General News

Our new Speed Dating category is now available to all visitors. Speed Dating events or parties are usually held either online at a website or, in the "Real World" at a bar, restaurant or other entertainment location. Speed Dating offers singles a fast and easy way to meet 10 or more new people in a single night. At a typical event you go on short 3 to 6 minute speed dates with each participant of the opposite gender. After each short date you then score the person as someone you would like to either see again or not. At the end of the night, the host (or website) then gathers all the scores and if that same person wanted to meet you, your contact information would then be exchanged.

There are currently only 2 dating sites in the category. I added the Lavalife review because, at the beginning of the summer Lavalife started to offer online virtual speed dating nightly at 9 PM (use to be 8 PM) to its members (see Story). HurryDate is a new dating site which we reviewed specifically for this category. They offer both online and offline speed dating events and parties plus a dating website where members can go after the event to further communicate with their matches.

For more information about what Speed Dating is all about, visit our Speed Dating Services category.

To find out more about the dating services currently listed in this new category, read our review of Lavalife and our review of HurryDate.

Janis Spindel, a matchmaker by trade for 18 years, connects right minded singles. One way she does this is by holding match parties. These are not your run of the mill single events. A dinner party in August at Ms. Spindel's Bridgehampton home was for 10 bachelors from Manhattan which shared a 5 course meal with 20 single beautiful women. Women, if they meet the qualifications can attend the event for free, but men are required to pay $10,000 for the privilege.

Her matching service which only accepts men as clients is called Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking. Their annual fees start at $50,000 USD and can increase substantially depending on the client's location and bonuses like, if the client gets married. Ms. Spindel says she is worth the price,

If you want the Rolls Royce of matchmaking, you pay for it.

She has over 1,200 relationships and 800 marriages credited to her. Ms. Spindel has yet to hear of one of her marriages ending in divorce. She employees about 20 "scouts" which help find potential clients and matches all over the United States.

For the full story, visit 27East and you can find Janis Spindel's website here. For our complete list of personal matchmaking services (which cost a lot less money), check out our Matchmaking Services category.

DatingSitesReviews.com would like to welcome our new blogger, Erika (RedheadWriting). Expect to see Erika posting her opinions, advice and insight into online dating and relationships, a couple of times a week. In her writing, Erika has a great sense of humor, likes to get to the truth of the matter and, is not afraid to express her opinion.

You can find out more about Erika by visiting her Bio page. To contact Erika directly with any questions or to suggest a dating topic, please use this form.

Welcome Erika.

Tom

Starting this Friday September the 18th and until midnight Sunday September the 20th, all members of the dating site Chemistry.com will be able to communicate for free.

This means not only new members get a free in-depth personality test but they can send mail messages to any of their matches and receive mail from singles who are matched to them as well, all at no cost. This weekend is guaranteed to be busy at Chemistry so, if you are interested in trying a online dating service that does the matching for you and have about an hour of time to spare, give Match.com's sister site, Chemistry a chance to match you!

This is Chemistry's 5th free communication weekend with the last Flirtathon happening 2 months ago in July (see Story). For more information on this dating site with an in-depth matchmaking system, read our Chemistry.com review.

The new OkCupid blog called OkTrends had an interesting first post which looked at members sending messages on their dating site. I was surprised by the fact that only 32 percent of first messages (the person who initiated contact) ever got a reply. This is less than a third of all first contacts, and this is on a dating site which is mostly free.

Based on crunching data from tens of thousands of sent messages OkCupid spotted a sweet spot on message length and the chance of a man or woman replying to your message. The first thing they found was that most single's first time messages are way too long.

Almost 16% of first messages are over 2000 characters (roughly 400 words), and the average is 743! At least in terms of using your time efficiently, your messages should be much shorter.

What they found is, on average for a man to write to a woman, a message should be about 200 characters in length. This will give him the best conversion rate of 17.1% based on the average amount of time it takes a man to write a message. For example at this message length the average male online dater can scan profiles and write 10 messages in 1 hour giving them on average, 1.71 replies to their 10 messages.

For women message length is even shorter. A message length of only 50 characters gives woman a conversion rate of 30 percent. This means they can send 11.4 messages per hour and expect on average to receive 3.42 replies from men. First contact message from women seem to more serve the purpose of getting the man to notice their profile, rather than convey any real information.

For the full dating advice article, read OkTrends and to find out more information about this dating site read our review of OkCupid.com.

Let's take a look at the Dating Site Background Checks poll.

A couple of months ago when I started the poll I was curious to see if background checks were important to members of dating sites. Of the 388 votes the poll received, 224 were by women and 163 were by men. Since the visitors of this site are pretty much evenly split between genders, this topic appears to be more important to women. Overwhelmingly women voted that background checks were important to them. Of the 224 votes, 192 or 86 percent of them said yes. Only 5 percent said no and a further 9 percent didn't care about background checks. On the flip side, 55 percent or 89 votes of the men thought background checks were important with 20 percent thinking the opposite and a further 25 percent not caring about the topic.

I am not surprised with the result that only 55 percent of men really cared about background checks. I thought more women would care than men but I didn't think we would see that 85 percent of all women find background checks important. This poll may be a reality check for some dating sites. If you want attract women to your service it looks like by offering an integrated background check of members into your website would go a long way to achieve this goal. This service should also be mandatory on all members with either having the cost integrated into the price of a membership or as an add-on for free. Having only certain members with background checks like some sites do, doesn't really help anybody.