Dating Services

According to Metro.co.uk 7.8 million people in Britain used internet dating last year. This is up 33% over 2005. With this growth spurt, Mad.co.uk has news that Match.com UK looks to be doubling its £4 million marketing budget from last year to £8 million. This is not surprising since the North American online dating market growth has slowed. Online dating companies now have to think globally and concentrate on the double digit growths of dating services in the European and Chinese markets. This is not easy as it sounds for North American dating services since ads and the dating sites themselves have to be tailored to suit the cultural difference from country to country.

Advertising Age has an article about Perfectmatch and 50 something daters. From 2005 to 2006 Perfectmatch have seen a 60% increase in 50+ singles. From 2006 to 2007 this growth has surged to 140%, making senior singles one of Perfectmatches most important demographics. This week to help attract more 50 plus singles, Perfectmatch.com has been featured on the TV dating show called "Another Chance for Romance". This show is aired on the Retirement Living TV channel that appears on Comcast and DirecTV in the United States.

Please read our review, for more information on Perfectmatch.com.

Reuters has an interview with Match.com's Chief Executive Thomas Enraght-Moony. In it they talk of the huge growth of social networking sites like Myspace and FaceBook. The results of all the visitors to these sites have only been good news for online dating in general and Match.com itself. According to the company social networking sites help singles with "their comfort level with exposing their personalities online". This means as visitors of social networking sites get use to the amount of personal information displayed on its web pages, they have less qualms of using this type of their own information with an online dating service.

The article also explores the rising competition Match.com has been receiving from rival dating services. Match.com had slower global growth last year but profits where up due to a fee increase. A large part of the profits goes into television, print and internet advertising.

Read our review of Match.com for more information.

Related Stories: Match.com and their Little Black Book, Match.com is about to launch a Facebook Application

TechCrunch is reporting that HotOrNot.com was sold to a Canadian company called Avid Life Media for an unconfirmed $20 million. Avid Life Media also owns Ashley Madison which is a hook-up site for married people.

It is estimated that Hot Or Not pulled in $2 million in profit last year. If this is the case, $20 million seems a little low, especially when compared to what other dating services have been sold for lately. I've got the sense recently though that Hot Or Not has been struggling with trying to increase revenue. They briefly went to a free model last summer (relying on people clicking on ads to bring in the income) but cited huge profile spam for switching to their paid revenue model again.

Related Story: Hot or Not is now Paid (again)

UPDATE - (Feb. 15, 2008) James, one of the original owners of HotOrNot.com, has confirmed the sale on his blog. He also mentioned that the $20 million price tag is incorrect. He didn't go into any details on what they did receive as payment.

It's official now! The "Who Has Viewed Me" feature is now available to members of eHarmony. You can now see members who have viewed you from up to 2 weeks ago. There is also a new option in your Match Settings which allows members to show their views of profiles as anonymous instead of showing their membership name.

This feature has the side affect of now allowing singles to see if a member is currently actively using eHarmony. If you send them a mail message and if their is no view of your profile (let alone a reply) by the eHarmony member, most likely then it is an inactive profile (unless the member is on vacation or something).

The New York Times has had several interesting articles this past month related to online dating. This past week they published an article regarding the more popular match systems called Hitting It Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love. The three main systems out there are from the dating sites eHarmony, Perfectmatch.com and Chemistry. The article goes on and talks about some of the published statistics behind the matching systems, their companies advertising battles and the problems with these systems not being peer reviewed.