Statistics

The internet traffic audience measuring service, comScore, issued a press release which covered the top growing websites and site categories for February 2010. Since February is usually considered the top month for dating sites (thanks to Valentine's Day) I thought we should take a look.

Traffic to online dating sites in February grew 5 percent to 24.2 million visitors when compared to January. The top 4 dating sites in America for February were:

1. eHarmony with 5 million visitors (up 82 percent) - Read Review
2. Match.com with 3.4 million visitors. - Read Review
3. PlentyofFish.com with 2.8 million visitors. - Read Review
4. SinglesNet.com with 2.6 million visitors. - Read Review

For comparison, other Valentine's Day categories like Flowers/Gifts/Greetings websites saw traffic increase by 7 percent to 32.3 visitors. In this category AmericanGreetings took the number 1 spot at 10.6 million visitors. The e-Cards category grew by 7 percent as well to 23.1 million visitors with MyFunCards.com leading the category with 6.3 million visitors. MyFunCards was up 75 percent when compared to January.

We noticed that eHarmony has shut down eHarmony Marriage. eHarmony Marriage was launched on February 6, 2006 as a service to help couples fix a struggling marriage. As of November 2009, eHarmony had removed all links to eHarmony Marriage on their dating site and as of last week, the domain "marriage.eHarmony.com" now gets redirected to eHarmony Advice.

eHarmony Marriage was an interesting concept that I guess didn't take off. At one point back in December of 2008 we notice that eHarmony Marriage only had about 1,000 visitors a month (see Story). This number is not large, especially when you consider eHarmony the dating site receives millions of visitors a month.

The main way I found eHarmony promoted the marriage service was through the dating site itself. If a user picked "separated" or "married" as their current relationship status when filling out a profile, they would then be asked by the website if they would like to learn more about eHarmony Marriage (see Story). With the closure, I guess if a marriage has reach the point of someone searching dating sites for singles, it is beyond the point of them wanting to fix the marriage.

eHarmony is not out of the marriage business all together. In 2008 they bought the popular websites Weddingbee (see Story) and Project Wedding (see Story).

For more information on this dating site, read our eHarmony review.

The owner of DateHookup.com, Dustin, wanted to find out if sending a Virtual Gift with your mail message to a member would increase the chance that the member would reply back. He took about 1 million first contact messages from last month (first contact refers to the fact that the member hasn't communicated with the person before) and compared the ones which included a virtual gift with ones that did not.

He found out that it did greatly improve your chances of getting a response. Your average mail message sent on DateHookup without a gift will have a 14 percent chance of getting replied to. With a virtual gift your chances nearly double to 26 percent. It sounds like if you really like the person, it would be stupid not to include a virtual gift to increase your chances of a reply.

I was surprised at the results. I figured that virtual gifts would improve the chance of someone replying, but not by almost 100 percent. Another thing I was surprised about was the actually reply percentage of 14 to 26 percent. I do not know the overall average reply rate, but if an equal number of virtual gift messages were compared with messages without virtual gifts then it would be 20 percent. This means 80 percent of all messages sent that are first contacts go unanswered. Is this reply percentage rate (which feels low to me) a DateHookup problem, or does this average reflect most dating sites which operate similar to DateHookup? I bet this average reply rate is similar across most free sites.

For more on the story visit the new DateHookup Blog. For more about this dating site you can read our review of DateHookup.com.

On March 4th, 2010 Spark Networks reported quarter 4 earnings for 2009 and their year end results (which was on Dec. 31, 2009). Revenue for the fourth quarter was $11.1 million which was a decrease of 16% from the same quarter last year. Spark Networks reported a lost for this quarter of $9.6 million and for the full year, a net loss of $6.4 million. Total revenue for 2009 was $45.4 million; in 2008 it was $53.7 million. CEO Adam Berger is quoted in the press release about this the losses:

It’s no surprise to anyone following us this past year that 2009 was extremely challenging for us as revenue declined by 21% with nearly half of the decline coming from our highly profitable Jewish Networks segment ... We accelerated our cost cutting program to offset the revenue decline but were unable to overcome the $8.9 million contribution1 decline and ended up suffering a $5.7 million decline in Adjusted EBITDA

Average paying subscribers for Spark Networks was 168,646 for quarter 4 2009 which is a 5 percent decrease when compared to quarter 4 in 2008. For the full year, average paying subscribers was 166,267. This is down 11 percent from 186,957 in 2008.

While Jewish Networks revenue fell 11 percent to $7.1 million, their subscribers grew by 4 percent to 90,567 in quarter 4. Average paying subscribers for General Market Networks (Spark.com and others) was 9,594. This is a decrease of 58 percent when compared to the fourth quarter of 2008. The Other Affinity Networks (MingleMatch) had better subscriber news and posted a 4 percent increase in subscribers to 67,725 during quarter 4 2009.

While Spark Networks continues to struggle, their balance sheet shows as of December 31, 2009 cash and cash equivalents of $6.2 million with no outstanding debt.

For the full 2009 Q4 release visit Spark Networks News Room.

Related Story: Spark Networks Third Quarter 2009 Financials

Since Zoosk received $30 million in funding in December (see Story), their dating site traffic has increased by 3 times according to Compete's estimate. In the graph below it shows that in August of 2009 unique visitors had just crossed the 500,000 mark for Zoosk. In January of this year they had reached 2.7 million unique visitors.

It looks like Zoosk is spending at least some of the money they raised on advertising to increase traffic to their dating site. In an interview with Online Personals Watch, Alex Mehr, CEO Of Zoosk also mentions that their dating site has just reached 50 million members. Just 5 months ago Zoosk members numbered around 40 million. That is a lot of growth, which goes to show how using Facebook and its users to spread information about the dating site has really worked for them.

For more information on this dating site, read our Zoosk review.

I was surprised when I learned that 80 percent of members at the dating site Mate1.com have never been married and have remained single. On the flip side this means on average at Mate1, 19% of men and 21% of women have been divorced. When you look at the data by country Ireland comes out on top at 94 percent for men and 91 percent for women who have never been married. Let's look at the data for other Countries:

• United States - 76% of men and women have never been married.
• Canada - 86% of men and 79% of women have never tied the knot.
• United Kingdom - 88% of men and 80% of women.

One other thing that I did find interesting was for all countries, there was always a higher percentage of men who were never married than women. Also, since Mate1 has such a high percentage of members who have never been married this seems to suggest that Mate1 members are more likely to be in their twenties and thirties.

For more on the story (including data for other countries) read Date Daily and to find further details about this dating site, read our review of Mate1.com.