Statistics

So, how has the recession affected different markets in the love and relationship industry? According to Yahoo News it is all up and down.

Dating Sites - UP - We have had numerous articles on this site which talks about how online dating sites for the most part are having a period of booming business (see Search Results). Singles are looking to relationships for comfort instead of material goods.

Divorces - DOWN - From a previous story we noted that 37 percent of Matrimonial Lawyers are seeing a decline of couples getting a divorced in these financially trying times. Couples realize it is more economical to stay together and try to work things out since attorney fees and court costs can sometimes run up to $100 thousand.

Romance Books - UP - Sales for romance fiction is up according to the world's leading publisher, Harlequin Enterprises. Quarter 4 in 2008 saw a 7 percent increase compared to the same quarter in 2007. The 4 years before this, sales in this category have been flat.

Weddings - DOWN - Online dating may be up but, 75 percent of couples getting married are spending less. On average couples are spending 24 percent less per wedding than they did a year ago. This is a huge blow to the $60 billion a year wedding industry.

Since the start of the global recession, online dating services in the United Kingdom have grown 13 percent (September 2008 - February 2009). A total of 5 million singles from the UK are now using dating sites. This is 13 percent of the total UK online population. Genders are split evenly and heavy use members were online an average of 4 hours per month viewing and average of 23 pages a day. 65% of UK online daters are 35 or older. The most popular dating site in the month of February was DatingDirect (owned by Meetic, 1.6 million visitors), followed by POF (with 1.4 million) and then Match.com (1 million visitors).

Read NewMediaAge for more information on the story. Visit our DatingDirect review , our POF review and our Match.com review for more information on these dating sites.

I have finished up our new review of the dating site, RSVP. It is the first dating site in our new Australian Dating Site category. I hope to have a few more added to this new dating category by the end of May.

RSVP is owned by Fairfax Digital and currently is the largest Australian dating site with over 1 million members. It uses a stamp/credit system for initiating contact with members and it is free to reply to any message from a member. This is also the only dating site that I know of which Australians can use there mobile phone to access the dating site and receive SMS alerts.

Read the new RSVP review for more information.

Australia's largest online dating site, RSVP, reported strong growth in membership over their last quarter. They saw a 31 percent increase in members in the first quarter of 2009 when compared to the last quarter of 2008. Men memberships increased by 30 percent while woman jumped even higher at 36 percent. The month of March even had higher numbers than January, which is usually one of the best months of the year.

Apparently even in Australia, online dating sites like RSVP.com.au are experiencing growth while the global economy suffers a recession.

For more on the Australian dating site, you will find our RSVP review here.

Last Friday on PlentyOfFish.com the Instant Messenger was disabled. Since then POF claims a 10% increase in traffic from the UK and over 15% from Australia. There is no mention on if the visitor traffic increased for the US or Canada. With the traffic increase Markus (CEO of POF) has decided to completely remove the feature. He also mentions that he should of realized there was a reason why a number of the other major dating sites don't use Instant Messengers on their websites.

I'm not sure why Markus attributes POF having more visitors to him removing IM from POF. There was no news story surrounding this (until now) so why would this increase visitors to his site (since no one knew about it)? It probably increased page views of visitors since members now have to use the mail center more instead of the instant messenger. I think it might be a mistake on his part since he freely admits that hundreds of thousands of users used it every day. While Plenty Of Fish's instant messenger may not have been as smooth experience as Microsoft's, it was still definitely useable. Maybe he should of disable IM on a user's account by default and require an action by them to enable it? This way users who don't use IM would never be bothered by it.

POF logo also has been updated. It has a cleaner look and the tag line of the site has changed. It use to say 100% Free Online Dating. Now it says Free Online Dating. Which is true, since POF just recently started to offer a paid membership that has a few additional perks (see Story).

Read our PlentyOfFish.com review for more information on this popular dating site.

I am surprised at the Economist. They posted this article on Thursday about how Online-dating websites prosper in the recession. While this may have been true 5 months ago, it is not the case anymore. They should of really done more fact checking. Take a look at a few traffic monitoring sites like Compete.com and they show most dating sites in February actually stayed flat or lost 5 percent or more of their visitors, when compared to January. February is suppose to be a dating sites most busy month. Granted traffic monitoring sites are not 100 percent accurate but they do give you a rough idea when you take several of them in consideration.

The Economist should also realize that traffic alone does not determine a website success. Revenue and Net Income ultimately determines if any business will survive. Not once is this information mentioned. They talk about OkCupid and how their registered active users is up but no where do they mention how online advertising has dried up in the last few months, OkCupid's primary source of revenue. eHarmony is also mentioned but, traffic patterns do not support this. Plus, there is a huge goof in the article:

eHarmony, a wholesome marriage-oriented site with more than 20m paying subscribers.

eHarmony has had 20 million people register on the site since they launched in 2000, this is both free and paid members. In 2008 we had estimated eHarmony only has about 90,000 paid members at anyone time (see this page for more details).

Another thing the Economist should of considered is, none of the major dating sites have had a press release lately touting the continued growth during the recession. This is another sign things may not be as good as back in November-December 2008, when we saw press releases from dating sites like Match.com, eHarmony and Perfectmatch. This was when they talked about the recession and the increased growth they received.

For more information on the dating sites mentioned in this post, read our eHarmony review and our OkCupid review.