Statistics

Global Personals had a good January this year. Revenues for the online dating company were up by 30 percent when compared to January in 2010. It also marked the highest level of earnings ever recorded for Global Personals in a given month.

This revenue increase is due to higher subscription sales. On average Global Personals saw their dating sites (Singles365.com, DatingAgency.com, etc.) bring in 45 percent more registered members when compared to the same time last year.

Janaury also broke another record for Global Personals. They "smashed" their previous record for number of members online at the same time.

To find out about a dating site owned by Global Personals please check out our Singles365.com review.

In a previous post, we talked about the stir author Lori Gottlieb caused with the publication of her now-infamous book Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough, in which she theorizes that women have difficulty finding suitable partners because their expectations are too high, not because suitable partners do not exist. Women, she argues, have taken the feminist ideal to an extreme, and are setting potential partners up for failure by becoming so picky and entitled that they are holding men to standards that cannot possibly be reached.

Some of you probably identified with her hypothesis immediately, and began reevaluating your expectations of partners and approach to finding a mate. Others probably reacted with anger and resentment, infuriated by Gottlieb's attitude towards feminism. And some of you are probably just confused, unsure of which side of the argument to support.

It's a debate that will likely never be settled, but more evidence has been found that suggests that Gottlieb might not be as crazy as she seems. In a BigThink.com article called "If I'm Hot, Then Why Are You Not?" Marina Adshade discusses her theory that people are poor judges of their position on the dating market. Many online dating profiles, she writes, include the line "I'm not willing to settle, and neither should you," which "suggests that people have estimated the quality of mate that they should be able to attract and are unwilling to 'settle' for anything less." More often than not, however, we are strongly biased when it comes to our assessment of ourselves. Most people overestimate their assets, like physical attractiveness, and underestimate their negative traits.

In one study, called "What Makes You Click? Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating" by G. Hitsch, A. Hortaçsu, and D. Ariely, members of dating sites were asked to rate their appearance. Less than 1% of participants rated themselves as "below average," and only 29% of men and 26% of women believed that they look "like anyone else walking down the street." That means that a whopping 68% of men and 72% of women considered their attractiveness "above average." And this biased self-assessment is not confined to physical appearance - people consistently rate themselves as funnier, kinder, more intelligent, etc., than the average person, an outlook that has contributed strongly to the pervasive attitude that Gottlieb claims is preventing many women from finding partners: "Why should I settle for someone average, when I have so many great things going for me?"

Another study, conducted using data from HotOrNot.com, seems to further confirm that people almost always overestimate their place in the dating market. The behavior of 16,550 HotOrNot.com members was examined; each subject "viewed an average of 144 pictures over the ten-day period and each of the 2,386,267 observations in the data set [was] an individual decision to hit the 'Meet Me' link." Each individual's rating of attractiveness and the attractiveness of the people he or she was interested in meeting were determined by other members of the site.

Some of the results were not surprising:

• The higher the hotness rating of a member's photo, the more likely other members were to want to meet them.
• A one point increase on the rating scale (for instance, from a 7 to an 8) coincided with a 130% increase in the likelihood that a member viewing the photo would initiate contact.
• Male members were 240% more likely to click on the "Meet Me" link than female members.
• Male members were also more influenced by the attractiveness rating than females were, and were more likely to initiate contact with women who were more attractive than themselves than women were with more attractive men.

Other results supported Gottlieb and Adshade's theories...but you'll have to tune in next time to hear about the other conclusions drawn from the study, and learn more about how your own dating life might be affected!

While Justin Bieber is trending on Twitter, what's trending in the world of online dating?

According to the Google Barometer Blog, mobile dating is the newest trend sweeping the U.K. Bickey Russell and Elizabeth Song, Senior Industry Analyst and Analyst Intern, respectively, for Google UK, studied the rising popularity of mobile dating and found that "the volume of Google searches on mobile devices related to dating grew by 215% YoY ['Year Over Year'] since 2008" in the UK alone. And, in an even more remarkable turn, "the volume of dating queries on mobile phones shot up ten fold in just three years' time."

As smartphone usage has become increasingly prevalent, the usage of mobile devices - and the constant Internet connectivity they provide - to access dating websites to search for potential matches and answer messages from interested members has become more and more popular. The market is so large, in fact, that Juniper, a market research firm, has estimated that "the overall mobile dating sector will grow to $1.4 billion worldwide by 2013." That's right - $1.4 billion in just three years. Google research has also found that searches from laptops and desktop computers for "mobile dating" and "text dating" have grown over 72% YoY in the UK.

