Online Dating

Yahoo is shedding assets so they can concentrate on their core business. It looks like Yahoo! Personals may be on the chopping block. On Wednesday Barry Diller, CEO of IAC (which owns both Match.com and Chemistry) noted that they are talking to Yahoo about acquiring their dating service. This information was gathered from a conference call regarding the IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings report (we will discuss Match.com's earnings in another story). It is estimated that Yahoo! Personals could sell for around $500 million. This happens to be the same price that the Friendfinder Network sold in 2007 (see Story).

Interesting enough Match.com and Yahoo already have some dating partnerships. Yahoo has a number of dating sites for different parts of the world but, they really only actually run the one for US and Canada (as far as I can tell). The rest are partner dating sites. Match.com runs the Yahoo dating sites for the UK & Ireland, Germany and Taiwan. Find out more about Yahoo Personals partners by reading [story: Yahoo-Personals-Dating-Partners].

For more on this story read The Deal and for the full IAC/InterActive Q1 2009 Earnings Call Transcript visit Seeking Alpha.

Read our Yahoo Personals review and our Match.com review for information on these popular dating sites.

Craigslist is in the news again about their Casual Encounters section of the classifieds website. The last story in March was about a Chicago Sheriff who sued Craigslist for being one of the largest source of prostitution on the internet (see Story).

The New York Times takes a look at Craigslist, specifically the Casual Encounters section.

Like bathhouses and sex clubs, the Casual Encounters section caters to the erotic underbelly of society, where courtship gives way to expediency and anonymity is a virtue (or at least a turn-on). The section was introduced in late 2000 and is available in all cities served by Craigslist, for users gay and straight, male and female. The ads range from prim to raunchy; a good number of people include photographs of precisely what they have to offer.

I found a recent article were the author asked the question, Are free dating site like Plenty of Fish good or evil? By this the author means, if hooking up has become so easy through free dating sites, does it affect relationships and marriages, and in the end, just add to the divorce rate. He then goes on and actually compares Plenty of Fish to a gun. The analogy he uses is, are free dating sites only bad when someone misuses it? He further expands on his analogy by comparing a safety of a gun to features like site registrations and paying membership fees.

The first thing I have to wonder is, why are only free dating sites under attack? Sure more scammers, etc.. can access free sites easier than paid dating sites since there is no real barrier to creating a membership but, does this have much to do with people cheating online? I would think affair dating sites like Ashley Madison, which actually promote cheating would be his target. It is not like spending $40 on a membership is a huge financial burden for anyone.

Comparing a dating site to a gun is a little extreme. I haven't read many newspaper stories were a dating site was used to kill somebody. Some people consider guns bad, even if they are not misused. Plus, almost anything can be misused and therefore bad in certain circumstances.

For the full article, visit Muncie Free Press. For more information on this free dating site, read our Plenty of Fish review.

I have finished up our new review of the dating site, RSVP. It is the first dating site in our new Australian Dating Site category. I hope to have a few more added to this new dating category by the end of May.

RSVP is owned by Fairfax Digital and currently is the largest Australian dating site with over 1 million members. It uses a stamp/credit system for initiating contact with members and it is free to reply to any message from a member. This is also the only dating site that I know of which Australians can use there mobile phone to access the dating site and receive SMS alerts.

Read the new RSVP review for more information.

It had been just under a year since we had updated our Wealthy Men review. We found that they still are offering 2 membership levels which are called Silver and Gold. The benefits of Gold include your profile appearing higher in the search results than Silver and all members (including free ones) can reply to your mail messages. What they did change was the membership terms. You now can only purchase a 1 month membership (which auto renews until you turn it off). The 3 month term membership is no more. This is surprising because a lot of other dating sites find this is the most popular membership term purchased. WealthyMen.com still does offer the 7 day Gold trial membership for a small price to allow you to test drive all features of the dating service.

The other thing which is now available at Wealthy Men is their 3-Month Guarantee. If for any reason, you cannot find your match in 3 months, Wealthy Men will give you an extra 3 months for free. To collect, all you need to do is email or call customer support after 3 months.

For more information, read out Wealthy Men review.

The Lindsay Lohan's eHarmony Profile video which we reported about here, received almost 1.8 million views in 24 hours when it was posted April 13th, on Funny or Die. Since then, the video has had a total of over 2.8 million views. Her self-parody has gotten her press coverage beyond the normal gossip newspapers. ABC and The Wall Street Journal even took notice.

eHarmony is enjoying the free publicity. An eHarmony spokesperson noted:

We appreciate that Ms. Lohan recognizes eHarmony is the company that single people turn to when they are serious about finding a great long-term relationship ... Her parody of our advertising gave us a good laugh

The video is more about Lindsay Lohan poking fun of herself, than eHarmony. In her own way Lindsay is actually endorsing the dating site. By this I mean, when people watch the video they will wonder, if Lindsay thinks the dating service will work for her (with her screwed up life), then it must work for anyone!

For more information on this dating site, read our eHarmony review.