General News

Back in early February, 2009 Date.com started offering Virtual Gifts for sale to its members (see Story). Members could send virtual flowers, chocolates, etc.. to someone they wish to date on the site by purchasing tokens for $1 to $5.

The parent company of Date.com, Avalanche LLC wanted to make sure they met any legal obligations to their members when dealing with Virtual Gifts and tokens. No real laws have been made in regards to virtual gifts in most countries. The closest comparison in the real world they could find was gift cards. Lawyers for Date.com

ultimately concluded that the consumer laws pertaining to gift cards didn't apply.

Date.com decided to make purchasing of gifts as clear as possible in their Terms of Service. Specifically this mainly deals with what happens if a user doesn't use their tokens. Date.com's policy for members inactive more than 365 days is to delete them. Unused virtual gift tokens are then deleted as well, with Date.com keeping the profits. Before your account is deleted from Date.com, multiple emails are sent out warning you of this fact and asking you to log in again.

For more about the dating site, read our Date.com review.

Last year eHarmony release a PDF of a summary of the Harris Interactive report for 2007 which showed how they concluded 236 eHarmony members get married every day. According to eHarmony's current Matching Advertisers with Buyers web page, Harris Interactive Research for 2008 still concludes 236 eHarmony members marry every day. From our count it also looks like the profile questions increased by 2 to 258 questions.

On average eHarmony Media of sites receives 3.6 million visitors per month and over 415 million page views with an average visit length of 5 minutes. In March 2009, 34 percent of visitors were male and 66 percent were females with the median age of 35 years. eHarmony Media includes the following categories Singles, Advice, Weddings, and Parenting. The sites included in these categories are eHarmony.com, Advice.eHarmony.com, ProjectWedding.com, Weddingbee.com, Justmommies.com and FertileThoughts.com.

For more demographic information read the eHarmony.com Statistics 2009 Adobe PDF file we have stored locally.

Read our eHarmony review for more general information on this dating site.

Great Expectations is in legal trouble again.

Almost a year ago today the Arizona Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Great Expectations (see Story). In February of this year a settlement was reached for $500 thousand in the Arizona lawsuit (see Story). Now the state of Wisconsin is suing Great Expectations over deceptive marketing practices and improper contracts.

The lawsuit, filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, claims Great Expectations overstated the size of its membership, its membership in specific age groups and other categories and how many members wound up getting married. The complaint also alleges Great Expectations did not fully screen members for criminal histories and misrepresented how they would use credit information provided by prospective members.

Over 1,000 residents of Wisconsin have used the matchmaking service with some of them spending more than $3,000 on the service. Great Expectations has declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The lawsuit names GE- Milwaukee LLC, a Nevada company that does business as Great Expectations locally in Wauwatosa, a Milwaukee suburb, and its parent company, JRM Management of Dallas, Texas.

For more on this story, read JSOnline.

The latest video for the track Available by Flo Rida is featured only at Plenty of Fish. This song is off his new album R.O.O.T.S. and contains Flo Rida surfing the Plenty of Fish dating site on a laptop looking through profiles and singing about being a single man. Flo must be serious about dating since he was only viewing members who had upgraded their membership. 😀

I am not sure how this partnership between Flo Rida and Plenty of Fish came about? Did Plenty of Fish pay to be in the video? Both parties benefit from the partnership and increased media exposure. The video is on a site that gets millions of hits a month, which is good for Flo Rida anda younger audience than usual will be visiting Plenty of Fish to check out the new video and possibly create a dating profile as well.

For more information on this dating site, read our review of Plenty of Fish.

It seems to me, part of AshleyMadison.com marketing strategy is trying to buy ad time or space for advertising that they know will be rejected by the publishers. This way they get free publicity when the media write about AshleyMadison.com problems. Recently they had a Super Bowl TV ad rejected (see Story) and back in 2007 Microsoft denied their ads from showing on their Microsoft Network web portal (see Story). There have been other incidents as well, including a bill board in New York City.

The most recent print ad problem deals with a $20,000 ad in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The advertisement was suppose to run 2 days after U.S. Sen. John Ensign's confirmed an extramarital affair with a women who worked on his campaign. The publisher of the paper decided the ad was not right for their paper and did not run it.

The Canadian owned dating site, Lavalife received a makeover of their homepage and front end of their website recently. As long as I can remember Lavalife has always had a homepage that was predominantly red (see right image). Now a light blue and grey is used, as shown in our new updated image on the left. Once you log in though, you will find that the members area has remained the same, with the familiar red in the background.

Another surprising change to Lavalife's homepage, is the standard image of a couple having fun is nowhere to be found. This is a staple for most popular dating services. You just get a basic Join for Free and Login panels for visitors on the new homepage. The Lavalife name and logo doesn't even really standout. I am not sure if this simplistic approach works, as image wise it doesn't show what Lavalife as a service offers. As matter of fact the word Dating is only mentioned once in small letters, in a link for a directory at the bottom of the home page. They mention finding singles, but not really what for. Obviously most people visiting this page would know, but I think Lavalife should of mentioned they are a dating site, since their company name doesn't suggest online dating either. Plus, what do most people type into a search engine when they are searching for a dating site, I would think the term dating site or something similar! If these words are not on the homepage, Google and other search engines are not going to return it in their search results.

I really like the dating site, Lavalife and what they offer singles but, I do think they made a number of mistakes in the redesign of their homepage. They have other landing pages which are more traditional and contain more information, but it is was mistake not to include more information on their homepage.

On a somewhat related note, last year I looked at other dating sites and their use of blue (see Story).

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