General News

ZDNet posted the results of ad spending by dating sites for quarters 1 to 3 in 2007. These figures are compiled by Nielsen. It looks like the top ten dating websites in ad spending where responsible for 91 percent of all dating site advertising. Of the over $350 million spent in ads, Match.com spent 40 percent of it or $145.5 million. eHarmony was second at $88.1 million. Since 2006, Match.com has almost doubled their ad spending while eHarmony had cut theirs by 16%. It would be interesting to see how this affected membership numbers.

The other sites that made the list in which we have dating reviews for includes, Yahoo! Personals at the sixth position with $14 million, PerfectMatch.com at position number 8 with $13.4 million and finally, Lavalife with $6.1 million at number 9.

A few other things to note is, these numbers includes both internet and TV advertising. Match.com and eHarmony have successful TV marketing campaigns which probably eats into at least half of the total amount they spent. I also have to wonder if Match.com's numbers (which really are the numbers of their parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp) includes Chemistry.com (who is also owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp). It was around Q3 of 2007 when Chemistry was spending a lot of money on those eHarmony attack TV ads.

IT News mentions that research by Parship, a large dating service in Europe has found that more and more singles in the United Kingdom are looking towards the rest of Europe for finding love. Of Britain’s 15 million single people, 20 percent or 3 million would consider a serious long distance relationship. This is 3 times more singles considering a long distance relationship than a year ago. The article goes on to explain that a major reason for this shift of views in the relatively cheap cost of air travel when compared to train tickets in the UK. On average a flight to Europe is 40% cheaper than a return train ticket from London to any other major city in Britain.

The Consumerist has a post regarding eHarmony and their divorced policy. In it they talk about a woman who was separated from her husband for 7 years when she signed up to eHarmony. She took her time and filled out the hour long profile. At the end she was informed that she would not be able to join since she was not actually divorced. After a year and when the woman got her divorced finalized her daughter wrote to eHarmony for her to see if she could reopen her profile so she didn't have to spend another hour to fill it in again. eHarmony's response was:

Since you are divorced, please reply with the county and state of your divorce proceedings, the name of the judge, and the date your divorce was finalized. We hope you understand that this information is very important in order to protect the integrity of our matching process. Once this information is received, we will be very happy to reset your Relationship Questionnaire for you. You will need to retake the questionnaire so that we can accurately assess your relationship needs and provide matches who are deeply compatible with you.

First off I must say is I do applaud eHarmony for sticking to their guidelines and allowing only people who are not married or separated. Other dating services could learn from this and it is what makes eHarmony one of the top spots to go if you are looking for a serious long term relationship.

In my opinion eHarmony does need to make a few changes to make things flow more smoothly. First off all, one of the first questions they ask is if you are single, separated or divorced. If this is a deal breaker profile question for eHarmony, then it should stop the user from entering further information at this point. They should really have all the profile deal breakers up front so people don't waste their time filling out a profile that eHarmony will ultimately deny. This just makes potential members angry.

The other thing I didn't like from the eHarmony customer service response was that the woman had to provide proof of the divorce. Why can't they rely on her word? On everything else she wrote in her profile they trust her about. Plus if a new member says they are divorced, you don't have to go out and prove this. I'm all for verification of profile information but I think they should allow her to change her status and maybe for these type of issues have a verification logo or something for the profile. Just like how some sites are doing for photos. If she needs to prove she is divorced then all divorced members should have too.

After checking out eHarmony profile creation again I notice that eHarmony Canada still allows you to continue the profile creation if you select you are separated. eHarmony.com has improved on this and now has your current relationship status on the home registration page. If you select separated or married, the browser changes and asks you if you want to learn more about eHarmony Marriage, a service from eHarmony that helps married couples with advice on how to improve a struggling marriage. This is a much better way to go about it than telling you after you spent the time to fill out the profile.

Read our eHarmony review for more information about this online dating service.

I had to create a new Yahoo! Personals profile the other day and found out a few interesting things. In step 3 of creating a profile there are 3 privacy options in regards to making your profile searchable. The options are:

1. Make your profile searchable only on Yahoo! Personals
2. Have your profile visible on both Yahoo! Personals and partner websites.
3. Do not make my profile searchable. Only people you contact will see your profile.

Point 3 is not a bad idea but I don't see many people using it unless they are singles who are over loaded with too many messages and winks from other members. I guess, it also allows singles who may be a little unsure about internet dating and want some privacy since it lets them only initiate the conversation and profile viewing.

I was surprised at point 2. I didn't realize Yahoo! Personals had partner websites. I don't remember ever running across a dating service that has been powered by Yahoo! Personals. Here is the example they give on how your profile will look on a third party dating website. From the example it looks like they hope to partner with other sites that offer other different types of listing (jobs, apartments, etc...) or maybe news and entertainment services.

The other interesting fact about point 2 (if you read the fine print) is your profile may appear in search engine queries. I don't think Yahoo.com is doing this now (at least not when I search) but who knows what the future may hold. Of course they could be referring to other search engines and not their own. I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with my dating profile appearing on partner sites but I am not too sure about having them come up in search results. Maybe they should of included a forth point to allow for a search engine option.

Perfect Match has released a new Facebook application called "What's Your Personality Type?". This application is based on Perfect Matches Duet Total Compatibility matching system and allows users to find out their own personality types to help find out who they may be compatible with on Facebook. These personality types include Romantic Impulsivity, Personal Energy, Outlook and Predictability. There are 7 true and false questions for each type to answer before you get your results.

As far as Facebook dating applications are concerned, it is fairly simple and doesn't allow you to access your account on PerfectMatch.com or its members. If the application becomes popular I could see Perfect Match putting more effort into it. Right now it is just more of a marketing tool for their main dating site.

For more information about Perfect Match, please read our review.

A press release from Dating DNA just announced an online dating system for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For now it only seems you can browse profiles, categorize them and add them to your favorites section. There is no communication yet. The iPhone uses the very capable Safari web browser, so the interface is clean, and well organized, very much in tune with Dating DNAs main website. The web pages of the iPhone web app have been reorganized from the main dating site, to fit on the smaller screen of the iPhone. I would think this should work on other Smart Phones but, I was unable to test this (do to not owning one!).

Dating DNA has other applications that allows access to their dating members through MySpace, Facebook and craigslist. I haven't tried any of them as of yet but, I did check on Facebook and there are currently only 56 daily active users for this application.

Dating DNA is a free online dating service with the goal of connecting members of the popular social networking sites together. Since their service is free they rely on advertising to pay the bills. Having multiple platforms (the main website, the facebook app, etc..) to develop cannot be cheap. Online dating is such a competitive market and the social networking sites are flooded with dating applications right now. Most of them having very little users. It will be hard for Dating DNA to find the marketing dollars to promote to singles of these networks what they can offer.