Statistics

Spark Networks reported their fourth quarter financial results this month. Revenue for the last quarter was down 9 percent to $10.1 million with a net income of $600 thousand. Net income is up substantially this quarter though since in quarter 4 of 2009 they reported a loss of $9.6 million. For the 12 months of 2010 revenue decreased 10 percent to $40.9 million with net income at $3.7 million when compared to 2009. In 2009 Spark Networks reported a net loss of $6.4 million.

For q4 2010 the number of average paying subscribers for the entire company was 160,744. This is a decrease of 5 percent when compared to the same quarter last year. For the entire year of 2010 the number of average paying subscribers was down 2 percent from 2009 to 162,311. Breaking average paying subscribers down by segment for quarter 4 2010 you can see all experienced a decrease when compared to the same quarter in 2009:

• Other Affinity Networks - 65,172 (-4%)
• Jewish Networks - 89,723 (-1%)
• General Market Networks - 5,174 (-46%)

For the full 2010 Q4 release visit Spark Networks News Room.

Related Story: Spark Networks Third Quarter 2010 Financials

Cupid PLC head office is located in the city of Edinburgh in Scotland. They employ about 15 people at the head office and another 200 or so in the Ukraine.

Cupid made a few announcements earlier this month about their final results for the year 2010:

• Revenues increase by 202 percent to £25.7m. In 2009 revenue was £8.5m
• Pre-tax profits for Cupid rose to £4.16m from £983,000 in 2009
• 42 percent of Q4 revenues came from outside the UK
• Their goal is to have more than 50% of revenues coming from North America by the end of 2011
• When you combine all of Cupid's dating sites they have 13 million customer profiles registered worldwide

For more information on this story you can read the announcement on the London Stock Exchange. To find out more about Cupid PLC dating sites you can read our Cupid.com review.

While Badoo.com is not a common name in the U.S., it’s fast becoming one of the most popular dating sites in the world. This week, the company announced that its user base has surpassed 100 million in 180 countries, mostly due to its hybrid business model, combining traditional online dating with social networking.

The company has also recently launched a Facebook app, which has gained 25 million users.

Users of Badoo.com can set up a profile and search for matches like traditional online dating, but the site seems to be more focused on “real-time” interactions, including chatting, flirting, and meeting as many new people as possible. They also offer geo-location dating. When you use the Badoo app on your mobile phone, you can meet others in your immediate area right away, rather than scheduling and planning a date.

"The biggest shift is from "marital dating" to "social dating" or "casual dating," says Bart Swanson, Badoo COO. "Online dating is no longer all about meeting a future spouse. It's about meeting lots of people in a short time, at short notice, in an easy, fun, relaxed manner."

While the site is popular in many European, Latin American and African countries, their U.S. presence remains virtually unknown.

“In the English-speaking world, we’re the biggest thing you’ve never heard of,” Badoo COO Bart Swanson tells Thinq.co.uk. “But that is now starting to change.”

According to Badoo, their user base is expected to reach 200 million by 2012. They are inviting U.S. users to try the site on their home page, hoping to tap into the saturated online dating market here. With the growing popularity of mobile dating apps, they just might succeed.

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.