Online Dating

Advertising Age has an article about Perfectmatch and 50 something daters. From 2005 to 2006 Perfectmatch have seen a 60% increase in 50+ singles. From 2006 to 2007 this growth has surged to 140%, making senior singles one of Perfectmatches most important demographics. This week to help attract more 50 plus singles, Perfectmatch.com has been featured on the TV dating show called "Another Chance for Romance". This show is aired on the Retirement Living TV channel that appears on Comcast and DirecTV in the United States.

Please read our review, for more information on Perfectmatch.com.

Reuters has an interview with Match.com's Chief Executive Thomas Enraght-Moony. In it they talk of the huge growth of social networking sites like Myspace and FaceBook. The results of all the visitors to these sites have only been good news for online dating in general and Match.com itself. According to the company social networking sites help singles with "their comfort level with exposing their personalities online". This means as visitors of social networking sites get use to the amount of personal information displayed on its web pages, they have less qualms of using this type of their own information with an online dating service.

The article also explores the rising competition Match.com has been receiving from rival dating services. Match.com had slower global growth last year but profits where up due to a fee increase. A large part of the profits goes into television, print and internet advertising.

Read our review of Match.com for more information.

Related Stories: Match.com and their Little Black Book, Match.com is about to launch a Facebook Application

According to JupiterResearch (a respected service which creates detailed reports from analyzing internet traffic) online personals is expected to have steady growth in the coming years of roughly 16% per year. As a whole it has been estimated that the online personals industry revenue for 2007 was $900 million. By 2012 revenue is projected to be $1.9 Billion, more than doubled. This is all happening when according to some experts Social Networking was going to have taken over online dating by now.

See the full press release here.

An article called Complaints soar against online dating services in Northwest talks about the rise of complaints against dating sites in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It states, consumer complaints filed, rose 73%, in 2006 over 2005. In 2006 there were a total of 2,525 complaints to the Better Business Bureau in the area of Alaska, Oregon and Western Washington. The year 2007 is expected to increase as well. The complaints in the article where broken down into the following groups:

• 35% of the people complained about the quality of the singles available and matching system.
• 17% was for poor customer service.
• 15.1% of the complaints was in regards to the number of dates from the service.
• 13.7% where about high pressure sales tactics.

This is a sharp increase in complaints, especially since dating services have been established since well before 2005. So what has changed? I think it has a lot to do with the rise of niche dating sites. These types of sites are a lot smaller than the popular dating services and tend to be run on a shoe string budget. For this reason some niche dating site owners may be making exaggerated marketing claims on their site to try and lure in paying members. It is also pretty easy for any website to make itself appear a lot larger than it is, to trick people into a paying membership. A lot of the smaller dating services are also just a one man show which makes customer service for the site hard to keep up with, even if they have a limited number of members. Of course not all of these sites are bad, just a small percentage. Unfortantly though, it may be giving the online dating industry a bad name.

If we take a look at the numbers again 2,525 complaints are not a whole lot when you consider it has been estimated that between 30 and 40 million Americans have logged into a dating service in 2007. So let's assume a lower number of 25 million Americans who used a dating site in the year 2006. Now the question is what percentage of the population does Alaska, Oregon and Western Washington make up for in the United States. It's not large, so let's be conservative and say 3%. Now, 3% of 25 million Americans is 750,000 singles. When you measure this number against the 2,525 complaints, you get less than 0.4% of singles using dating sites actually complain to the Better Business Bureau. This is a very, very, very small number of complaints. So in a way, this article makes it seem that there are a large number of complaints against dating sites by just comparing the number of complaints with last year and not taking the total number of complaints and the actual number of singles using dating services. So what do my numbers not take into account (you are probably asking yourself)? Well, obviously not everyone will take the time to complain to the BBB. Also, not all dating services belong to the BBB, so complaints would not be filed for them. How does this affect things? I'm not totally sure but, after looking at other industries and companies in the BBB database and looking at the complaints, I feel online dating sites as a whole don't have any more complaints than any other industry on the internet. As with each industry, someone will always not be satisfied with what they bought and there will always be companies that do not have the best intentions for their customers.

So, how do you find a reputable online dating site? A good start (besides reading our site and user reviews) is the Better Business Bureau. From here you can search for the dating service to see if it belongs to the BBB. If so, it will show the complaints (if any) and if they where resolved. Remember, most large businesses will have complaints. The key here is to see if the complaints of the company where resolved to the satisfaction of the BBB. The article at kgw.com also contains some very wise tips when considering a dating service, especially one that is not as well known.

TechCrunch is reporting that HotOrNot.com was sold to a Canadian company called Avid Life Media for an unconfirmed $20 million. Avid Life Media also owns Ashley Madison which is a hook-up site for married people.

It is estimated that Hot Or Not pulled in $2 million in profit last year. If this is the case, $20 million seems a little low, especially when compared to what other dating services have been sold for lately. I've got the sense recently though that Hot Or Not has been struggling with trying to increase revenue. They briefly went to a free model last summer (relying on people clicking on ads to bring in the income) but cited huge profile spam for switching to their paid revenue model again.

Related Story: Hot or Not is now Paid (again)

UPDATE - (Feb. 15, 2008) James, one of the original owners of HotOrNot.com, has confirmed the sale on his blog. He also mentioned that the $20 million price tag is incorrect. He didn't go into any details on what they did receive as payment.

It's official now! The "Who Has Viewed Me" feature is now available to members of eHarmony. You can now see members who have viewed you from up to 2 weeks ago. There is also a new option in your Match Settings which allows members to show their views of profiles as anonymous instead of showing their membership name.

This feature has the side affect of now allowing singles to see if a member is currently actively using eHarmony. If you send them a mail message and if their is no view of your profile (let alone a reply) by the eHarmony member, most likely then it is an inactive profile (unless the member is on vacation or something).