Australia

The Plenty of fish blog just released some current traffic statistics for their dating site. It's good to see a snapshot of what the user base of Plenty of fish is. Marcus Frind released the statistics to highlight how his dating site has grown and to be more open on the number of members POF has.

The user statistics released are based on active daily registered users. This means that the user must be logged into POF.com to be considered part of the statistic group. I am assuming that the numbers given are an average but it doesn’t say what the timeline is for that. It probably is for last month (January) but I am only guessing that he would release the latest numbers available. The user statistics could very well be for last year, last quarter or some other time period.

Plenty of Fish’s largest market is the United States with 2 million active daily registered users. This is followed by the United Kingdom with 550,000 and then Canada with 450,000. POF estimates that if you take the roughly 1400 dating site (non-adult) found in the United States and combine their paying members you will come out with 2.5 million subscribers. Combining these numbers together sounds like a lot of people and it is, but online dating has a lot of room to grow. The population of the United States sits at about 313 million with about 100 million people actually single. This shows that about 1/3 of the population is single. The United Kingdom has a population of about 63 million and Canada is close to 35 million. If we assume that the proportions of singles in these countries are about the same as the US then there are about 21 million single people in the UK and about 12 million in Canada.

In the US I figure that there are about 5.5 million people actively using a dating site every day. I came up with this number by adding Plenty of Fish’s 2 million active users with 2.5 million US paid subscribers, and then adding in an extra million singles for all of the other free dating sites that people use. This means only 5.5 percent of all singles in the United States are actively using an online dating site. Since about 78% of the US has internet access (according to Wikipedia) then this percentage only slightly improves to about 7 percent. The potential for growth in the online dating industry is still huge when your untapped market sits at over 90 percent.

I also found a few other related statistics. Plenty of Fish currently reports (from July 2012) that they have had 45 million members register since launch in 2003. Their current rate of growth is 40,000 new members signing up every day which works out to about 30 percent a year. Members of POF send out 20 million messages a day generating 7 million conversations. Currently the average age on POF is 35. In 2009 the average member was 40 years old.

To find out more about this dating site you should read our Plenty of fish review.

eHarmony Australia is offering a free communication weekend that starts in the morning on Friday November 2nd and ends Monday November 5th at the end of the day.

If you are an Australian single and wish to try a dating site which performs the matching for you, then eHarmony.com.au is a service that offers the features you are looking for. To try it out just create a free members account this weekend and fill out the profile questionnaire. This process will take you about 30 minutes or so and is important because the questions you answer are used to determine what other members will make a quality match for you. Once you have finished with your profile you will receive a number of matches right away. From here you can look at their profiles and pick the ones you feel a connection with. Communication is free with any of your eHarmony matches and no credit card is required.

For more about how this Australian matchmaking site in helps singles, please read our eHarmony review.

eHarmony in Australia is offering a free communication weekend that starts Friday the 28th of September and runs until end of day on Monday the 1st of October.

This is a great chance for singles in all parts of Australia to visit eHarmony.com.au and create a profile since eHarmony becomes extra busy during a free communication weekend. Once your eHarmony profile is complete and you have answered the personality questions you will be able to receive matches and view the matches profiles. When you have determined which matches you wish to contact you can then go ahead and communicate with those matches at no cost. This promotion is available to new and existing eHarmony Australia members.

To find out more about what this online dating site in Australia offers, please read our eHarmony review.

According to the blog "Breaking the online dating sound barrier”, the dating site Plenty Of Fish only accepts users from Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, France, Germany and Italy. I did try creating a new user from China and I didn't have any problems (I had the account deleted), so POF must check the IP of the user to see what country it is from before they allow them to register.

The other bit of news about Plenty Of Fish is, it now supports 4 languages. Before now the site was only available in English. As of a few days ago French, German and Spanish versions can be accessed with an Italian version coming soon. This means any text from the user interface (menus, links, etc.) along with all help and information pages are available in the language. The only thing that doesn't get converted is any text a user may have typed for profile fields like the About Me section.

For more information on this story you can check out Fernando's Blog and to find out more about this dating site you can read our Plentyoffish.com review.

For 14 days eHarmony Australia is running a free guided communication event starting April 13th and ending on April 26th, 2011. This means starting tomorrow for a fortnight, singles in Australia can visit eHarmony.com.au, create a profile, receive matches, and then communicate with those matches through the guided communication process at no cost.

As winter approaches in Australia it is a good time for singles to check out their local online dating site since this is typically the busy period for dating and matchmaking services.

To find out more about this online dating site in Australia, you should check out our eHarmony review.

I am not sure what the woman from Australia was thinking, who was mentioned in this article about her being scammed from someone she met on a dating site? Let's go over the facts:

• Her husband died 11 years ago
• She has 2 teenage kids
• She never met the guy in person
• He promised her marriage and $28 million
• She sold her home and investment property for $600,000 and sent him the money to "invest"

At the moment she is warning women to avoid dating sites because of her experience. First of all, this could have happened to her with a person she met in real life, I do not see how it is the fault of online dating. She should be warning women about not sending men they just met online, money. In her story there are huge warning flags and I think the women choose to ignore them just because she was being greedy, especially when she thought she was getting $28 million out of it. I think the real victims here are her two children, she should have been thinking about them. Now I don't think anyone deserves to be scammed, she just should have thought things through.