Statistics

The Wall Street Journal in an article called "Marriage-Maker Claims Are Tied in Knots" attempts to find out if some of the statistics are true, in regards to the number of marriages a dating site claims to have generated. eHarmony is targeted because of their claim that 236 members get married everyday (see Story). I believe this works out to 2% of the total number of Americans who got married last year met through the site. Match.com is also mentioned due to stats they released recently (and then pulled) that says 12 couples got married or engaged everyday on their dating site (see Story).

The author, Carl, in a way defends the dating sites published stats when he says that:

One obstacle to further research is that newlyweds are hard for researchers to find. So online-dating companies looking to tout their success as matchmaking yentas have sought novel ways to enumerate marriages.

Less than 2 percent of Americans get married every year. To perform a survey and to get an accurate sample size 1.76 million phone calls would need to be made says Dr. Gonzaga of eHarmony. That would be a costly endeavor, so dating sites are forced to find creative ways to come up with some marriage numbers. The closest thing to an election-quality poll Carl could find was a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, which in 2005 reported from a poll of 3,215 adults, that 3 million Americans found a long term relationship (not necessarily marriages) through a dating site.

I notice the other day that eHarmony has now hidden their traffic statistics over at Quantcast. This is what you see now:

On eHarmony's Quantcast profile page you still get to see the US demographics and how many unique visitors they had last month but, the daily traffic and trends graphs are not available to the general public anymore. eHarmony first became Quantified by Quantcast last summer (see Story). A website being Quantified means that Quantcast directly measured the traffic data. It is not based on estimates as other sites may be on Quantcast and other traffic measuring services like Alexa, Comscore and Compete.

Over the last year eHarmony has become a much more open dating service, they have started several blogs and answered customer complaints in their forums. I hope that the fact, eHarmony has hid their daily traffic statistics, it is not a sign that they may have decided to reverse this trend.

For more on this matchmaking service, read our eHarmony review.

Here is the results from a poll that 1,000 Zoosk members took about Virtual Gifts. This information is probably similar for members of other dating sites.

• Only 15 percent of members have ever sent virtual gifts.
• 76 percent stated they were more likely to respond to a potential match who sent them a virtual gift.
• 71 percent send virtual gifts which reflect their personality.
• Traditional virtual digital gifts (flowers, chocolates) make up 37 percent of all gifts sent. Gifts that show off a person's wild side (martini, etc...) make up 27 percent. 23 percent of all gifts are warm and fuzzy (teddy bear, etc...). Finally, 13 percent of virtual gifts are seasonal.

To find out more information about this online dating service you can read our review of Zoosk

According to researchers, internet dating services are used more by a certain type of person which fits a particular psychological profile. In a 2009 survey of 3,345 US citizens, researchers found the following results:

More likely to use Internet Dating

• People who are more sociable.
• Singles with high self-esteem and who put some value in romantic relationships.
• Men and women with low self-esteem and who consider romantic relationships NOT to be an important part of their life.

Less Likely to use Internet Dating

• People who are more introverted.
• Singles with low self-esteem and who put some value in romantic relationships.

The average age of the participant of the survey was 48 and all were between the ages of 19 and 89. 47.5 percent were men and 52.5 percent were woman.

For the full story and more details on the results of the survey, read PsychCentral.

In an article on the UK website, The Guardian, author Tanya Gold asks the question, Are Britons who are searching for love online, looking in the wrong place? At the point of writing the article Tanya had been internet dating for 3 weeks. She so far has mixed feelings. On one had she is dazzled by the possibilities but on the other, she feels "sleazy and slightly vulnerable".

Tanya gives four examples of online dating gone wrong. Two are her own dating experiences and all seem to point to men as the ones causing all of the problems 😲. I had a laugh at one of her dates named Clive. Apparently he had broken his dentures the day of the date and asked if he could pick her up toothless. What was he thinking? She also gave 4 positive examples of how online dating worked and created successful matches. One of her examples was Jane, who in 10 years, went on more than 200 internet dates before she met her soul mate.

Lets look at some of the UK stats more closely in which Tanya compiled. According to her information, fifteen million people in Britain are single, and almost five million are looking for love online. 20 percent of married people between the ages of 19 and 25 met their spouse online and a YouGov survey of 2000 people found that, for all age groups, 15 percent of couples met through the internet. The surprising twist here is that according to research at Bath University, a relationship that was started online lasts on average 7 months. I wonder how long an average relationship lasts that was not formed on the internet?

Across the pound and in America, Tanya found that according to the Plenty of Fish dating site, 33 percent of online daters form a relationship, 33 percent do not, and the last 33 percent give up on internet dating altogether. She also discovered a poll from the University of Texas which found 30 percent of women who met men online had sex on their first date. From these encounters, 77 percent of men did not wear condoms (how about other birth protection?) When compared to the information from the Centre of US Disease Control, almost 50 percent of all women required men to wear a condom during their first sexual experience.

The New York Times seems to be covering a number of dating topics recently. In this article they looked at the marketing of the science behind online dating. A professor of psychology, Jeffrey Lohr is quoted several times in the article. He released a research paper recently which looked into some of the claims from the more popular dating sites (see Story). In summary of his research, Professor Lohr stated:

It seems to me that everybody is marketing their product far beyond the available evidence. There is none to very little effectiveness in the matching process.

The one person he did have praise for is Dr. Helen Fisher of the anthropology department at Rutgers. She helped Chemistry.com create their profile questions and matching system. Dr. Fisher based her work for Chemistry on her own published and peer reviewed research about how love and matchmaking works. Unlike Chemistry, most dating sites have very little science that has been published to back up the claims of their service and matchmaking system.