General News

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.

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.