Marketing

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.

New Ads

As per this recent story, Chemistry.com to Spend $40M on TV Ads, it looks like Chemistry.com new TV ads called "Chemistry Vows" will be coming to a TV near you. The four new commercials will appear on the NBC network along with Bravo, HGTV, TBS and A&E. After viewing the commercials and seeing the list of networks the commercials will be aired on, Chemistry is definitely targeting the 30 and older crowd. This makes sense since Chemistry is all about the long term relationship, something that most 20 to 29 year olds are not looking for yet, either do to school or job advancement, etc.

New Feature

To improve members experience with online dating, Chemistry has added the feature "You've Been Noticed". This feature allows members to find out who has viewed their profile. According to Chemistry:

CNNMoney has an article about the marketing approach one dating site called TeamDating.com took to get free publicity. This was all done without hiring a PR firm or consultant. TeamDating has appeared on many popular national TV shows like The Today Show, Good Morning America and Extra . Print publications include newspapers like USA Today. Every show or news piece TeamDating has appeared in has given them a huge traffic spike like with over 600,000 visitors when TeamDating appeared on the Today Show. The article doesn't mention what their average daily traffic is now but it does say they have 60,000 regular visitors (what does regular mean? Weekly?) and over 20,000 registered dating teams

Ray Doustdar, who owns TeamDating achieved his PR success through his own hard work of reading, researching and contacting media people. He spends over 90% of his work day dealing with marketing his dating service. He knows where his customers are and who to contact to get a story out. He also knows what type of story each media outlet is looking for and who there readers or viewers are.

Now days most internet businesses need a detailed marketing plan, and dating sites are no exception. Gone are the days of "if you build it, they will come"! Competition is huge in the online dating market and any company wanting to create a service needs to realize that marketing is the most important thing to your sites success.

Expect to see more television commercials for Chemistry.com mid April. There will be 4 different ads and the campaign will be mostly seen on cable stations like Bravo, TNT and the Food Network.

Last year Chemistry.com spent $21 million on television commercials which helped grow the sites traffic by over 70 percent in February (when compared to the last year). Chemistry had over 500,000 unique visitors last month. In total they have 4.2 million registered members.

See BrandWeek for further details or check out our Chemistry.com Review (Chemistry).

PerfectMatch.com relationship expert and professor of sociology at the University of Washington, Dr. Pepper Schwartz has been in the news a few times late last month. She was interviewed on Oprah & Friends XM radio show in a live segment in which she discussed matchmaking and online dating. Then a few days later a WebMD article called The ' Good Enough' Marriage' was publish in which Dr. Pepper Schwartz was asked for her expert opinion on, if it is ok to settle for Mr. or Mrs. 'Good Enough'. This article was also featured on CBSNews.com.

Dr. Pepper Schwartz played a leading role in designing PerfectMatch.com singles matching program called the Duet Total Compatibility System. For more information please read our Perfect Match Review (Perfectmatch.com).

The New York Times has published an article regarding Chemistry.com new attack ads on eHarmony. Chemistry will be launching ads this week in newspapers and magazines which strike out at eHarmony for not accepting gay members. eHarmony counters Chemistry.com's attacks by stating:

eHarmony's matching system is based on psychological data collected from heterosexual married couples, and we have not offered a service for those seeking same-sex matches. Nothing precludes us from offering a same-sex service in the future, but it's not a service we offer now.

You may remember, last April Chemistry did a similar ad campaign called "Rejected by eHarmony". They spent $20 million on that campaign which helped raise their membership levels by 80% and gay members have increased by will over 200%. Currently it is estimated that Chemistry has 3.7 million registered members and eHarmony has 17 million members.