Statistics

Just a small news tidbit,

JLM Pacific Epoch is reporting that Match.com China (cn.Match.com) has been online since 2006 and has now more than 8 million registered members.

The economy is in reverse but online dating site Match.com is speeding ahead. They had their largest membership growth for November in 7 years. Match.com started 13 years ago in 1995. According to a press release Match.com attribute the growth to:

The combination of a new matching service, the Daily5, and the daily drumbeat of bad economics sent consumers to Match.com looking for love.

Match.com members initiated over 400,000 more connections this November (when compared to Nov 07) thanks to in part the new Daily 5 feature (see Story). November also produced the third busiest week of the year. Usually the weeks in January and February leading up to Valentine's Day see the heaviest use of dating sites.

For more information on this popular dating site, read our Match.com review.

November 18th, 2008 is the day that Match.com officially passed the 1 Billion winks sent, mark. A wink is used to notify other members you are interested in them without actually sending an email. Currently Match.com members send over 735,000 winks a day, worldwide.

A wink in my opinion is not the best way to notify someone you are interested. It basically puts the onus on the other single now to strike up a conversation through email (which almost never works). If you really want the best chances of getting someone's interest, send a well crafted email.

See our previous story on the subject . For more general information on this dating site, read our Match.com review.

On FriendFinder Networks corporate site they are claiming to be the largest social networking company in the world. The numbers they give to support this are:

• 250,000,000+ total profiles in their database since inception (for all websites).
• On average, over 150,000 new members per day.
• Over 10,000 private label social networking and live video sites in their network.

While FriendFinder Networks may be the largest social networking company in terms of number of profiles created, but how relevant are all those profiles. FriendFinder got its start way back in 1996, 12 years ago. I am sure many of these profiles are unused now or duplicates within the same site and across multiple sites. Adult FriendFinder, the largest site in the Network, says on their home page they have over 29 million active members. An active member to FriendFinder is someone with a valid email account who has logged in within at least 2 years. Now 2 years is a long time to be considered an active member but at least FriendFinder publishes how these numbers are calculate. Most dating sites do not. I would consider the largest social networking sites to be the ones with the most number of active profiles. In my opinion an active profile is one in which someone has used it in at least 2 months (and this is stretching it). I'm sure this honour would go to either Myspace or Facebook.

While we are on the subject, why are more and more dating sites calling themselves social networking sites? Sure they have social networking features but the main goal of the site is dating and to match you with a compatible person. If you are not single, there is no point in joining any dating site or the ones that call themselves Social Networks. These sites really should be called Social Networks for Singles.

Here is FriendFinder Networks corporate home page. For more information on the FriendFinder dating site, read our review.

Spark Networks released their 3rd quarter financial results this past week. It wasn't a very good quarter for the company when compared to 2007 Q3 and last quarter.

Revenue for the third quarter of 2008 was $14.0 million, an 11% decrease compared to $15.8 million in the third quarter of 2007, and a 6% decrease compared to $15.0 million in the prior quarter. Revenue for the nine months was $44.1 million, a 10% decrease compared to $49.2 million for the same period last year.

Subscribers are also down.

Dating site PerfectMatch.com has seen a 47 percent increase in members over the same quarter last year. This is a huge jump especially in these economic times. Most other popular online dating services membership growth levels have either flat lined or increased marginally. Membership renewals are also up and when you combine these numbers with the new member numbers, matching on PerfectMatch.com has increased by 125 percent. Almost 92 percent of these matches are using the automated matching system called the Duet Compatibility System.

For more information on the dating service, read our PerfectMatch.com Review.