Statistics

The online dating boom began in 2000, when around 100,000 early adopters braved uncharted Internet territory and dial-up connections to find love on the World Wide Web. Now, according to a Metaflake study, that number has reached 9.1 million in Britian and shows no signs of stopping. Some market players have estimated that in India this number will hit 115 million in three years.

Globally, the online dating market is estimated to be worth $4 billion USD. Two nations in particular, the UK and India, have seen especially steep rises in the popularity of online dating. In India, 6 million singles have joined dating sites and created a market worth over $130 million USD. In the UK, the online dating market jumped 6% to £170 million.

Metaflake credits the success of online dating in the UK to a few factors:

• Meeting partners online has been most successful in secular, well-to-do countries.
• Advertising strategies from rival dating sites have become increasingly aggressive.
• The British are open-minded and willing to take a chance on online dating.
• The UK has a "colourful dating landscape" that caters to all needs and interests.

Adam Sachs, co-founder and CEO of Indian dating site StepOut.com, sees similar changes happening in India. "Dating culture in India is evolving rapidly. Changing cultural dynamics like the increase in average marriage age... are shifting the dating paradigm significantly," he says.

These changing dynamics have made online dating a more socially acceptable option for Indian singles. Dating is now seen as a way to develop a close connection with someone before taking a step as serious as marriage. Internet dating services are valued for the convenience and accessibility they provide.

Despite positive predictions, however, it won't be completely smooth sailing for online dating sites. The marketplace is crowded and competitive, and the landscape is constantly changing. Social media sites like Facebook threaten to replace online dating services as they expand.

The growing use of smartphones is also changing the dating industry. Apps with location-based functionality are capturing more and more of the market, and mobile dating services that are simplified, cheaper versions of their online counterparts are increasingly prevalent.

Though the road may have a bump or two, experts predict that the only way is up for online dating. Metaflake's chief executive, Henning Wiechers, estimates that the UK's online dating market will have expanded by another 5% in 2012, and Indian dating site QuackQuack expects the online dating industry to see an annual growth rate of 20%.

For more current statistics on this industry you can read our Online Dating Facts page. To find out more on where some of these statistics come from for this article you can read IBNLive and the Guardian.

We have lots of online dating statistics for you today. Most of them have been compiled by comScore which is a company that measures internet traffic worldwide. This will make a nice wrap-up for the year 2012.

To start things, off did you know for the month of September 1 in 10 users on the internet visited a dating site? Well they did. For users of smartphones this statistic doubled to 2 visitors in every 10. Interestingly in quarter 2 of 2010 only 2 percent of every e-Commerce dollar was spent via a mobile device. In 2 short years this has risen to 10 percent which is 1 in every 10 dollars. I would bet that the online dating segment breaks down in a similar fashion since most dating sites have dating apps now.

Anyways, did you know visitors of online dating sites are not a fickle bunch? 26 percent of them visited more than one in a given month. Personal computers still win for quality time though with on average a user spending 80 minutes using online dating sites. This compares to mobile phone users who spent only 70 minutes. Facebook is a target rich environment for the dating site marking machine. 38 percent of all dating site ads are on Facebook. These ads reach almost half (47%) of their target users.

So what are the top ten dating site companies worldwide at the end of 2012 from comScore? Well compared to last year of the top 50 dating sites, 28 percent are new to the list! That is a lot for any industry.

• 1 - Match.com Sites
• 2 - Plenty of Fish Sites
• 3 - Zoosk.com
• 4 - Xpress.com
• 5 - Spark Networks
• 6 - eHarmony
• 7 - SpeedDate.com
• 8 - DateHookup.com
• 9 - Mate1.com
• 10 - Ashley Madison

So how do our English speaking friends overseas feel about online dating? In September of this year 5.7 million people in the United Kingdom (which has a total population of almost 63 million) visited an online dating site. This is a staggering 22 percent increase over the same time period last year. The 55 plus age group demographic led the charge with a 39 percent increase in visitors which topped 1 million unique visitors. The most active age group visiting dating sites was the 25 to 34 year olds with 1.3 million users which works out to 23 percent of all visitors. What was the most popular dating site in the UK? Why Plenty of Fish of course with almost 1.5 million visitors who spent on average for the entire month 115 minutes on POF.com.

A subject related to online dating is social networking. Worldwide for the month of November in 2012, on average a visitor spent 5.2 hours on one or more social network (excludes mobile phones). Over the past 3 months according to Alexa, Facebook came out on top followed by Twitter and then LinkedIn. In the top ten country list (see this) Argentina came out on top with an average of 9.8 hours in a month. Second went to Brazil with 9.7 hours and third was Russia with 9.6 hours. Canada came in 6th with 7.9 hours and the United States was nowhere on the list. This means in the U.S. visitors spent under 7.5 hours a month on social networking sites.

To find out more about the state of online dating in 2012 you can check out this page and view a presentation here. For more information about online dating and dating sites you can read our Statistics and Facts page.

Over the last couple of weeks, the Internet has been bubbling over with discussions of travel and dating. Would you travel to meet a date you met online? Would you use an online dating site to find no-strings-attached fun in a new city while traveling?

It turns out that traveling might be a boost for your love life, if you're looking for something specific in your dates.

For instance...

If you're prefer your dates big and beautiful, HuffPo says these are the best cities to date in:

1. Ogden, Utah
2. Whittier, California
3. Metairie, Louisiana
4. Medford, Oregon
5. Spring, Texas
6. Glendale, Arizona
7. Montgomery, Alabama
8. Carrollton, Texas
9. Concord, California
10. Torrance, California

OurTime.com, a dating site for singles over 50, identified the top 10 cities for plus-sized daters by analyzing the behavioral data of its users to find the location of the site's most popular users who self-identified as "big and beautiful."

