General News

Oops, I missed this one, sorry UK Daters! According to Netimpreative, yesterday (Sept. 24) was National Dating Day. To celebrate this, DatingDirect.com setup a booth at Waterloo Station, under the clock. This location is apparently a famous place for daters to meet in the UK. This clear booth had Celebrities, single models and DatingDirect.com members inside. The idea is singles who saw the booth can then login to DatingDirect.com to enter in a competition to win a date with anyone in they saw in the booth.

The target audience for this publicity campaign was for male and female singles aged 25 to 35. Will it work? Who knows, I just feel sorry for the people in the booth!

We haven't had a new review in a while so I took the time this weekend to try out ChristianCafe.com. This matchmaking site has been on my radar for a while. I've heard many good things about this site and for the most part I would have to agree, Christian Cafe offers a friendly Christian enviroment to meet singles. Plus, with their 10 day trial, anyone can try it out for free.

Read our review here.

CNN Money has an informative article about how the online matchmaking service eHarmony was started 7 years ago. eHarmony is one of the few dating sites which was started by a psychologist, Dr Neil Warren, who had years of experience counselling married couples. This enabled eHarmony to present a scientific approach to matchmaking. They continue to do this by having on staff "five Ph.D. researchers who are constantly tweaking the matchmaking software based on their latest findings". eHarmony takes the conservative approach to online dating and believes in Christian values. A lot of other dating services currently are pushing a sexier image.

The author explains as well the process of how eHarmony works, from signups, to creating a profile and then the matchmaking process. The article further goes through the ups and downs of eHarmony's success, including their latest negative press regarding gay singles being not allowed to use the site.

A new report by Juniper Research says that by 2012 mobile dating and chatroom services will have over a quarter of a billion people using them and revenues will pass $1 billion by 2010. Large dating services like Match.com and Date.com already have invested heavily in mobile services with Match.com recently upgrading their Match Mobile service with new features and a better interface (see previous story). Match Mobile members now have access to search all members available to regular Match subscribers.

For more information on this report head on over to PC Advisor.

The Motley Fool has an interesting point of view regarding eHarmony's charges against Chemistry before the Better Business Bureau's ad council. The charges are in response to Chemistry's new TV and internet ads that mention eHarmony has rejected over a million singles.

The article goes on and explains that the Chemistry ads are free advertising for eHarmony and they don't necessary reflect them in a bad light. It can be a good thing for a dating service to be choosy over which singles can join.

According to the New York Times, True has a huge advertising bill from the last six months which they have not paid. In March True.com was ranked as the number one most visited dating site according to Hitwise. Since then it has fallen too number six and the main reason for this most likely is only a few True dating ads can be found on the net now. True's big advertising push most likely got them in financial troubles with ad spending out pacing paid members sign ups.