Dating Services

The online Jewish dating service JDate has been selected as an Official Honoree in the Social Networking category for this years Webby Awards. This is the 12th year for the awards. The Webby Awards recognize websites that are superior in quality and sets standards on the internet. To get your site nominated in the Webby Awards is very difficult, your website must stand out in all categories including functionality, usability and the over look of the site. According to the awards website:

Of the more than 10,000 entries submitted to the 12th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree.

The one thing I was surprised about was JDate was put in the Social Networking category. Since there is no Online Dating category listed at the Webby Awards I guess it was the closest match. A press release by JDate also calls their site an online community. While this is true, JDate's primary focus is still online dating. The community is a result of the dating. As social networking sites try to take away dating site members (just take a look at all the new dating applications available at MySpace and Facebook), dating sites are now including more social networking features to lure these members back and then some.

Read our review for more information on JDate, the online Jewish Community.

After the article “Navigating the One Night Stand” was published about a week and a half ago on eHarmony and through their newsletter angry members started to voice their opinions on blogs and/or cancel their memberships. The article described what to do if "you're a swinging single and you've had a one-night stand" and what the etiquette was after the fling. This article was a far departure from eHarmony and their Advice Blog which normally promotes long term relationships and Christian values.

On April 21, 2008, Stan Holt, Vice President of eHarmony published an apology on eHarmony Advice for the “Navigating the One Night Stand” article. In it Stan Holt states:

The advice contained in this column was completely inconsistent with our editorial guidelines and the relationship service that we offer to our members. The day after sending the e-mail newsletter, I was made aware of the column and it was immediately removed from our site.

It's not often you get an apology from a company and it shows eHarmony realized the mistake and they value their members enough to put an apology in writing. Most other companies making a similar mistake may have removed the article but I am sure most wouldn't have put up an apology.

You can find more information about the retraction and the complete text for the article “Navigating the One Night Stand” at the unofficial eHarmony Blog. For more general information about eHarmony, please read our review.

CNNMoney has an article about the marketing approach one dating site called TeamDating.com took to get free publicity. This was all done without hiring a PR firm or consultant. TeamDating has appeared on many popular national TV shows like The Today Show, Good Morning America and Extra . Print publications include newspapers like USA Today. Every show or news piece TeamDating has appeared in has given them a huge traffic spike like with over 600,000 visitors when TeamDating appeared on the Today Show. The article doesn't mention what their average daily traffic is now but it does say they have 60,000 regular visitors (what does regular mean? Weekly?) and over 20,000 registered dating teams

Ray Doustdar, who owns TeamDating achieved his PR success through his own hard work of reading, researching and contacting media people. He spends over 90% of his work day dealing with marketing his dating service. He knows where his customers are and who to contact to get a story out. He also knows what type of story each media outlet is looking for and who there readers or viewers are.

Now days most internet businesses need a detailed marketing plan, and dating sites are no exception. Gone are the days of "if you build it, they will come"! Competition is huge in the online dating market and any company wanting to create a service needs to realize that marketing is the most important thing to your sites success.

Western Alumni Gazette from the University of Western Ontario has a piece about the owners of the dating service Christian Cafe. They go into details on how Philip and Samuel Moorcroft got ChristianCafe.com off the ground in the late 1990's, some of the challenges they faced and how the dating site is fairing now. Currently the cafe is one of the largest Christian site's on the internet with over a 100,000 members. The business is based in Markham, Ontario, Canada and employees 15 people.

For more information on Christian Cafe please read our review.

eHarmony has added free Icebreakers to their dating service. This allows non-paying and paying members to pick from 11 predetermined short messages and send it to their matches. Icebreakers include simple messages like, "Great pic…love to see more photos!". This type of feature has been used for a long time on other dating services so it is in no way a revolutionary thing but, I do think eHarmony needed to add them.

What Icebreakers do (and this has always been a major complaint with eHarmony members) is it gives free members the ability to see if their matches are currently using eHarmony and are not just potentially old profiles of members who don't log in anymore. If the new members has a match they really like, by sending an Icebreaker and getting a reply back they know it's an active profile and it will be most likely worth signing up to the service to pursue the communication. The only problem here is that eHarmony choices for Icebreakers are rather limited. Replying to an Icebreaker with any of eHarmony's current list of Icebreakers doesn't make sense. Most of the Icebreakers either ask a question or want you to do something like talk or request a picture, so there is no real way to say yes or no to a Icebreaker question.

Icebreakers will also give eHarmony more paying members in the long run for the same reason stated above. This is the second major feature eHarmony has added in the last few months. They obviously are feeling the competition from other serious matching sites like Chemistry and PerfectMatch.com. I wonder what else they have up there sleeve?

Related Story: eHarmony Members can now see "Who Has Viewed Me"

MillionaireMatch.com recently updated their website with some new features. The main new feature is members now can have their photos verified. This works well in conjunction with verifying your income level since, some of the same documentation is needed to do both. Your photo and income level are the two most important parts of the profile on these types of dating sites and having them verified as authentic gives members who have performed this free service a huge advantage over non-verified members. Singles searching through profiles are much more likely to contact a verified member.

The searching of members has also been tweaked. You can now easily remove unwanted profiles from view and you now have the ability to do keyword searching. Keyword searching taked into account the text in the two essay profile questions. You also can now get your profile highlighted in the search results which draws the viewers eye to it first and makes it stand out much more.

For more information, please read our MillionaireMatch Review.