General News

The Unofficial eHarmony Blog got a peek at eHarmony’s June advertiser kit which had an interesting promotional page. On it eHarmony stated they receive 3.2 to 3.5 million unique visitors with 350 - 500 million page views per month. With this traffic, they receive 12 - 15 thousand new registrants per day. From this, 1 in 20 site visitors will subscribe to eHarmony and these memberships refresh every 3 to 4 months.

From the information above, I calculated that eHarmony receives between 600 – 750 in new paid members a day or 219,000 – 273,750 paid members a year. This means at any one time on eHarmony there are between 72,000 and 90,000 paid members (if you take the 4 month member average refresh rate).

I’ll have to update my Online Dating Statistics & Facts page with this new information. For a more detail view of eHarmony, try reading our review.

According to this article, a recent worldwide survey of adults by Harris Interactive shows that 23 percent of people go online for dating, while 50 percent use social networking sites and 72 percent use the internet for gaming.

Only two of these activities generate any real income for investors besides online advertising. The next big website will be one that can combine all 3 of these online activities successfully.

TechCrunch has a short article about a new DNA dating service called Gene Partner. The twist with this dating site is that they will perform their DNA matching service for only $199, which is a lot less than the $1000 or so required by other similar services. While the cost is just 20% of what the competitors charge I feel this price is still out of the range most singles are willing to spend. They need to bring the price down to the $60 range before these type of dating sites become anything more than a novelty.

I'm not sure why TechCrunch called the article Ok, We Have Our First DNA-Based Dating Service: GenePartner. This dating service is definitely not the first DNA matching service (see story). They even admitted to this fact in the article. Seems like a cheap promotional stunt to generate visitors. I'm surprised at TechCrunch, they are better than that.

India’s Dishtv, a direct to home television provider with over 200 channels and 3.5 million subscribers has announced a new collaboration with India’s largest matrimonial service, Shaadi.com. Called Shaadi Active, this service will allow TV viewers to actively search for a bride or groom from the millions of profiles available on Shaadi.com. Numerous search criteria will be available to select from including caste, age and profession.

For more information on Shaadi.com, check out our review.

On Tuesday members of Project Wedding got an email informing them that eHarmony had purchased the website. Looking at the home page of Project Wedding you will notice that the copyright at the bottom has been updated from WebShaka, Inc to eHarmony, Inc. The current owners, Joe and Margaret, will still maintain the site for an unknown period of time.

Project Wedding is as the name suggests, a place to help you plan your wedding. The site includes message forums and articles where you can seek advice. You can also find a list of vendors for weddings that include categories like photography, dresses and cakes. These vendor listings also include customer reviews which can be very helpful to the bride or groom to be.

What did eHarmony purchase this site? Well, it is a natural progression for the company to go from matching couples together to now help them plan a wedding. Last year eHarmony has said they were responsible for over 43,000 marriages in the United States. They already have generated goodwill with these couples and they are use to using eHarmony's service so it should be fairly easy to get them to use an online wedding planning site. This website may becoming a bit of a niche social networking site for eHarmony where couples can trade information from where the best place is to get pictures done in your city to, who has the best wedding dresses.

Currently eHarmony also runs eHarmony Marriage, which they call an online alternative to marriage counseling.

For more information about the dating service, eHarmony, please read our review.

Well it looks like eHarmony United Kingdom has been launched. Originally rumoured to open in June, 2008 the dating site is now accessible (props to the unofficial eHarmony Blog for finding out this). No official press releases as of yet have been found and no links exist on the other eHarmony sites pointing to the new UK dating site.

For a limited time when new eHarmony members living in the United Kingdom sign up, they will receive a free 90 day membership. I would assume, all current eHarmony members living in the UK who signed up at the main eHarmony.com dating service will have the option to be moved to the UK dating site to take advantage of its UK specific matching system. eHarmony United Kingdom will need to get a lot of members fast so they can start competing with other popular UK Dating Services and, giving away free memberships is one way to do it. They will just need the marketing campaign to back it up.

eHarmony UK has partnered with the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) to help predict what makes a couple compatible in the United Kingdom. The Oxford Internet Institute is a department of the University of Oxford and was founded in 2001. A research team from OII gathered relationship data from 1000 married couples living in the United Kingdom that ranged in age from 19 to 81 and with relationships that spanned from under 1 to 65 years. With this data eHarmony was able to come up with a scientific matching system based on their key dimensions of compatibility. This matching system shares many similarities with its US counterpart but differences were found by the UK research team which are now taken into account.

Visit the eHarmony United Kingdom home page or check out our eHarmony UK Review.

Related Story: eHarmony to open a dating service in China