Statistics

The United States online dating industry market research report from IBISWorld has updated their numbers for 2012 and their predictions for 2013 and beyond.

For the last 5 years the online dating industry has seen an average revenue increase of 2.9 percent and should reach $2 billion annually in 2013. After a slight dip in 2009 due to the recession revenues are up in large part to the increase use of smartphones and tablets by single adults who have a lot of disposable income. Realizing this, dating sites have created dating apps for their services on a wide range of mobile devices including the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Most of these devices are also GPS enabled which has led to location based dating as well.

In the last 5 years the number of dating services has increased in the US on average every year by 3.1 percent according to IBISWorld to 3,898. Employment has also increased by the same amount by these dating companies to an estimate of 7,376.

IBISWorld predicts that demand will be strong in the next 5 years for online dating services. This is due in part to the increase use of smartphones and the increase in internet access for households. Mobile dating revenue is expected to almost double in the upcoming 5 years.

Thanks to a $30 million marketing push in 2012 ChristianMingle now has over 8 million registered members of whom 154,000 pay to subscribe. A large portion on these members live in the Midwest and Bible Belt areas. Over half of the members (55%) are 37 years or older and a quarter of members (25%) are over the age of 50. In the last quarter of 2012 the amount of subscribers grew by 89 percent when compared to the same quarter in 2011.

ChristianMingle’s objective is to create long-term focused relationships. Currently the site doesn’t allow gay Christians to join in an attempt to balance the interests of its members. Spark Networks which owns ChristianMingle does have other dating websites for LGBT singles which cater to a more casual relationships. ChristianMingle’s main competition in the Christian online dating niche is eHarmony and ChristianCafe.com.

For more on this story you can read Business Week and to find out more about this dating site you can read our ChristianMingle review.

The Plenty of fish blog just released some current traffic statistics for their dating site. It's good to see a snapshot of what the user base of Plenty of fish is. Marcus Frind released the statistics to highlight how his dating site has grown and to be more open on the number of members POF has.

The user statistics released are based on active daily registered users. This means that the user must be logged into POF.com to be considered part of the statistic group. I am assuming that the numbers given are an average but it doesn’t say what the timeline is for that. It probably is for last month (January) but I am only guessing that he would release the latest numbers available. The user statistics could very well be for last year, last quarter or some other time period.

Plenty of Fish’s largest market is the United States with 2 million active daily registered users. This is followed by the United Kingdom with 550,000 and then Canada with 450,000. POF estimates that if you take the roughly 1400 dating site (non-adult) found in the United States and combine their paying members you will come out with 2.5 million subscribers. Combining these numbers together sounds like a lot of people and it is, but online dating has a lot of room to grow. The population of the United States sits at about 313 million with about 100 million people actually single. This shows that about 1/3 of the population is single. The United Kingdom has a population of about 63 million and Canada is close to 35 million. If we assume that the proportions of singles in these countries are about the same as the US then there are about 21 million single people in the UK and about 12 million in Canada.

In the US I figure that there are about 5.5 million people actively using a dating site every day. I came up with this number by adding Plenty of Fish’s 2 million active users with 2.5 million US paid subscribers, and then adding in an extra million singles for all of the other free dating sites that people use. This means only 5.5 percent of all singles in the United States are actively using an online dating site. Since about 78% of the US has internet access (according to Wikipedia) then this percentage only slightly improves to about 7 percent. The potential for growth in the online dating industry is still huge when your untapped market sits at over 90 percent.

I also found a few other related statistics. Plenty of Fish currently reports (from July 2012) that they have had 45 million members register since launch in 2003. Their current rate of growth is 40,000 new members signing up every day which works out to about 30 percent a year. Members of POF send out 20 million messages a day generating 7 million conversations. Currently the average age on POF is 35. In 2009 the average member was 40 years old.

To find out more about this dating site you should read our Plenty of fish review.

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.