General News

Starting this Friday, November 20th, 2009, eHarmony UK (eHarmony.co.uk) is having a 4 day long free communication weekend. Until Sunday midnight (Nov. 23rd), all members of this dating service can review matches and communicate with all members for free. All that is required from you, is the time you need to try out this matchmaking service.

eHarmony places an emphasis on long term relationships that lead to marriage. If this is something that interests you, give one of the fastest growing dating sites in the UK a try.

The last free communication weekend for eHarmony UK was held at the end of October, just 4 weeks ago (see Story).

Read our review of eHarmony for more details and users opinions on this popular matchmaking service for British singles.

The Online Dating Insider had a good post about something I have heard of happening but hadn't really followed up on it before. Buying and selling of friends and fans on Facebook, and followers on Twitter. One such website which offers this service is uSocial.

For the low price of $87 you can have 1,000 twitter followers in 7 days or less. If that is not enough you can get up to 100,000 followers for only $3,479 in 365 days.

If Twitter is not your thing you can always opt to buy Facebook Fans or Friends. As of writing this story, buying Facebook Friends was temporarily unavailable but 1,000 fans of a Facebook page only cost $197. 10,000 fans comes in at $1167.30

Why does someone need to buy followers or fans? It is for marketing purposes and getting more traffic to your website. The more fans a page has, or followers your tweets get, the more supposed creditability you or your business has and the more people you can promote your products too. You can also buy votes from uSocial as well, to get your articles on the front page of Digg, del.icio.us and Propeller. I am sure Facebook, Twitter and Digg all hate these type of advertising services, as it undermines the value of what they are trying to offer.

Like it or not, the internet revolves around advertising. That said, there is the ethical way to advertise and then there is the other way. I think uSocial went the other way, therefore I would never recommend someone to use a service like this.

As Thanksgiving moves closer, we knew the next eHarmony Free Communication Weekend would soon be upon us. Starting tomorrow, Thursday, Nov 19 and to Sunday Nov. 22 all members of eHarmony (US and Canada) will be able to communicate and review their matches at no cost. These 4 day events are the best way for singles interested in online dating to give eHarmony a try and to see if this matchmaking service is the one that not only works for them, but fits their needs as well.

The last free communication event was held in late October, just 4 weeks ago (see Story). This is Free Communication Weekend number 21 for eHarmony here in the US.

Check out our review of eHarmony for more information on the dating site. We also currently have 72 user reviews which you can read that are available from our review page.

On November 9th Meetic released the financial results for the first 9 months of 2009. Revenue earned during this period totalled 117.2 million Euros (over $174 million USD). This is a 20 percent increase over the same period last year. From this income, the purchase of Match.com's UK site this year added 19 million Euros in revenue. 96 percent of all revenue was from sources in Europe.

Meetic's dating sites subscriber base totalled 970,623 as of September 30th, 2009. This is an increase of about 25,000 subscribers from the same date in 2008. No mention of Match.com's UK site is here so it is unsure if their subscriber numbers have been included in the Meetic 2009 numbers. We estimated that Match.com UK had about 291,000 paying subscribers as of quarter 2, 2009, at the time of the sale (see Story).

Earnings Before Interest, Taxes and Amortization (EBITDA) came to 24.1 million Euros over the first 9 months. This is an EBITDA margin of 20.5 percent. As of September 30th, 2009 Meetic had a net cash surplus of 41 million Euros and the only debt on the books was from the Match acquisition which is estimated at €7.1 million.

Expect the quarter 4 2009 financials and annual revenue for Meetic to be published on the 11th of February 2010.

News first spotted on OPW. For more information, read the full Meetic Q3 2009 Financial report.

OKCupid has released some interesting detailed reports and stats about their members. It looks like a member of Plenty of Fish (see the blog) is following suit by using a built in tool on PlentyofFish to check out the different demographics based on an interest you can type in. This tool is intended to inform potential Advertisers of Plenty Of Fish on what type of people use the site, so they can better target their ads.

POF will return a percentage result for the following attributes for any interest. This information is compiled straight from the members dating profiles and the percentages are based on the answers members have chosen for each profile attribute.

Drum roll please ... the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the word Unfriend as its 2009 word of the year. Oxford's definition of this word is:

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Other words up for consideration this year was hashtag (Twitter related), intexticated (a driver distracted by texting on his phone), and sexting (sending sexually explicit texts and pictures over your phone).

For more on the story, read the OUPblog.