General News

It looks like last month was the month for magazines to do articles (see National Geographic Singles Article) related to dating. Scientific American has an article out called The Truth about Online Dating. It looks at number of issues:

• The hype of online dating.
• Deceptions singles write in their profiles.
• If dating matching systems work and the different types of matching systems avaliable.
• Plus, other interesting dating site statistics and information.

The article also looks at other side businesses that have resulted from the popularity of online dating sites.

Here is one interesting quote I found in The Truth about Online Dating, "In 2001 online dating was a $40-million business; by 2008 that figure is expected to break $600 million, with more than 800 businesses". This statistic shows that more singles are moving to the internet to find love, which in turn has created more dating sites vying for your dollar. This is why I hope people use this site to inform themselves on dating services before spending any money.

A fair number of a new type of dating service has cropped up recently that deals with finding single people with money (i.e. rich people) a match. These sites can also be called Millionaire Dating Sites or Sugar Daddy Dating Sites. We have review a few of these sites and have found WealthyMen.com to be a good choice. They have a good selection of singles (seems to be centered around large cities like New York, etc.) and they do verify income and pictures. We will be adding more reviews soon to the Wealthy Singles Dating Category.

PerfectMatch.com famous for it's partnership with LIVE with Regis and Kelly and their dating movie appearances, is now offering 2 months FREE with 2 month subscription purchase at Perfectmatch.com. This is a great offer and actually just costs five dollars more than the one month membership plan.

To view more information about Perfectmatch.com please read our review but remember if you would like to receive this promotion you must click on the special link above to enable the coupon.

While surfing the FriendFinder site, I noticed a link to a page I hadn't seen before about the statistics and numbers regarding members. They must have gotten some complaints in order to post this information to clear things up. Most dating services keep this type of information under lock and key. I am glad FriendFinder has decided to give us this information and I was surprised at how fair they are.

On the page FriendFinder explains the calculation of the number of accounts, members, listings, logins, and any other similar information appearing on their website is updated approximately every 24 hours. This is a good thing. It will show a true account of number of members, etc. at this point in time. I'm sure a lot of other dating sites calculate a total members number at their peak dating time and then use it until a better calculation can be had.

FriendFinder also further explains that a "member" is a user account which has been logged in within approximately the past year, has an available profile, and has an active email account. I am glad they have implemented this condition. A lot of dating sites post that they have million of members but you never know if they include members as example, logged in 2 years ago and have since never logged in again, to inflate their dating membership numbers.

The last major thing FriendFinder states on this page is, a member is considered "online" if they have logged in within approximately the last hour. So online members really means members who have visited within the last hour. They may still be online or not. This is not the best. In my opinion, it should only include members with activity within the last 15 minutes. Unlike other dating services, at least they state how they calculate online members.

For more information on FriendFinder check out our review.

Opps, I must have missed this last week. Our Passion.com Review (Passion) for sexy singles passed it's 100,000 page view milestone, our first Dating Review to do so. That certainly is a lot of singles in a little over 2 years. The next closest site is Lavalife at over 85,000 page views.

To view the rest of the top ten sites by page views and ratings check out our Top 10 Dating Services page.

This months National Geographic Magazine (Feb, 2007) has an interesting statistics page on Singles in America. According to the article (and the U.S. Census Bureau) depending on what side of the Mississippi River you live on will increase your chance of finding a mate. Western urban areas like San Francisco and Los Angeles tend to have many more males than females. Females tend to out number males in eastern cities like New York (185,000 more), Washington, Chicago and Miami.

One reason for this is that 58% of college students are female, and a large portion of these colleges tend to be in the east. Once graduated more females tend to join the white collar workforce in big cities, while men tend to rely more on agriculture or cities with booming construction sectors like Las Vegas.