Online Dating

The Cron.com in Houston, Texas took a look at online dating and how a number of dating sites have experience growth during the past year, as the global economy has shrank. Most of the stats we have heard before in other articles, including some from Match.com (see Review) and eHarmony which both saw memberships increase in the high teens percentage wise when compared to the previous year. New facts we learned, included finding out that OkCupid has seen a 75 percent membership increase since September and that the professional matchmakers at It's Just Lunch have seen a 16 percent growth in the last 6 months.

The Houston Chronicle also included a number of success stories from different couples which lead to marriages. There was testimonials for It's Just Lunch, Together Dating and eHarmony.

I had a laugh when I saw an article about how the global economy downturn has made it harder for Nigeria's scammers to find unsuspecting people to steal money from. This doesn't mean that there are less scammers out there, in fact there are more and they are trying even harder.

U.S. authorities say Americans -- the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers -- lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code.

The Washington Post interviewed 4 self proclaimed scammers or yahoo-yahoo boys as they call themselves in Nigeria. The ones who do well at their trade can earn up to $60,000 in a good month though, business lately is down over 40 percent. Most scammers are young men who started in college and who then learned the skills of their “trade” from each other.

Swindles to watch out for through emails:

• The work-from-home scam. Currently the most lucrative.
• The lottery scam. How can you win a lotto you never apply for?
• Emails that promise money or jewels that are stuck at a bank scam. This usually requires paperwork (personal info) or fees to get.
• Dating Scams that promise love, but need you to send money, usually out of the country.

Remember as in “real life”, you always need to be carefully of who you deal with online when comes to your personal information and money. For the full story, visit the Washington Post.

We got word that there will be a Free Communication Weekend at eHarmony in the United Kingdom (eHarmony.co.uk), starting Friday August 28th to Monday August 31st, 2009. Having this popular promotion and combining it with their big TV advertising campaign going on at the moment, means eHarmony UK members should have lots of matches to review and communicate for free with during the last weekend in August.

There is no information yet of a Free Communication Weekend coming soon for eHarmony here in Canada and the United States but we expect it will happen at the same time or in the first few weeks of September.

Read our review of eHarmony for more information on this popular online matchmaking service.

Every dating site has its own spin on the dating profile format. In this series, I'll take a look at some of the different profile formats and how you can write your best profile for that particular service. Let's take a look at another geek niche dating site, Geek 2 Geek (gk2gk.com). They've apparently bought up a ton of Google ads lately, because I've seen their banners everywhere (and heard lots of commotion on Twitter from people who have seen them).

As a geek, what may appeal to you about Geek 2 Geek is their pretty sleek and clean interface. SoulGeek can be a little colorful and animated and hard to navigate in comparison. However, I feel that SoulGeek gives you a better feel for who your matches are on a geek level. Geek 2 Geek does not offer the extensive list of geek activities or allow you to talk about your passions in the same way SoulGeek does.

In your Geek 2 Geek profile, you can select your geek interests, but the only two places you're allowed to write your own material are the same as every other dating site, geek or not - Description (about you), Match Description (about them). Keep both sections short and sweet - remember that you're telling a story, not listing your qualities like items in a catalog. You want to give just enough information for someone to want to get to know you better. Since it is a geek niche site, feel free to let your geek flag fly and talk about your D&D character or how many hours you spend glued to your Xbox controller. There are sympathetic ears here!

Geek 2 Geek allows you to upload several photos. Be sure to have one close-up of your face and one full body shot. The rest are up to you - and since it's a geek site, why not upload your geeky photos? (You know which ones I'm talking about!)

Happy dating, geek friends!

For those of you who want a personal matchmaker and have been checking out either Premier Match or Modern Matchmaker here is a bit more information about these two services including cost and number of clients:

Premier Match

• First launched in 1999. The owner is Christie Nightingale.
• Have offices in Philadelphia, New York, and Washington.
• Have signed up nearly double the number of new clients this year, when compared with the same time period in 2008.
• The cost of a full-year membership starts around $5,500 and guarantees 10 to 12 introductions (cost of dates not included).
• Have signed up between 32 and 47 new clients each month since October.
• Has over 2,000 Philadelphia clients.

Modern Matchmaker

• Located in Pittsburgh. The president is Susan Dunhoff.
• Charges $1,250 for a six-month package (cost of dates not included).
• Has over 500 clients.

For our list of similar services, check out our Matchmaker Services category.

The Wall Street Journal in an article called "Marriage-Maker Claims Are Tied in Knots" attempts to find out if some of the statistics are true, in regards to the number of marriages a dating site claims to have generated. eHarmony is targeted because of their claim that 236 members get married everyday (see Story). I believe this works out to 2% of the total number of Americans who got married last year met through the site. Match.com is also mentioned due to stats they released recently (and then pulled) that says 12 couples got married or engaged everyday on their dating site (see Story).

The author, Carl, in a way defends the dating sites published stats when he says that:

One obstacle to further research is that newlyweds are hard for researchers to find. So online-dating companies looking to tout their success as matchmaking yentas have sought novel ways to enumerate marriages.

Less than 2 percent of Americans get married every year. To perform a survey and to get an accurate sample size 1.76 million phone calls would need to be made says Dr. Gonzaga of eHarmony. That would be a costly endeavor, so dating sites are forced to find creative ways to come up with some marriage numbers. The closest thing to an election-quality poll Carl could find was a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, which in 2005 reported from a poll of 3,215 adults, that 3 million Americans found a long term relationship (not necessarily marriages) through a dating site.