Statistics

People Media was recently purchased by Match.com's parent company IAC (see Story) which prompted me to look for further information about this company. They were founded in 2002 and now have almost 4 million unique visitors with 550 million page views per month, when you combine all of their dating sites traffic together. As a comparison, Match.com had roughly 5.5 million unique visitors last month. ComScore lists 6 of People Media's dating sites in their top 50 dating site list. BlackPeopleMeet is People Media's largest online service which averages over 167 thousand visitors a day and just shy of 1 million unique visitors in a month. 44 percent of BlackPeopleMeet members are male and 56% are female. This is pretty close to the average of People Media's top 10 dating sites gender ratio of 47 percent Male and 53 percent female.

People Media also currently has existing partnerships with the Steve Harvey Morning Show and AOL Personals, to power a number of their dating communities.

To find out more information, including traffic stats broken down by individual dating site, read the People Media 2009 Advertising Kit.

A survey at a UK dating site for single moms and dads found that 92 percent of single parents prefer to date other single parents. 500 members participated in the survey with which the majority listed the reason for their answer being, they have more in common with someone who has similar responsibilities and time commitments.

For the full press release, visit PRWeb and for a list of dating sites for single parents, check out our Single Parents Dating category.

Congratulations to ChristianMingle, they recently announced that they had passed the 2 million member mark. This religious dating service was launched in 2001 and has grown into one of the largest niche Christian dating services on the internet with thousands of singles joining every day. Of course when you join, you wouldn't have access to 2 million singles actively looking for a date. This number reflects the total number of members who have joined since the dating site launched. What this number does illustrate is, ChristianMingle continues to grow and prosper. This makes it a good dating site for a person to join if they are looking for someone of a Christian Faith and/or who believes in Christian values.

A quick check on internet traffic analyzer website, Compete, shows that of all the niche Christian dating sites we have reviewed, ChristianMingle receives the most unique visitors, by far every month. Here is graph of their monthly traffic over the past year:

This year in May, ChristianMingle received over 650 thousand unique visitors. This is almost twice as many visitors as in May, 2008.

For more general information on this dating site, read our review of ChrisitianMingle.

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: