed another 18-24 months worth of runway to realize its fullest potential ...

I guess the venture capitalist didn't see it that way.

Match.com uses Jangl for their anonymous calling, so does FriendFinder and Friendster. PlentyofFish also used it but, according to the owner Markus Find he is removing the links for the service from his site right now.

You can also use Jangl on Facebook and it was coming soon to MySpace.

I wonder what business Match.com and the others will be switching too now? Maybe they will develop an in house service instead? Voice chatting is pretty important to a dating service and I hope these companies have a contingency plan in place. When you use 3rd party services for important aspects of your business you always need a backup plan if something unforeseen should happen.

There is nothing official that I could find on their site yet but it looks like LoveHappens is closing its doors. About.com and a few other sites have reported this (plus it is mention in a few confessions on the site). Here is the email that was sent out:

Dear LoveHappens member,

After much consideration we have decided to end the LoveHappens service. You may continue to use LoveHappens until May 31, 2008. After May 31, 2008 you will no longer have access to LoveHappens. We hope you enjoyed using LoveHappens as much as we enjoyed making it for you and we wish you love and success in the future.

The LoveHappens Team

I can't say this is 100% true since there is nothing mentioned by the LoveHappens Team on the website. I have to wonder if it is just someone spoofing LoveHappens email or maybe it is a marketing ploy by LoveHappens to garner some publicity?

LoveHappens is a mid level dating service that is not doing to bad in traffic. Alexa currently ranks them 5,848 most popular site, which is pretty good when you consider the millions of websites on the internet. On the other hand Compete does have them averaging a million unique visitors per month last summer and it looks like in the last few months they have only been getting around 300,000 unique visitors. That is quite a drop.

Another site that recently closed its doors was Single Parent Love Life, see story here.

Well it looks like Match.com made $90.5 million in the first quarter this year. This is up from the same time last year by 10 percent according too Gigaom. The Online Dating Insider also mentions while commenting on the same story that international subscribers increased by 12 percent while North American subscribers declined slightly. Even so, Match.com was able to increase revenue by 6 percent per subscriber.

While internet dating does continue to grow in North America (but not at the same numbers as in previous years) even the large dating services like Match.com are feeling the pinch from the increasing number of dating services and social networking sites out there. I wouldn't be surprised if the next couple of financial quarters show similar results for Match.com.

Find more information about Match.com here.

ZDNet posted the results of ad spending by dating sites for quarters 1 to 3 in 2007. These figures are compiled by Nielsen. It looks like the top ten dating websites in ad spending where responsible for 91 percent of all dating site advertising. Of the over $350 million spent in ads, Match.com spent 40 percent of it or $145.5 million. eHarmony was second at $88.1 million. Since 2006, Match.com has almost doubled their ad spending while eHarmony had cut theirs by 16%. It would be interesting to see how this affected membership numbers.

The other sites that made the list in which we have dating reviews for includes, Yahoo! Personals at the sixth position with $14 million, PerfectMatch.com at position number 8 with $13.4 million and finally, Lavalife with $6.1 million at number 9.

A few other things to note is, these numbers includes both internet and TV advertising. Match.com and eHarmony have successful TV marketing campaigns which probably eats into at least half of the total amount they spent. I also have to wonder if Match.com's numbers (which really are the numbers of their parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp) includes Chemistry.com (who is also owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp). It was around Q3 of 2007 when Chemistry was spending a lot of money on those eHarmony attack TV ads.