Industry

It looks like the domain name Dating.com was sold yesterday at auction on DomainFest for $1.75 million US. The domain was sold by Oversee.net to an unknown buyer. Currently the Dating.com domain hosts a World Dating Partners while label dating site. I wonder what the new owner plans on doing with the domain? I am going to assume they have plans to launch a dating service since that type of website potentially could generate the most profits. With the money the buyers spent on the domain it looks like the new owner plans to invest a fair bit of money in the new service. It should be interesting to see what they come up with.

For more on the story read TechCrunch.

CupidMedia's popular AsianEuro.com dating service was renamed AsianDating.com last Monday. This change will not affect current customers in any way and the site will continue to function as before. Cupid Media decided to go ahead with the new name since it better reflects what the dating service offers its members.

For those of you who have not heard about AsianEuro.com before, the dating site was launched in 2000 and has grown into a popular spot for Asian singles to mingle. Currently there are over 1 million singles worldwide that have joined this dating site.

We don't have a review for this dating service yet but, it is on our to do list and should be up in the next few weeks.

The BBC World Service commissioned a survey which polled about 11,000 internet users from 19 different countries. The results of the study concluded that 30 percent of people who use the internet feel that the online world is a good place to find a partner. Education played a factor in this survey as well. For those people who have completed high school, 28 percent believed that dating sites worked. When compared to adults who did not finish high school, a higher percentage, 36 to be exact, thought going online was a good place to find a date.

When looking at internet users from different countries, Pakistan came in at the highest at 60 percent, followed by India at 59 percent. British participants in the survey came in at 28 percent. This was followed closely by the French at 27 percent. Americans were fairly low at 21 percent.

The overall result from this survey is fairly close to a similar statistic from another story that roughly 30 to 40 million singles in the United States use online dating sites or social networks to look for love. This is about 1/3 of single Americans or 33 percent.

For more on this survey, read the eCommerce Journal.

Every couple of months People Media release the results of a dating survey they have done (see Story). Their latest DatingData Poll is about the recession and if it has impacted people's attitudes towards dating.

Over 27,000 singles responded to the People Media poll across their selection of dating sites (BlackPeopleMeet.com. SeniorPeopleMeet.com, BBPeopleMeet.com, etc..) and 51 percent indicated that the current recession has not impacted their attitude about dating.

24 percent of the American singles who took the poll said that they would not date anyone who was unemployed. When you take gender into consideration for this answer, only 11 percent of men stated this fact while 37 percent of women did.

A further 17 percent of singles said that they are less motivated to date in the suffering economy and 6 percent viewed dating as networking to find a job.

Finally, only 2 percent of American singles are more motivated to date in the current economic conditions.

While not directly related to the poll, the press release also mentions that since the start of the year (2009), and according to ComScore, the number of unique visitors to People Media dating sites has grown by 15%.

To find out more information on some of People Media's dating sites, check out our BlackPeopleMeet review, our SeniorPeopleMeet review and our BBPeopleMeet review.

While I think genetic testing can reveal biological compatibility, I do have problems recommending it as your sole source of information about your matches. Personality and your own likes and dislikes play a major role in matchmaking. Plus, all of the DNA testing dating sites memberships are too small to really be able to generate high quality matches for someone.

It looks like that one of the first dating sites we talked about which does DNA matchmaking, ScientificMatch.com, is planning to phase out the dating part of the site and concentrate on matchmakers and couples. I think that is a good idea for Scientific Match as their price tag of $995 was just too steep for them ever to gain any traction as a dating site. See this Story for more details on ScientificMatch.com.

Another genetic testing dating service we talked about was GenePartner. Back in the beginning of June they had run tests on 500 people, now after 5 months, they have doubled the number to 1000. This is still not a lot of people but it is the only DNA matching company to specify any numbers. Another advantage of GenePartner is they are much cheaper than other similar services. They only charge $99. GenePartner have also recently partnered with a dating site called Sense2Love.com (which is expected to open next month) to offer their service as an add-on to the regular dating site's service. I think partnering with other dating sites like this, is the only way for DNA matchmaking companies to be able to create a member database large enough to generate quality matches for singles. For more on GenePartner and how their service works, read this Story.

The one other thing I have problems with these type of matching sites is I would never really want to give up my DNA to them. You would never know if your DNA could ever fall into the wrong hands (like your insurance company).

The free dating site DownToEarth.com was officially launched in January 2009 by IAC, the parent company of Match.com and Chemistry (see Story). Down To Earth's target market was the College-aged crowd of 18 to 25 and their goal by the end of the year was to have 250,000 members. Well, it looks like they didn't make it. OPW reports that the dating site DownToEarth.com has been relaunched as Stir.com.

DownToEarth.com reached their traffic peak in March at almost 250 thousand unique visitors, since then the dating site's traffic has fallen by over half to 96 thousand unique visitors in September: