Dating Services

Seven years ago today, eHarmony was launched (August 22, 2000). Today more than 17 million singles have registered as members. eHarmony's unique scientific approach to matchmaking has made it very popular, allowing them to increased there membership base by at least 30% every year. eHarmony is one of the few succesful dating services which only displays potential matches to members and do not allow them to search for matches themselves.

For more information of what eHarmony has to offer, check out our review.

To update an older story we did on Paying For Perks at dating sites, I noticed on Online Dating Insider that Match.com has added a few more perks above and beyond what a normal paying membership covers. Their main push is still MindFIndBInd with Dr. Phil but, the new perks included:

• matchMobile - Allows you to access features of Match.com right from your cell phone. Includes viewing profiles and instant messaging singles. Costs $4.99 per month for 3 months.
• Email Read Notification - Find out when and if singles from Match read the emails you send them. Costs $3.99 per month for 3 months.
• matchTalk - Speak with other Singles on the phone but keep your phone number anonymous. Completely integrated into Match. Costs $4.99 per month for 3 months.

I wonder if these new features will work out. If they do, this is where paid dating sites will start to out shine there free counterparts. By having services that truly offer added value and are just too expensive to be implement by the free dating sites (costs couldn't be covered by on site advertising).

The only service I don't agree with here is the Email Read Notification. In my opinion, this service should be included with a normal paying membership. It should be part of the Hot Lists functionality like, who has viewed your profile. There also should be a privacy option here for members to disable notifications being sent out when you read someone's email, and not a paid option either!

One perk I did miss from my last article was:

• Highlighted Portrait - Your profile picture is highlighted with a border so it stands out in search results. Costs $2.84 per month for 3 months.

This perk may be worth it for some members since it does make your search listing much more noticeable, and the price for it is not bad either.

CNN Money has an article called "Voice-over-IP powers online love connections". This article talks about a new service eHarmony plans to offer which allows for members to place actual phone calls to other members without giving out personal information. Here is quote from the article that describes the service in more details:

"Using voice-over-Internet Protocol, or VOIP, technology, eHarmony's service enables potential partners to speak on the phone without disclosing personal contact information. If one of the interested parties wants to initiate a call, he or she clicks on a special link on the eHarmony site, and eHarmony then sends an e-mail indicating the caller's interest to the intended call recipient. The eHarmony service, designed by VOIP provider Jajah, then initiates a call to the recipient's preferred phone number, only that data (as well as the phone number of the caller) is completely masked by the site."

eHarmony plans to offer this service for an additional charge of $5.75 which give them an unlimited number of calls to its members. At this point there is no mention of when the service is planned to start.

This type of service is a good idea, especially for people who are not into using Instant Messenger or similar tools. These singles tend to be older and not as technical savy, which fits right into eHarmony's demographic. I like the fact you don't need a VOIP phone that plugs into the internet, a normal phone can be used, which keeps it very simple. The one thing eHarmony needs to allow with this additional service is insure paying members can contact other non paying members. This is my major complaint with a number of dating services. When a member is a paying a fee they should be allowed to contact any member in the system.

Lavalife plans to represent the brighter side of Online Dating in its new upcoming TV commercials. They will list positive aspects as well as the message that online dating actually works.

Read more about the commercials and Lavalifes message at MarketingMag.ca.

I notice this article on Online Dating Insider, it looks like Match.com now requires you to sign up for a free membership before you can perform searches or view any profiles. While I understand they are doing this to increase membership numbers, I think the increase in singles creating fake profiles or people just moving on and not signing up would be a bigger loss to Match. Most singles do join multiple dating sites (according to our polls) but I would think they like to perform searches to see if there are potential matches close to home before investing time in creating a quality dating profile.

Should be interesting to see if Match.com does this still in 6 months.

I received an email from Relationship.com. They are changing their name to ChristianMingle.com to make it easier for people to realize what type of single Relationship.com is trying to attract.

For the last year or so Relationships.com has been the most visited Christian dating site according to Hitwise. Hitwise is a company that keeps track of how many people visit web sites and then ranks them accordingly.

I guess this means I'll have to update my review of Relationship.com to reflect the new name change. I should have another look at this dating site anyways since it's been a while and I like to review each site at least once every 6 months.