Statistics

People Media announced a partnership with AOL Personals back in March to offer niche dating services to AOL's visitors (see AOL Personals and People Media Partner). Last Thursday at a dating industry conference called iDate 2009, they announced that they have launched 6 new niche dating sites for AOL and have also updated their existing sites with new matching and community features. The new upgrades include a smoother flowing registration process, more advance searching options and, new profile attributes and features.

Currently People Media has 27 niche dating sites which in total experience almost 4 million unique visitors per month. In April of this year, the People Media brand of dating sites had seen a 55 percent increase in traffic when compared to the same time last year. People Media's best known niche online dating sites are Black People Meet and Love and Seek.

For more information about this news, read the press release at PRWeb.

Last year eHarmony release a PDF of a summary of the Harris Interactive report for 2007 which showed how they concluded 236 eHarmony members get married every day. According to eHarmony's current Matching Advertisers with Buyers web page, Harris Interactive Research for 2008 still concludes 236 eHarmony members marry every day. From our count it also looks like the profile questions increased by 2 to 258 questions.

On average eHarmony Media of sites receives 3.6 million visitors per month and over 415 million page views with an average visit length of 5 minutes. In March 2009, 34 percent of visitors were male and 66 percent were females with the median age of 35 years. eHarmony Media includes the following categories Singles, Advice, Weddings, and Parenting. The sites included in these categories are eHarmony.com, Advice.eHarmony.com, ProjectWedding.com, Weddingbee.com, Justmommies.com and FertileThoughts.com.

For more demographic information read the eHarmony.com Statistics 2009 Adobe PDF file we have stored locally.

Read our eHarmony review for more general information on this dating site.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas took a look at several claims of the more popular online dating sites. Psychology professor Jeffrey Lohr and Aimee King and Deena Austin-Oden (psychology graduates) found that the claims are more self serving than anything else. They wrote an article about this topic called Browsing for Love in All the Wrong Places which can be found in Skeptic magazine, volume 15 number 1. We found a review of this article at PhysOrg.

One example that the researchers used, as pointed out by PhysOrg, which made them skeptical of claims by dating sites is customer satisfaction testimonies. It is assumed by the researches that most dating sites only select satisfied customers reviews to display, rather than an average sample from all testimonies received. This is an obvious point and I am sure most people realize testimonials and reviews on a dating services own website are all preselected. In fact most companies in any industry would operate this way. It is how marketing works.

eHarmony, Perfectmatch.com, Chemistry and Match.com are all talked about in the review of the article at PhysOrg. The one example given about Match.com is their claim that they are responsible for twice as many marriages as any other site in the world. According to the review, Match.com:

The Unofficial eHarmony Blog has dissected a few web pages over at eHarmony and they have figured out, to date that the dating site has had over 28.1 million user registrations (for all countries). By looking at the source of the registration process and in particular the JavaScript, you can find your user ID number. This number is incremented each time a user is registered. So, if you ever want to know exactly how many users have registered, follow these instructions to find your eHarmony User ID.

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

The Online Dating Insider pointed out that Hannah Schwartz of the Australian dating site RSVP said that their membership is up 31 percent this quarter when compared to the same quarter last year. Schwartz states in the following video (around the 6 minute 27 second mark) that the membership increase is driven mainly by woman and the total membership number for RSVP is now over 1.4 million.



She further states that when surveyed, members have turned to online dating due to the recession, and the need to cut back expenses.

For more on this popular Australian dating site, read our RSVP review.

According to The National, there are as many as 40 million singles from the United States who are looking for love on social networking sites and online dating services. With the recent bad press online personals has received lately due in large part of several murderers meeting their victims through Craigslist, The National decided to take a further look at the dangerous side of online dating.

The article brought up several cases, including the 2 Craigslist ones mentioned above.

In April a Boston medical student, Philip Markoff, dubbed the “Craigslist killer” by the media, was arrested and charged with murdering a masseuse who advertised on the popular website’s erotic services section.

Two months later Craigslist was hit with another scandal when it emerged that a North Carolina man used the site to hire a man to rape his wife while the husband watched.