Statistics

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.

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.