If you're looking for interracial dating, try your luck in one of these states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Michigan, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Missouri, Indiana, Arizona.

The data comes from InterracialDating.com, which surveyed its members to find - surprisingly - that political affiliation is not a good predictor of interest in interracial dating. 10 of the top 20 states for interracial dating have historically voted Republican over the past 5 presidential elections.

If you're gay and searching for a May-December relationship with benefits, SeekingArrangement.com recommends dating in these cities:

1. New York, New York
2. Chicago, Illinois
3. Los Angeles, California
4. Houston, Texas
5. Beverly Hills, California
6. Atlanta, Georgia
7. Dallas Texas
8. Toronto, Canada
9. Las Vegas, Nevada
10. San Francisco, California

The SeekingArrangement.com study found that the average gay sugar daddy is now 39 years old, has an annual income of approximately $215,482.39, and has a net worth of over $6 million.

SeekingArrangement also identified the most promiscuous cities in Europe, for tourists who are interested in a little more than sightseeing during their travels. The cities in which tourists are least likely to get busy with the locals are Edinburgh (Scotland), Naples (Italy), Paris (France), Madrid (Spain), and Hanover (Germany).

Instead, travelers who are hoping to get lucky should add Carlisle (United Kingdom), Prague (Czech Republic), Vienna (Austria), Mykonos (Greece), Barcelona (Spain), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Monaco (France), Paris (France), Dublin (Ireland), and Stockholm (Sweden) to their itineraries.

To find out more about the dating sites which offered these insights, you can read the OurTime review and the Seeking Arrangement review.

Some think of fall as the time for Halloween and Thanksgiving. Others think of fall as time for the celebration of Movember, a tradition run since 2004 by the Movember Foundation.

What is Movember?

Movember is an annual, month-long event that hopes to "change the face of men's health" by raising awareness of prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and other men's health issues. On November 1st, Movember participants - known as Mo Bros - begin the event clean shaven. For the rest of the month, Mo Bros grow and groom their 'staches and raise money for the Movember Foundation by seeking sponsorship for their efforts. At the end of the month, Mo Bros celebrate their achievement by throwing a Movember party or attending one of the official galas held around the world.

This year Zoosk is celebrating the month of Movember by surveying members about their thoughts on facial hair and how it plays out in their relationships. Here's what they found:

Facial hair is becoming more popular in America.

• Only 50% of American men say their father had facial hair.
• But today, 64% of American men report having facial hair.
• "Mustache" may be a French word, but only 40% of French men currently embrace facial hair.

The most common reason for growing facial hair is confidence.

• 44% of men around the world say they feel more confident when they have facial hair.
• Other common reasons for growing facial hair are: to feel more attractive, to feel more sophisticated, and to feel more intelligent.

The majority of women are a-ok with facial hair, and the goatee is their favorite form.

• 80% of American women and 69% of women in the UK and Canada don't mind their men with facial hair.
• But most women in Australia, France, Mexico and Denmark prefer clean-shaven men.
• The goatee is the preferred form of facial hair, as voted by 36% of American women, while the soul patch is the least-liked form.

Participating in Movember might actually increase your chances of finding love.

• 63% of American women say that they would be more open to romance with a man who grew facial hair for a worthy cause.
• Only 27% of French women say they would feel more romantic with a man who grew facial hair for a cause.

Men and women disagree over which celebrity sports the best facial hair.

• More than 50% of women think it's Johnny Depp.
• Men, on the other hand, say Depp's facial hair is second to James Bond himself: Sean Connery.

See the infographic here. To find out more about this dating site you can read our Zoosk review.

The social dating site Zoosk announced the other day that they have reached a number of mobile milestones. As part of their mobile strategy Zoosk has released a HTML5 version of the site that makes it much more easily accessible via a mobile phone when using the phone’s browser.

Zoosks daily mobile users now account for 15 percent of the site’s traffic. In the past 12 months mobile traffic on the Zoosk dating apps and HTML5 have increased 148 percent. Android phones make up 55 percent of app usage while the Apple iOS phones account for the other 45 percent. For mobile traffic as a whole from members, 61 percent comes from the apps themselves while 55 percent is done via the phones internet browser. This means that 16 percent of members use both the app and the mobile web. On Sundays and Mondays mobile traffic reaches its peak usually and is on average 10 percent higher. Thursday and Fridays are the low point in the week and mobile traffic can see a drop of 5 percent.

Zoosk also quotes a few mobile online dating statistics from a 2011 Juniper Research finding. They state that the mobile dating market is expected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2011 to $2.3 billion by 2016. User will jump from 650 million in 2011 to 1.3 billion by 2016 (fueled largely by China and then North America).

To find out more about this dating site please read our review of Zoosk.com.

China is the new frontier for online dating. It is the fastest growing market place with millions of new singles joining dating services every month. In under 2 years (by 2014) it is expected that China’s online dating market will double its 2011 value to 2.02 billion Yuan. This works out to more than $317 million US dollars.

In 2010 a survey by China’s government found that of China’s 1.3 billion citizens, about 14 percent of them, or 180 million are single. For comparison in 2008 it was reported that the USA with its 300 million plus population had 93 million single people. Percentage wise this works out to about 30 percent which is twice the amount of singles as reported in China. With the China survey no break down by gender was mentioned but educated and self-sufficient single women are on the rise. A new phrase has been coined which appears in the China’s official dictionary. The phrase is Sheng Nu which means Unwanted Girls in English and is defined as all single woman over the age of 27.

The current top 3 dating sites in China are (based on their membership claims):

• Zhenai.com – 63 million users
• Baihe.com – 40 million users
• Jiayuan.com – 39 million users

For a list of dating sites that cater to Asian singles in North America and Europe you can check out our Ethnic dating category.