General News

In New Jersey the Senate Budget Committee advanced a proposal to require online dating services to tell customers whether criminal background screenings are carried out on members. Other states have considered this but none have passed any laws. The main reason no laws have been passed is it could mislead people into feeling secure when background screening only shows who has been a criminal and not someone who may be a criminal.

The only dating service at the moment that I am aware of that performs criminal background checks is True.com. While this does obviously point to people who are more likely to commit crimes, it could lead people to feel perfectly safe and therefore let down their guard. This is a tool that helps you be safe but, you should still be just as careful as when going on any other date. Read our article 10 Tips on having a fun and safe first date. for some useful tips on being safe when dating online.

There are also independent services available online that allow you to perform criminal background checks. SafeDate and Check Your Dates Past are such sites and for a small fee will do a criminal background check for you on anyone. So if you have any doubt or worries about someone you are communicating online with, these services maybe worthwhile for you.

Read the full news article here on the Safer Dating Bill.

We have added a review for a dating service called Single Parent Love Life. As the name suggests its a niche dating site for single parents.

Since we now have two dating sites related to dating parents, we have now added a new category called Single Parents Dating. While these dating sites tend not to have the number of members that the more generic dating sites do, you do have the comfort of knowing the singles on these type of sites know and expect you to have children (and your children come first).

A new dating site review has recently been added for MillionaireMatch.com. This dating service offers singles that chance to meet rich single men and rich single woman. Members at MillionaireMatch.com can be certified by the dating site as a Millionaire and their dating profile will be marked with a diamond logo. In order to meet this criteriea the single must make at least $150K or have net assests worth at least $1 million.

For more information read our MillionaireMatch.com review.

A few days late but some of you may have noticed that PerfectMatch.com has started advertising in the land of television. They now join the ranks of eHarmony and Match.com with national TV commercials and is now directly competing with them. The first commercial for 2007 is a narrative explaining how PerfectMatch matching system works. It actually is very informative and I am sure will help boost PerfectMatch's already surging member numbers.

If you wish to see the TV Commercial visit PerfectMatch.com and click on perfectmatch tv on the bottom menu of their web site.

I just read an interesting article regarding Match.com. They are one of the largest dating services on the internet, and this success is due partly to their marketing towards singles between the ages of 45 and 59 (Baby Boomers). These singles make up over 1.7 million members of Match.com's 15 million total membership, this is a 350% increase over the last 6 years. Another interesting thing to note is 7 out of 10 of these members are divorcees.

For more information, see the full article here.

Spark Networks, owners of AmericanSingles.com, Date.ca and JDate.com have released their 2006 4th quarter financials. There is some interesting numbers here for singles thinking about joining one of these dating sites. For the year end (Dec 31, 2006) American Singles had 80,519 paying subscribers and JDate had 74,775 paying subscribers. All of Sparks business ventures combined had a total of 217,276 paying subscribers, an increase of 10% when compared to last year. Of course none of these numbers include the members who use the site with a free membership.

I was surprised by JDate's numbers, they must be the largest Dating Site for Jewish singles out there.

Spark Networks also had another milestone on February 14th, 2007. It was their one year anniversary of its AMEX Listing. Look for them under the ticker "LOV". For more information on Spark Networks financial results check out this page.