Dating Services

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.

The same article as mentioned in our previous post also had some traffic details for February (the busiest month for the dating industry) on some of the more popular online dating sites. First of all, traffic in general for dating services fell 5 percent, when compared to last year. For the most part this decreased is blamed on the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.

According to comScore Match.com came out on top in February with 3.9 million unique visitors. Yahoo! Personals was second, followed by Singlesnet.com and then eHarmony with 2.8 million (a 30% increase over last February). In February, 2007 eHarmony had 1.8 million unique visitors.

For the most part the major dating sites had similar or increased traffic this February when compared to last. I think the dating sites that took the hit, traffic wise where probably the smaller niche dating sites. The social networking sites with their interest groups makes finding people with a specific interest easier sometimes.

You may have noticed Singlesnet.com is in the top 5 most visited dating sites and that we do not have a review of them. I haven't done a review because, when I initially looked at them a couple of years ago I had a few issues with there site. There where also a few too many negative user comments about them. I should check out Singlesnet.com again and see if anything has changed.

Expect to see more television commercials for Chemistry.com mid April. There will be 4 different ads and the campaign will be mostly seen on cable stations like Bravo, TNT and the Food Network.

Last year Chemistry.com spent $21 million on television commercials which helped grow the sites traffic by over 70 percent in February (when compared to the last year). Chemistry had over 500,000 unique visitors last month. In total they have 4.2 million registered members.

See BrandWeek for further details or check out our Chemistry.com Review (Chemistry).

The MiamiHerald.com talks about Florida's new ''Internet predator awareness and online safety act''. The bill would require online dating services serving Florida to:

disclose online and by e-mail whether or not it conducts a criminal background check. If it does, it must tell the consumer that background checks are "fallible."

This is similar to a bill New Jersey recently passed called the Internet Dating Safety Act.

Once again True.com is trying to push this bill through. They already do background checks on its members. Both Yahoo! Personals and Match.com are reluctant to do criminal background checks since they are reported to be unreliable. I agree with a statement that a Yahoo! lobbyist made regarding True's push on internet dating legislation:

"This doesn't have to do with online predators as the bill says," said Bill Ashworth, a lobbyist with Yahoo! "This is a food fight between True.com and the rest of the Internet dating industry."

I don't think True is doing this for the safety of their members, I believe it has more to do with publicity and getting there name mentioned in news articles.