Online Dating

Love at first byte by the Daily Record looks at the question about if Online Dating is still a tabooed subject and if couples are embarrassed to tell others how they met online. The author contacted 10 local couples to tell their story and only one gave their permission. Apparently based on just this statistic the author assumed that people do not want to share their online dating experiences. The article does mention the point of "Some people certainly don't want their personal lives splashed on the newspaper's pages.". This is certainly true but, I think the author should of increased the number of people he asked to share their online dating experience with. He should of also asked couples who didn't meet online if they would be willing to share how they met each other. I bet when he compared the two results, the ratio would be not as bad as he thinks it is.

Early last year we did a poll called Do you tell your friends you're Dating Online?. Of the 330 votes, just over 43% said they would tell their friends. So this means almost half of the people said they would share their online dating experiences. This is a much better result than 1 out of 10 that the Daily Record assumed. Of the 86 voters who said no in our poll, the reason for this was they did not want their friends to see their dating profile and the personal information it contained. This makes sense to me but, it is a little weird that it is ok for strangers to see some of your personal details but not your friends. I think this can especially hold true for men. You want your image to remain tough and macho to your male friends, so you can't show them you have a soft side in which your dating profile might portray.

The Chicago Tribune has a story about some of the research going on to find out how attraction works between people, both gay and straight. The author takes a look at 4 aspects of this. These aspects are DNA matching with the online dating site ScientificMatch.com (see our other story on them), how physical attraction and evolution works, if there is a love hormone and finally, how your brain effects love.

More and more dating sites are pushing how they have the science and research behind their match system. eHarmony, Chemistry and Perfectmatch are the big 3 who promote their matching system and the science along with their relationship experts. All of these sites post a summary review of how their matching systems work as quoted by the experts. None as of yet (that I am aware of) have actually gone in great details on how their system works and made the research public to back it up. We also need peer reviews of these matching systems from an independent source to begin to fully trust these matching systems. We talked about this in a story we previously did where Chemistry may be one of the first sites to start actually doing this.

Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch did a guest post at TechCrunch about how the niche dating sites market share is growing fast while the top 5 sites for the most part are losing ground. The top 5 dating sites in market share, according to Hitwise are:

1. Singlesnet
2. Plentyoffish
3. True
4. Yahoo Personals
5. Match

These top 5 sites lost 7% of their overall market share when comparing Match 2008, with a year ago.

New Ads

As per this recent story, Chemistry.com to Spend $40M on TV Ads, it looks like Chemistry.com new TV ads called "Chemistry Vows" will be coming to a TV near you. The four new commercials will appear on the NBC network along with Bravo, HGTV, TBS and A&E. After viewing the commercials and seeing the list of networks the commercials will be aired on, Chemistry is definitely targeting the 30 and older crowd. This makes sense since Chemistry is all about the long term relationship, something that most 20 to 29 year olds are not looking for yet, either do to school or job advancement, etc.

New Feature

To improve members experience with online dating, Chemistry has added the feature "You've Been Noticed". This feature allows members to find out who has viewed their profile. According to Chemistry:

CNN Living has a story that looks at scam artists, internet dating and the website RomanceScams.org, where you can report on romance scams. In my opinion the article doesn't really put online dating scams into perspective but, it did have a few good examples and tips. One excellent point includes this quote about how to identify a possible scammer:

If their spelling is horrible, they use emoticons heavily and they appear to be available at unusual hours for your time zone, they may be scamming you. Scammers often work on the Internet from other countries and use photos of others they find online. Often, a simple Google search can help identify whether your online companion is legitimate or whether he or she is simply using someone else's name and photo.

This story uses some scare tactics that I don't agree with. In one case they mention that the FBI Internet Crime Report had 206,884 complaints last year about internet fraud which cost the victims over $239 million. That's a good thing to know but this statistic appears to take into account all online business including online stores, online auction sites and the list goes on. What percentage of this is deals with online dating? Where are the statistics that compare it to other online industries or email and normal mail fraud? Maybe online dating has a better track record, who knows? You can't tell from the CNN article.

The other statistic in the story I wondered about was, according to Romance Scams website, of their 30,000 members 883 people reported losing over $8 million too online scammers. This works out too almost $10,000 per person on average. This seems a little high to me. I don't know many people who have $10 grand to give to their friends and family let alone to someone online. I wish the author had expanded on this information a bit further and included a few links to some reports.

Romance Scams is a non-profit site that does offer excellent information about dealing with and identifying online scams. A lot more dating sites are starting to take this issue more seriously and have started to include easy to find "Report Abuse" links on dating profiles that allows you to identify a scammer. Dating Services also monitor and identify scammers manually and automatically through software. Singles need to know, and to watch out for online dating scams but, you do have to keep things in perspective and use common sense.

A student at Penn State posted a "My Opinion" piece called Internet dating sites unrealistic. She wrote a cynical view of online dating services and in my opinion never really gave them a chance. After viewing some profiles on Match.com she decide to write up a sexy profile under the alias "MeltNmyMouth69" (I have to admit, I laughed a bit at the name). She then proceeds to be surprised when she got a ton of winks (she had only signed up as a free member) from what she termed as Creepers. At the end of the story she proclaims:

You will not find love on the Internet.

If you truly are interested in a long term relationship then this is obviously the wrong approach. You have to take online dating seriously and put the time and effort into it. If you create a profile that is going to attract horny individuals, then of course this is who is going to contact you. Much the same way as if you are going to a bar dressed seductively, you are going to attract a certain type of guy. If this was not the type of men she wanted to attract then, of course her online dating experiment was going to fail.