General News

TechCrunch is reporting that HotOrNot.com was sold to a Canadian company called Avid Life Media for an unconfirmed $20 million. Avid Life Media also owns Ashley Madison which is a hook-up site for married people.

It is estimated that Hot Or Not pulled in $2 million in profit last year. If this is the case, $20 million seems a little low, especially when compared to what other dating services have been sold for lately. I've got the sense recently though that Hot Or Not has been struggling with trying to increase revenue. They briefly went to a free model last summer (relying on people clicking on ads to bring in the income) but cited huge profile spam for switching to their paid revenue model again.

Related Story: Hot or Not is now Paid (again)

UPDATE - (Feb. 15, 2008) James, one of the original owners of HotOrNot.com, has confirmed the sale on his blog. He also mentioned that the $20 million price tag is incorrect. He didn't go into any details on what they did receive as payment.

It's official now! The "Who Has Viewed Me" feature is now available to members of eHarmony. You can now see members who have viewed you from up to 2 weeks ago. There is also a new option in your Match Settings which allows members to show their views of profiles as anonymous instead of showing their membership name.

This feature has the side affect of now allowing singles to see if a member is currently actively using eHarmony. If you send them a mail message and if their is no view of your profile (let alone a reply) by the eHarmony member, most likely then it is an inactive profile (unless the member is on vacation or something).

Forbes has an article about how to find single millionaires online. There is not much new information here but they do mention several of the sites we have reviewed . This includes Sugardaddie.com and our award winner MillionaireMatch.com. The article does explain that more and more single millionaire's are using specialty online dating services than the more traditional matchmakers. Online sites cost on average $20 per month while a personal matchmaker may charge thousands of dollars for there services. Plus, with online dating you also have the convenience of logging in anytime and at work or home.

Check out the full article, How To Find A Millionaire (Or Billionaire) and for a list of are dating site reviews for wealthy singles go here.

Canada's Christian Community Online Website has a good article on the Christian online dating scene. It gives a general overview and what Christian singles can expect when joining a Christian niche dating site compared to a general dating service like Match.com or Yahoo. The article also explores the over saturated online dating site market blaming the fact that companies think it's easy to market and create a dating site.

ChristianCafe.com is also mentioned in this article with a few good quotes from Sam Moorcroft the president of this Christian dating service. Christian Cafe is the largest Christian niche dating site in the world and controls over a third of this market. You can find more information about Christian Cafe by reading our review.

The New York Times has had several interesting articles this past month related to online dating. This past week they published an article regarding the more popular match systems called Hitting It Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love. The three main systems out there are from the dating sites eHarmony, Perfectmatch.com and Chemistry. The article goes on and talks about some of the published statistics behind the matching systems, their companies advertising battles and the problems with these systems not being peer reviewed.

Match.com UK will be powering Freeads.co.uk new dating service. This deal will give Freeads users access to millions of singles already on Match.com and it will offer Match.com access to the million plus monthly unique visitors at Freeads.

Duncan Horton, Freeads.co.uk chief executive, commented:

For us partnering with a company of Match.com's calibre to launch our dating section is a huge coup. Rather than relying on our users to populate this new section for us we are able to hit the ground running by offering them access to the millions of singles already registered on Match.com.

This makes sense to me since it is extremely difficult to get a new dating service off the ground these days with all the competition. There was no mention of the cost for Freeads users but I am assuming it will be the same cost as signing up normally to Match.com UK's dating service.

For more information or you can read our Match Review (match.com).