Online Dating

Reuters has an article in their Lifestyle section called Older Japanese go online in search of love. It reviews the experiences of Kawamura, a 65 year taxi driver in Japan, when he decided to try out online dating to find someone to share what he calls his "second life". The dating service he signed up for was Match.com's Japanese site. Match.com launched this site 4 years ago and now has almost 850,000 profiles from singles in Japan. The 30-39 age group makes up almost half the members but the 50 and over age group is almost at 9 percent. This age group is also the fastest growing segment at Match.com Japan. One reason for this is, 1 in 5 Japanese are aged 65 years or older and this is expected to double by 2050, plus Internet use is sky rocketing among Japanese seniors.

For more information about Match.com, please read our Match Review (match.com).

ZDNet posted the results of ad spending by dating sites for quarters 1 to 3 in 2007. These figures are compiled by Nielsen. It looks like the top ten dating websites in ad spending where responsible for 91 percent of all dating site advertising. Of the over $350 million spent in ads, Match.com spent 40 percent of it or $145.5 million. eHarmony was second at $88.1 million. Since 2006, Match.com has almost doubled their ad spending while eHarmony had cut theirs by 16%. It would be interesting to see how this affected membership numbers.

The other sites that made the list in which we have dating reviews for includes, Yahoo! Personals at the sixth position with $14 million, PerfectMatch.com at position number 8 with $13.4 million and finally, Lavalife with $6.1 million at number 9.

A few other things to note is, these numbers includes both internet and TV advertising. Match.com and eHarmony have successful TV marketing campaigns which probably eats into at least half of the total amount they spent. I also have to wonder if Match.com's numbers (which really are the numbers of their parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp) includes Chemistry.com (who is also owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp). It was around Q3 of 2007 when Chemistry was spending a lot of money on those eHarmony attack TV ads.

IT News mentions that research by Parship, a large dating service in Europe has found that more and more singles in the United Kingdom are looking towards the rest of Europe for finding love. Of Britain’s 15 million single people, 20 percent or 3 million would consider a serious long distance relationship. This is 3 times more singles considering a long distance relationship than a year ago. The article goes on to explain that a major reason for this shift of views in the relatively cheap cost of air travel when compared to train tickets in the UK. On average a flight to Europe is 40% cheaper than a return train ticket from London to any other major city in Britain.

I had to create a new Yahoo! Personals profile the other day and found out a few interesting things. In step 3 of creating a profile there are 3 privacy options in regards to making your profile searchable. The options are:

1. Make your profile searchable only on Yahoo! Personals
2. Have your profile visible on both Yahoo! Personals and partner websites.
3. Do not make my profile searchable. Only people you contact will see your profile.

Point 3 is not a bad idea but I don't see many people using it unless they are singles who are over loaded with too many messages and winks from other members. I guess, it also allows singles who may be a little unsure about internet dating and want some privacy since it lets them only initiate the conversation and profile viewing.

I was surprised at point 2. I didn't realize Yahoo! Personals had partner websites. I don't remember ever running across a dating service that has been powered by Yahoo! Personals. Here is the example they give on how your profile will look on a third party dating website. From the example it looks like they hope to partner with other sites that offer other different types of listing (jobs, apartments, etc...) or maybe news and entertainment services.

The other interesting fact about point 2 (if you read the fine print) is your profile may appear in search engine queries. I don't think Yahoo.com is doing this now (at least not when I search) but who knows what the future may hold. Of course they could be referring to other search engines and not their own. I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with my dating profile appearing on partner sites but I am not too sure about having them come up in search results. Maybe they should of included a forth point to allow for a search engine option.

A press release from Dating DNA just announced an online dating system for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For now it only seems you can browse profiles, categorize them and add them to your favorites section. There is no communication yet. The iPhone uses the very capable Safari web browser, so the interface is clean, and well organized, very much in tune with Dating DNAs main website. The web pages of the iPhone web app have been reorganized from the main dating site, to fit on the smaller screen of the iPhone. I would think this should work on other Smart Phones but, I was unable to test this (do to not owning one!).

Dating DNA has other applications that allows access to their dating members through MySpace, Facebook and craigslist. I haven't tried any of them as of yet but, I did check on Facebook and there are currently only 56 daily active users for this application.

Dating DNA is a free online dating service with the goal of connecting members of the popular social networking sites together. Since their service is free they rely on advertising to pay the bills. Having multiple platforms (the main website, the facebook app, etc..) to develop cannot be cheap. Online dating is such a competitive market and the social networking sites are flooded with dating applications right now. Most of them having very little users. It will be hard for Dating DNA to find the marketing dollars to promote to singles of these networks what they can offer.

I probably get close to 200 emails a year from owners of dating and related sites who want me to promote one thing or another. Only a handful ever catch my interest and the website "Why was I Dissed?" is one of them. It is a well designed website that offers 2 services. You can get dating advice by Dr. Craig April, a licensed psychologists in Los Angeles and (this is what caught my eye) you can try to find out why someone who you where talking to online just stopped with no explanation. Receiving advice about dating online is nothing new and their are many websites that offer this service but, finding out why someone stopped answering your emails, this is the first time I have seen this.

How does it work? It is pretty simple. You start an Investigation in which you give a few details about yourself, including your name, age and gender. You also choose the type of relationship you had and explain in more detail on how you know the person. You also include the persons email address and name with whom you where in contact with (they call them the Avoiders). From here WhyWasIDissed.com will attempt to contact the Avoiders through email. Here is a quote from the website:

After beginning your investigation, FREE OF CHARGE, we will contact the communication avoider with your investigation case number. They will be asked a series of personalized questions accompanied with multiple-choice answers and fill in the blank options. Once they’ve responded, we will let you know the results immediately.

If no response is forth coming WhyWasIDissed.com will then send a second email. If no response is heard within two weeks it is then assumed the Avoider will not.

When someone stops responding to your emails you are always left wondering why? Will a third party service work as a mediator to find this answer out? I'm not sure but, it is an interesting idea. The Avoiders may feel more comfortable explaining themselves in a structured manner but then again, they may be horrified that a third party knows about a failed relationship. As mentioned in the quote, Investigation are currently free but the website does say only for a limited time. I'm not sure when they will start charging and how much. IMHO WhyWasIDissed.com should keep it free since they are already charging for dating advice. I think the "Why was I Dissed?" service, could possibly be made into a great web viral marketing tool for the dating advice part of the website.