So what can on-the-go online dating do for you? New interactive features are being invented constantly, allowing you to take advantage of countless new online dating opportunities like proximity dating, which uses GPS or Bluetooth technology to alert users when other singles are nearby. Mobile and location dating also introduce a real-life context into the online dating scene, "making the process less detached from users' everyday lives, social networks, and gathering places."

If you're interested in trying mobile dating, you don't have to venture far outside your comfort zone - many major dating sites, like Match, eHarmony, and JDate, have mobile apps available for download. If you're ready for something new, however, check out these popular apps:

1. Meet Moi: Meet Moi is a location-based mobile dating app that updates your location in real-time and alerts you when a match is nearby. Their basic service is free.

2. SpeedDate.com: Members can search through millions of profiles and start conversations via email with prospective matches. SpeedDate provides an advanced set of filters that allows users to search based on specific criteria, as well as a tagging feature that ensures that favorite profiles are saved.

3. Grindr: Grindr is the largest location-based dating app for gay, bi, and curious men. Grindr is free, and has about 600,000 users per month (about 250,000 users per day, who log on approximately eight times within a 24 hour period!).

4. Zoosk: Zoosk won the award for Best Mobile Dating Site at the Internet Dating Conference this year, and is consistently a #1 dating app in the iTunes Store. The app has all of the functionality of the website, with a GPS location tagging feature.

For more information on the service which won the award Best Mobile Dating Site, please read our Zoosk review. For other dating sites which also offer their services over a phone, check out our Mobile Phone Dating category.

Spark Networks 2010 3rd quarter financials are in so let's see how they did. Overall revenue is down $1.2 million this quarter to $9.9 million when compared to the same quarter last year. Net income for quarter 3 was $1.2 million. This is up 20% over quarter 3, 2009.

The Jewish Networks revenue was $6.8 million for the 3rd quarter this year. This was 4 percent less when compared to last year. The other Affinity Networks revenue was down 14 percent to $2.7 million and the General Market Networks earned $264,000, a 54 percent decrease over last year.

Average paying subscribers for Spark Networks, as a whole, in the 3rd quarter of 2010 were 158,422. This is a decrease of 4 percent compared to 165,206 for the 3rd quarter of 2009. Subscribers for the Jewish Networks were at 89,792 for the 3rd quarter. This is up 4 percent when compared to the 3rd quarter of last year. The Other Affinity Networks subscribers were down 7 percent to 62,026 and the General Market Networks decrease was 49 percent to 5,888 subscribers.

For the full 2010 Q3 release visit Spark Networks News Room.

Related Story: Spark Networks Second Quarter 2010 Financials

The "Are You Interested" Facebook application is owned by SNAP Interactive. This app recently became the largest dating application on Facebook with 13,262,420 monthly active users. Just a month ago they had only around 8,424,000 monthly active users. Snap Interactive also posted 3rd quarter revenues of $1.65 million which was an increase of over 100 percent when compared to the same period last year. With these rising revenue numbers it looks like Snap Interactive new found traffic is of high quality.

The second largest Facebook dating application is Zoosk with 7,514,381 monthly active users. While "Are you Interested" may have a larger Facebook presence, Zoosk still has a much larger overall membership base thanks to the popularity of their dating website. Zoosk Facebook users also get to interact with the members of the dating website, and vice versa.

For more on this story, check out All Facebook. To find out more about dating on Facebook, please take a look at our Facebook Dating reviews category.

A recent post from Markus, the owner of PlentyofFish.com, over on his blog commented on Mark Brooks view that free dating sites are going to kill off paid dating sites. It looks like Markus doesn't see that happening (which I agree) since he mentions the fact that the rankings for dating sites over the last few years have remained relatively stable.

What he did say is Facebook has been taking traffic from all dating sites. According to Markus, his Google Analytics account shows that page views per user (a free dating sites bread and butter since they make money on displaying ads) have declined 30 percent in the last 2 years. He also reported that PlentyOfFish.com's traffic increased by 15 percent on September 23 when Facebook went offline for 4 hours.

I was actually surprised to see Markus refute Mark Brooks in public like that since he was a client of Marks dating consulting business for a while a year or two ago. It looks like their working relationship may not have ended on a high note.

For more information on the online dating site mentioned in this article, read our review of PlentyofFish.com.