Industry

Do you want to see how many visitors a dating site has been getting over time? Google Trends now offers this ability. You can also compare up to 5 different sites. To see the daily unique visitor numbers (instead of just a graph) you must be logged into Trends.

The Google Trends website data is "estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources" (quoted from the Google Webmaster Blog. I would assume these sources are the searches people perform on Google (which they track) and from their other free services like Google Analytics. These results are probably more accurate than other companies with similar services like Alexa or Compete since, Google has such a large pool of data to collect estimates from. Google is responsible for providing over 60% (see USA Today) of the search results from search engines, for people in the United States.

In Japan, 8 popular matchmaker services created a industry association that will introduce later this year a system which will certify the quality of service of matchmakers. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will be helping to create this certification system. Some of the points that this certification will address are:

... clear-cut explanations of contract documents, cancellation policies and an obligation by the service providers to obtain public documents certifying that applicants are single.

Some estimates conclude there are almost 3,700 matchmaking companies in Japan with about 600,000 customers. These include both offline and online services.

This new Matchmaking Industry Association is in response to a huge rise in complaints over the last few years in Japan. In 2007 there was 2,871 complaints up 80% since 2000.

When reading the article the one guideline that the association wants to tackle that I was surprised about was "certifying that applicants are single". I'm not sure how possible this is. They can check for marriage licenses but, what can they really do beyond that?

Western Alumni Gazette from the University of Western Ontario has a piece about the owners of the dating service Christian Cafe. They go into details on how Philip and Samuel Moorcroft got ChristianCafe.com off the ground in the late 1990's, some of the challenges they faced and how the dating site is fairing now. Currently the cafe is one of the largest Christian site's on the internet with over a 100,000 members. The business is based in Markham, Ontario, Canada and employees 15 people.

For more information on Christian Cafe please read our review.

I notice over at Yahoo! Personals that they have 14 different job position openings with categories ranging from User Experience and Design, Engineering, Marketing and Business Development and Finance. Each position has an in depth description of what you would be required to do at the job and what schooling and work experience you must have. There is also a link so you can apply online. So if you are a Designer, a web developer or a Product Manager why don't you give Yahoo a try?

On a side note, if you are a web developer and get the job at Yahoo Personals, the first thing you can work on is the "Things not looking quite right?" notification I received when viewing the job openings page. I am using Internet Explorer 7, one of the browsers Yahoo Personals does recommend!

I saw OmniDate.com mentioned in the news recently. The twist to this dating site (every new site needs a gimmick these days) is you can go on virtual dates with your matches. You can pick from a variety of virtual dates which is represented as different animated backgrounds. You also have several detailed 3D characters to pick from which represent you in your conversations.

The graphics look good, though the window is a little small (at least at my monitor's resolution). The main problem is I don't really see this as virtual dating. The characters look good but there are not that many choices. So, if you go out on several virtual dates you may end up seeing double. OmniDate also needs to bring in audio chatting. You can make the characters express different emotions like laughing (with sounds) but all the chatting is done via the keyboard and comic book text bubbles. In the end I see this more as a fun text chatting tool.

I think virtual dating needs to represent the actual person with live voice and video. At this point they could put you in different settings like a restaurant or bar complete with appropriate sound effects. Also, when I here the word virtual I tend to think of those glasses that you can wear with tiny screens that can track your head movement. When you look around it feels like you are in actually there in the virtual environment. It needs to be something that offers true emersion with an actual representation of the person you are talking too. We are a long way off technology wise before this happens.

The closest thing to virtual dating at the moment is live video and audio chat. A lot of speed dating sites have this type of system setup. I haven't looked much into speed dating yet since it really hasn't caught on in the internet world yet but, David over at Online Dating Insider has been testing them out recently and has a few good posts about them.

The New York Times is reporting that Spark Networks is up for sale. Spark Networks owns a large number of dating services (probably close to 20) with their flagship dating sites being AmericanSingles.com, BBWPersonalsPlus.com, and JDate (in order of size). According to comScore Media, the Spark Networks of dating sites are the 4th largest with 2.45 million visitors in November, 2007. Yahoo! Personals had the most visitors on the metrix with 4.23 million people for that month. This comparison is slightly unfair to other dating services since, the Spark Network is made up of a group of different dating sites. Still AmericanSingles.com did have 1.20 million visitors for November which is still a very large number of people and sales.

With shares (LOV) closing at $4.90 yesterday this gives the company a value of $131.4 million. Some Analysts predict that it may go for as high as $185 million, especially since the share price has risen close to 20% in the last few weeks. Spark Networks are in talks with companies that own related sites like MySpace, Match.com, eHarmony and Yahoo! Personals too see if interest in a sale can be generated.

Recently there was another dating network sold for the tune of $300 million, see the story here.