Statistics

An article from Canoe took a look at online dating statistics in Canada.

From a cross-Canada survey conducted by Leger Marketing, they concluded the following points:

• 25 percent of Canadians have tried online dating. The percentage rises to 36 percent if you look at people between the ages of 18 and 34 (much higher than in 2009)
• Still, the majority of people do not plan to try online dating as 69 percent of them said that it is not likely they could find love online
• 64 percent of singles using online dating say that common interests is the most important factor when looking for a match
• 49 percent of singles using online dating say that physical characteristics from photos and videos is the most important factor when choosing a match
• 39 percent of all the Canadians surveyed said that they actually read over all of the information provided in a dating profile

Online dating has seen a huge increase in popularity in the last few years in Canada and the rest of the world. According to the Canadian owned dating site Plenty Of Fish, they have seen a 40 percent increase in memberships over the last 2 years. Plenty Of Fish currently has 33 million registered users from around the world.

China's leading dating site, Jiayuan.com has roughly a million users a month now who pay for the privilege to exchange messages with other members. The messages can be paid for by either the sender or the receiver. Their second quarter earnings this year almost doubled to $12.9 million when compared to the same quarter last year. Jiayuan listed on the Nasdaq back in May and since then their stock price has jumped 21 percent (as of last Friday). This is very good especially when you compare it to other Nasdaq listed Internet companies from China (most have fallen).

Jiayuan never relied heavily on advertising on their site as a source of income. In 2008 advertising made up only 15 percent of their revenue. Online advertising is a very competitive market with slim margins and for this reason at the start of this year Jiayuan decided to drop advertising from their dating site completely. Supporting a sales staff and the way it affected the user experience just did not make it profitable. Paid messaging now accounts for 80 percent of their revenue with the other 20 percent generated from in-person events and a premium service members can use to hire a human matchmaker.

For more on the story you can read the WSJ.

Spark Networks has reported their second quarter financial results for the year 2011. Revenue is up by 17 percent to $12 million when compared to quarter 2 of 2010 and up 9 percent when compared to the last quarter. This is the largest quarter over quarter growth in 6 years and the third consecutive quarter growth in a row.

Jewish Networks was responsible for $6.73 million of revenue. This is an increase of 1 percent when compared to the same quarter last year. The Other Affinity Networks saw revenue reach $4.7 million. This is an increase of 68 percent when compared to Q2 2010. General Market Networks revenue continued to fall with revenues of only $153,000. This is a decrease of 48 percent. Revenue from Offline & Other Businesses was $449,000.

Average paying subscribers for the Jewish Networks rose 1 percent to 90,094 during quarter 2. Other Affinity Networks surpassed Jewish Networks for the first time ever and reached 96,071 average paying subscribers. This is an increase of 50 percent. General Market Networks subscribers fell again to 3,485. They saw a 46 percent decrease when compared to the same quarter last year.

I have been seeing a lot of Christian Mingle TV commercials lately so I am sure this marketing endeavor is partially responsible for the large increase of subscribers that the Other Affinity Networks is seeing.

For the full 2011 Q2 release visit Spark Networks News Room.

Related Story: Spark Networks First Quarter 2011 Financials

PlentyOfFish has just updated their mobile dating applications for both the iPhone and Android OSs. The big improvement with this version is speed and lower bandwidth use. This is achieved by caching the profile and picture data retrieved from POF so it is only downloaded once or when updated.

Other improvements include easier editing of both photos and profiles. Pinching and zooming profile pictures has been added along with updates to editing your location and searching for local users. Users can also now just search for mobile users near them.

The POF App on the Android Market currently has a rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars with almost 6,000 votes. According to a number of reviews the only thing missing from the app is the ability to chat via text.

For more on this story please read the press release. To find out about this dating site and what other singles think you should check out our PlentyOfFish review.

Plenty of Fish is looking to hire a Database Administrator (DBA) so if you are interested in the job and have the qualifications you should comment on their blog. Markus also released a few statistics about his dating site and what the DBA will be up against. Last year alone Plenty of Fish sent out 5.5 billion messages. This works out to about 15 million a day. He also noted that Plenty of Fish's Behavioral Matching Engine deals with almost 20 billion pieces of data from their 30 million plus registered users that is stored in their database.

What this all boils down to is POF needs some heavy duty hardware to run its website and a DBA that knows how to optimize databases and SQL statements.

For more information on this free dating service you can read our PlentyofFish.com review.

How have marriage and divorce changed over the years?

In 2009. the United States Census Bureau surveyed 39,000 households in an attempt to get a glimpse into the evolution of marriage and divorce in America. The results from the Survey of Income and program Participation (SIPP) were just released, and FlowingData.com used their findings to create visual charts of the state of America marriage. You can see the original graphs here, at their website.

Their primary finding concerns the ages at which men and women choose to marry. "In 1986," says FlowingData.com, "nearly three-quarters of women from 25 to 29 years old had married at least once, while in 2009, only about half of women in the age group have married."

In each survey year - 1986, 1996, 2001, 2004, and 2009 - the graph shows the same trend: the lowest percentage of married people fall into the 25-29 years bracket, and the percentage steadily increases through each successive age bracket until it peaks at "55 and older." The huge disparity seen in the 25-29 years category between the 1986 graph and the 2009 graph is almost completely gone by the time participants had reached the 55+ group, where the points from the two graphs nearly intersect.

In most age and race groups, according to the survey, a "lower percentage of people were married in 2009 than in 1986. However, in some groups, such as those 55 years and older, a higher percentage of people were married in 2009 then in 1986; although the differences are quite small." The SIPP results also confirmed that, in 2009, it was no longer particularly uncommon for someone, either male or female, to be married more than once.

Divided into ethnic groups, the survey found that, though in most cases fewer marriages happened for each age bracket in 2009 than in 1986, marriage in both years increased at a fairly steady rate (regardless of race) as age increased. The lowest percentage of married people for all ethnic groups fell in "25-29 years," and the highest in "55 and older." The greatest differences between 1986 and 2009 are seen in the 25-29 age bracket for all races.

And what of the infamous seven year itch? According to this survey, the idea of the seven year itch isn't completely accurate, but it isn't far from the truth either. "The median marrying age for men is 24.5," reports FlowingData.com, "and median divorce age is 32.0. For women: 22.3 and 30.1, respectively."