General News

Match.com and Chemistry's parent company IAC reported their Quarter 3 Financials last week. IAC revenue grew by 10% to $369.3 million when compared to the same quarter last year. It's not all good news as they reported a net loss of $14.8 million. In Q3 2007 they had a $70 million net income.

Q3 operating loss was driven by the spin-off expenses and a $16.2 million non-cash charge related to the modification of certain IAC equity awards in connection with the spin-offs.

Match.com revenue is reported to be $93.5 million, this is up $4 million over quarter 3 last year and up $200,000 from last quarter. This revenue gave Match an operating income (before amortization) of $30.3 million.

For more information, read IACs press release in their media room.

Tom Smiley recently released on October 31, 2008 a case study in which he examines the number of fake profiles found on Craig' s List. Specifically, he took a look at all personal ads for woman seeking men in all United States cities for one day. This totalled 6,590 individual ads. In total he claims to have found that 5,564 of these personal ads appeared to be fake. This means only 16% of the ads he examined where real. Tom Smiley used 5 different methods to figure out if a personal ad was a fake. These methods were:

1. Dismissal of ads with pictures posted in multiple ads.
2. Dismissal of ads with three point randomizers.
3. Dismissal of ads with typical verbatim occurrences indicating variables in form letters.
4. Dismissal of ads that are obvious fraud.
5. Dismissal of ads that simply don't match headline w/content.

More Details can be found here on his methodology including examples. I'm not a big user of Craig's List and always thought their personals section wasn't the best place to visit to find someone to date. After reading Tom Smiley's case study I definitely wouldn't recommend Craig's List for dating to anyone.

For the full case study see Online Personals Fraud and you can view our Craig's List review.

The Online Dating Insider pointed out that eHarmony is looking for a Customer Relations Risk Analyst.

This main responsibilities this job entails are (quoted from Monster):

• Review, investigate and communicate with customers on variety of incidents related to escalated customer issues, including service/policy dissatisfaction, negative experience complaints and/or special handling needs.
• Research customer accounts/usage and determine root cause and appropriate resolution of issues leading to customer issues.
• Review incidents involving potential violation of company terms and conditions and determine action to be taken related to customer account.

From the last bullet point it looks like eHarmony is planning to crack down on scammers a lot more. Customer relations is important aspect of almost any industry and it looks like eHarmony is taking customer service very seriously.

On a slightly unrelated note, one new thing I learned from this job posting (in the About eHarmony Section) was they mentioned eHarmony's main shareholders include Technology Crossover Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Fayez Sarofim & Co.

For the full job details check out the post on Monster. To find out more about this dating service, read our eHarmony Review.

Red has long been associated with love, romance and Valentine's Day. There seems to be a reason for this, according to a recent University of Rochester study. The color red appears to boost a woman's attractiveness to men. With the study:

... volunteers were told they had $100, shown the picture of their "date", then asked how much of that money they were prepared to spend. On average, wearing red meant a more expensive night out, and in general, a higher rating of attractiveness.

The study concluded that there is clear evidence that the color red on woman makes men feel more amorous at the subconscious level.

For the full story visit the BBC News.

In mid October we reported about (see Story) Perfect Match's Dr. Pepper Schwartz on the Bonnie Hunt Show. She was helping Bonnie's friend Holly by reviewing her profile and pictures and giving her some pointers to improve her online dating adventure. Starting last week and for the next 5 weeks Holly and her online dating experiences with PerfectMatch.com will be regularly featured on the Bonnie Hunt Show. Holly currently has 3 matches she really likes and can't decide which one to go on a date with. Voice your opinion and vote on which 3 of these PerfectMatch.com guys Holly should go out with.

If you want to find out what all th fuss is about with this dating service, read our Perfect Match review.

I get several emails a day from dating related website owners asking me to take a look at their service. I do for the most part take a quick peek and I find most of them don't stand out.

MeetWays is different. It is a free service that offers a useful dating tool. You enter two addresses (or zip/postal codes) and it will find the halfway point between them. It will then list restaurants, coffee shops or whatever you specify on a graphical map. This tool is integrated in a large part with Google Maps so it works for more than 25 different countries. On the map you get your 2 red points which represent the addresses you entered, the middle red address point and then a number of yellow points which are the businesses in the area that are offering the service you specified.

Meetways doesn't display many of the smaller related businesses in the area and only shows businesses which are buying ad space from Google. This is not necessary a bad thing since a large number of businesses are represented. This tool does work well and can be used more than just for dating, client or business lunch meetings come to mind. Think of this tool as an interactive yellow pages.

Visit MeetWays to try out the tool for yourself.