Statistics

Plenty of fish launched a new dating website called eVow early this September. It is a service which allows singles to find long term relationships only. Instead of focusing on providing matches like other dating sites which specialize in long term relationships and marriage, eVow plans to allow searching of their profiles. This is the main selling feature of the site at the moment.

In less than 7 days of operation, more than 100,000 people signed up to eVow (thanks to being advertised on POF). The site is currently free but there is a plan to make it a paid dating site soon. New features are also planned for the site which took just under 30 days to create (from when programming started).

You can expect a review of this new relationship site to be available soon.

For more on the story read the POF Blog and to find out further details on the largest free dating site in the world, read our Plenty of Fish review.

What do you do when you're a Stanford Business School graduate in the early '90s and you're searching for "the best woman in the world?" For Gary Kremen, the answer was simple: invent online dating.

The quest for a wife (and the financial security it would require to marry her) led Kremen to create Match.com, an idea that came to him after he realized how much revenue personal ads generated for his local newspapers. In 1993, Kremen founded Electric Classifieds Inc., the first company to provide online classified advertising, and in April of 1995, after raising $200,000 from investors, Match.com was born. Though the site's functionality was limited (it only allowed users to exchange messages and pictures via e-mail or fax),100,000 users registered with the site within its first 6 months. Now Match.com has over 1.7 million paid subscribers, and Web sites in 30 and 8 languages.

Kremen chalks up the wild success of Match.com to his "'relentless' work ethic." He ran the business from "a cramped, one-bedroom apartment that he shared with two roommates," often remaining in his pajamas while he "sat glued to his Sun workstation, designing Match's Web site and developing marketing strategies." Despite his hard work and the $1.5 million in venture capital he received, Match.com didn't initially pay off either romantically or financially for Kremen.

In 1997, much to Kremen's chagrin, Match.com's investors sold the startup to Cendant, a consumer-services company, for $8 million, and in 1998 the company was sold again, this time to IAC/InterActiveCorp (then still known as Ticketmaster), for $50 million. All Kremen got out of the transaction was a lifetime account on the site and $50,000 from selling his stock in the company.

Kremen was not discouraged, and in 2001 his perseverance was rewarded: Match.com partnered with AOL and MSN, which "brought in a large influx of people at a rapid pace," and in 2003 Match.com launched MatchMobile, its incredibly popular mobile phone service. 20,000 singles now register on Match.com every day, making it one of the largest and most influential online dating sites. It is consistently ranked among the top five online dating sites based on traffic.

Kremen finally found financial security after a judge awarded him $65 million in a dispute over the domain name sex.com in 2001, and after buying Electric Classifieds (then named Instant Objects) debt in 2004 so that he could retrieve its priceless patent. He held a foreclosure sale and sold the patent for $1.7 million.

Kremen's romantic goals were also met. In an age in which 1 in 5 relationships, and 1 in 6 marriages, are between people who met using online dating sites, and in which "roughly 74 percent of the 10 million Web users who are single and looking for a partner have turned to the Internet to find someone," Kremen met his match the old fashioned way - through a mutual friend.

Read the original article here. To find out more about this popular dating site, read our review of Match.com

The research company Ground Truth has stated that mobile dating has increased a total of 92 percent from the first week of June until the end of July. In the month of June there was a 31 percent increase alone followed by 46 percent in July. So who is seeing a lot of this traffic? According to Ground Truth it is the mobile-optimized dating site Flirtomatic. They received 65 percent of the total mobile dating traffic this summer so far. Other dating sites like Match.com came in as the 7th most visited dating site on a mobile phone. eHarmony was 17th (which is not bad considering eHarmony's iPhone App just launched). Ground Truth said part of the reason why there has been such an increase in mobile dating traffic this summer is because no one wants to be inside sitting at the computer. Singles enjoying the warm weather find it easier just to use their cell phone where ever they happen to be, to check out their online dating profile.

One other item noted by Ground Truth was that the average visitor to a mobile dating service spends 12 minutes and 44 seconds per week on the site.

For a list of dating site who offer dating through your cell phone, check out our Mobile Phone Dating category.

To continue on our story about how 542 eHarmony Members Marry Every Day we dug up some more interesting statistics. Some of these fun facts are from the new Harris Interactive study while others were released by eHarmony to help celebrate their 10 year anniversary.

• By April of last year there had been over 400 million conversations on eHarmony since launch.
• By August of 2009 eHarmony had 30 million members register and had 30 million pictures uploaded.
• 43.99% of newlyweds who met through an online dating service were matched by eHarmony.
• 25.75% of newlyweds who met online (Social Network, Dating Site, etc...) where matched by eHarmony.
• It is estimated that currently there are 1,130,006 non-married, monogamous relationships started by eHarmony.

eHarmony also found that offline, Americans met their spouses 15% of the time through work and another 15% of the time through friends. The chances of meeting your spouse at school is only 9% and through your family only just over 4%. Bars and clubs came in at 5.4%.

To find out more about this popular online matchmaking service, check out our review of eHarmony.com.

From an article over at Madison.com about seniors and how popular online dating is with this demographic, they talked briefly about Match.com. In the piece, Match.com's public relations coordinator, Jaklin Kaden, stated that over 6 percent of Match members are 60 years old or older. For Match members 50 or more, this statistic jumps to 22 percent.

To find out more about this dating service, read our review of Match.com.

eHarmony commissioned a new marriage metrics study from Harris Interactive in 2009. They have released the statistics from the study this week in part to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. The last Harris Interactive study done for eHarmony was in 2007 (see Story); it concluded that 236 eHarmony users get married every day. This was based on data from April 1, 2006 to March 31, 2007. So, it has been about 3 years since this statistics has been updated. Let's see what Harris Interactive found out.

What they found was that the number of marriages per day resulting from eHarmony has doubled. On average, 542 people are married every day in the United States because of meeting online at eHarmony. Wow, this means there will be another 271 happy couples who married today, thanks to using the dating site eHarmony. This new data came from an online study from Harris Interactive which they ran during July and August of 2009. 7,994 people responded to this study, aged from 20 to 54 and who were married between Jan 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009. If you calculate it out, during this 18 month period, 148,311 eHarmony couples got married. This equals to 4.77 percent of all new marriages in the United States.

For more on this story you can read the 2009 summary of the eHarmony Marriage Metrics Study. For more about this dating site and how it matches members together, read our popular eHarmony review.