General News

On FriendFinder Networks corporate site they are claiming to be the largest social networking company in the world. The numbers they give to support this are:

• 250,000,000+ total profiles in their database since inception (for all websites).
• On average, over 150,000 new members per day.
• Over 10,000 private label social networking and live video sites in their network.

While FriendFinder Networks may be the largest social networking company in terms of number of profiles created, but how relevant are all those profiles. FriendFinder got its start way back in 1996, 12 years ago. I am sure many of these profiles are unused now or duplicates within the same site and across multiple sites. Adult FriendFinder, the largest site in the Network, says on their home page they have over 29 million active members. An active member to FriendFinder is someone with a valid email account who has logged in within at least 2 years. Now 2 years is a long time to be considered an active member but at least FriendFinder publishes how these numbers are calculate. Most dating sites do not. I would consider the largest social networking sites to be the ones with the most number of active profiles. In my opinion an active profile is one in which someone has used it in at least 2 months (and this is stretching it). I'm sure this honour would go to either Myspace or Facebook.

While we are on the subject, why are more and more dating sites calling themselves social networking sites? Sure they have social networking features but the main goal of the site is dating and to match you with a compatible person. If you are not single, there is no point in joining any dating site or the ones that call themselves Social Networks. These sites really should be called Social Networks for Singles.

Here is FriendFinder Networks corporate home page. For more information on the FriendFinder dating site, read our review.

Spark Networks released their 3rd quarter financial results this past week. It wasn't a very good quarter for the company when compared to 2007 Q3 and last quarter.

Revenue for the third quarter of 2008 was $14.0 million, an 11% decrease compared to $15.8 million in the third quarter of 2007, and a 6% decrease compared to $15.0 million in the prior quarter. Revenue for the nine months was $44.1 million, a 10% decrease compared to $49.2 million for the same period last year.

Subscribers are also down.

A while ago we asked the question Is PlentyOfFish.com going to offer Paid Memberships? Well, it looks like the owner, Markus, will be offering some products and additional features for sale on Plenty of Fish sometime soon. He didn't mention or hint at what the new products or features might be. The reason Marcus gave for his eventual switch from what POF's slogan, 100% Free. Put Away Your Credit Card is:

There is really no money in being free and we have to start experimenting with other models now or we won’t be able to compete in 3 or 4 years.

Now Markus does make a fair bit of money, especially for the low overhead he has but it is not even close to what other popular dating sites are reporting as income. Markus will have to be careful here and I am sure he will take a slow approach to what he plans to offer as not to scare off his members. Products for sale will be the easiest way to go at first. Having real flowers and candy on the site for sale (instead of the virtual kind) could be a big seller. Especially if it is implemented in a way that makes it quick and easy to choose the person and the flowers to send.

I really doubt Plenty of Fish will go completely paid. Instead I see them offering enhancements to existing free memberships. This could include things like improved customer service, profile listing highlighting, having your profile appear higher in search results and an improved matching system. Of course, this is all just speculation. We will have to just wait to see what POF has in store for it's members.

For more information on this service your can read our POF review.

Dating site PerfectMatch.com has seen a 47 percent increase in members over the same quarter last year. This is a huge jump especially in these economic times. Most other popular online dating services membership growth levels have either flat lined or increased marginally. Membership renewals are also up and when you combine these numbers with the new member numbers, matching on PerfectMatch.com has increased by 125 percent. Almost 92 percent of these matches are using the automated matching system called the Duet Compatibility System.

For more information on the dating service, read our PerfectMatch.com Review.

I was doing some research and I ran across this CNN Money article again. In it CNN mentions that eHarmony has annual revenues of almost $200 million. In 2007 this dating service spent upwards of $100 million in advertising (from our stats page you will see they spent $88 million for the first 3 quarters of the year). This means, about 50% of revenue (membership fees) goes towards advertising. I know eHarmony is not the only dating site spending this type of money on marketing. Other dating sites that have similar spending habits includes Match.com and Friend Finder. I wonder how this compares to other industries?

For more information on eHarmony, read our dating review.

I was doing some Yahoo! Personals research and came across some interesting information. Yahoo! Personals has 13 international sites and I had always thought they were all based on the U.S. and Canadian Yahoo dating websites. I was wrong. It looks like some of the international dating sites are actually partnered dating sites. Basically what this means in the dating world is the underlying dating site is actually run by another company. The dating service itself still retains the other partners logo and general theme of the website (in this case Yahoo). Partnering like this is not necessary a bad thing since the partner usually are experts and already successful in their field. Both partners benefit with the relationship, with each endorsing the other.

From what I can tell, Yahoo! Personals for the UK & Ireland is actually the Match.com UK dating site. Yahoo! Personals for Germany and Taiwan is Match.com as well. Yahoo! Personals France, Italy, Brazil and Spain is part of the Meetic Network of European dating sites. I would also question the Japan, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan Yahoo dating sites.

This leaves just the US, Canada and the Australian Yahoo dating sites being actually owned and run by Yahoo. The Yahoo dating site for Australia though, is partnered with eHarmony Australia. On Yahoo's main dating page you have the choice of going directly to Yahoo Dating to search for singles or visit eHarmony Australia to let them find your matches for you. This is a similar idea to AOL's partnership with eHarmony (See Story).

I guess I was more surprised than anything else. I had always figured Yahoo being so big that they would have created and run their own dating sites for these countries.

For more information on Yahoo! Personals, read our online dating review.

UPDATE: Wow, I must of been reading eHarmony's mind! They released a press release yesterday (which I just saw today, Nov 12) announcing eHarmony Australia and Yahoo's partnership.