Statistics

The UK's Times Online posted an article today about online dating in the United Kingdom. While it talks about a few of the popular sites briefly, the main topic of the story is eHarmony's new website with a matching system designed just for the United Kingdom. Launched in July of this year (see story), eHarmony jumped started their membership base by offering 90 day memberships for free. This offer is now over but anyone curious in eHarmony UK can still signup for a 7 day free membership. eHarmony UK does standout from other US dating sites that have moved into the European market. The reason for this is, they have worked with local established research institutes (in this case, Oxford University) to modify their dating site and matching algorithm to make it apply more specifically to relationships in the United Kingdom.

The article also has some price comparisons for one month memberships:

• Dating Direct charges £25 for a single month. Read our Dating Direct Review for more information.
• eHarmony costs £33.95 for one month. We currently do not have a review that has looked at eHarmony's UK site but you could try our eHarmony Review that is for the US.
• Match.com charges £22 for a month. Read our Match.com UK Review for further details.

For the full story visit the Times Online UK and to find out more about this matchmaking service read some eHarmony Reviews.

Since 2000 eHarmony has produced more than 1 Billion automated matches for its members. With eHarmony's detailed profiles and strict criteria for matching singles, combined with their large membership base, this is a huge success for them.

To see how this fact was established using eHarmony's match ID, visit the Unofficial eHarmony Blog. For more information about this popular online dating service read our eHarmony Review.

We found this PDF file on eHarmony called eHarmony | Harris Interactive 2007 Marriage Metrics Number of eHarmony Marriages, which explains the facts behind their findings in which 236 eHarmony users get married every day. Of all the popular dating sites on the web today eHarmony is definitely one of the more trusted dating sites. By releasing the facts behind their claims, it helps improve eHarmony's creditability even more.

To find out more about eHarmony, please read our review.

Bill Tancer of Hitwise released a book recently called "Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters". For those of you who don't know Hitwise monitors the internet and compiles anonymous statistics for clients on how often web sites are visited, how they are found and the demographics of the person doing the surfing. There are many companies that do this type of work with Compete.com and QuantCast.com being some of the other popular ones. These 3 statistic sites of course usually don't see eye to eye and the data they release every month never fully matches. What it does though when you compare the statistics is give you a general idea on how websites you are interested in are performing.

One of the topics the book covers is online dating. Of the top 10 dating sites it lists most of the Male to Female ratios hover around the 50 percentile mark with the most notable exceptions being the gay dating sites. eHarmony also has a much more uneven Male to Female ratio of 38% to 62%. What I was surprised at is the average age range of eHarmony visitors. Bill pegged it at 25 to 34 years of age. I had thought eHarmony members tended to be older than this. Match.com members average age according to Bill is between 35 and 44 which I would see as being more reasonable for eHarmony. eHarmony also appeared 7th on the list behind such dating services as Adam4Adam and DateHookUp. While these are popular dating sites, in my view and research eHarmony receives many more visitors. With this ranking issue found with his online dating facts, it puts into question the rest of the statistics.

Now QuantCast monitors eHarmony directly through a business agreement, you can trust their statistics for this site much more. Bill's book and Quantcast do pretty much agree on the gender ratios and age ranges for eHarmony. For the month of August 37% of the visitors where male (which makes 63% female) and 40% of the visitors where between the ages of 18 to 34. 38% of visitors fell in the age range of 35 to 49 and 20% were over 50.

QuantCast also had another stat which was interesting. 16% of visitors used eHarmony through a business internet connection. With the way companies monitor their internet connections these days, I wouldn't be doing this.

According to a local Michigan author, 97.5% of the almost 300 online daters she interviewed did fudge the facts about at least one aspect of their dating profile. Woman tended to lie more about their age and weight while men lied more about age and their marital status. The author found about 60 percent of men who stated they were either single, separated or divorced where actually married. Most of the interviewed online daters used popular dating sites such as American Singles, eHarmony, Match.com, Senior FriendFinder and Yahoo Personals.

While I expect a few not quite truthful answers in a dating profile (I always assumed more people than not probably round down their weight), I was surprised at the percentage of men she found who lied about their marital status. This is a much larger issue than saying your 6 feet tall, when you are only 5 foot 11 inches. I wonder if the same percentage holds true for men at bars?

This topic would make a good poll. I should create one to see what visitors of Dating Sites Reviews fib about in their dating profiles.

I saw some interesting statistics on a website that mentions:

According to the US Census, 40% of American adults patronize the services of online dating sites resulting in about 120,000 marriages annually.

I searched the U.S. Census Bureau website for awhile and couldn't find the information mentioned in the quote. If this statistic is true, it would mean that eHarmony is responsible for a third of all marriages that resulted from online dating. According to eHarmony they are responsible for on average 118 marriages a day or 43,000 in one year, in the United States (see stats).

I am suspect of the number of total marriages resulting from online dating as mentioned in the quote above since, other facts didn't ring true in the article. As example, it also mentions:

China too expects dating patrons to grow in huge numbers. With 64 million singles residing in the nation, the market is expected to double in the present year.

The United States has a population of roughly 300 million with over 90 million singles. Canada has a population of 30 million with a third being single. This is the same ratio as the United States. China has a population of over 1.3 billion. I would expect them to have more that 64 million singles, a lot more! If the same ratio holds true then you would expect to see over 400 million singles.

For the full article called Internet Dating – The Good, Bad and Ugly, visit MedIndia.com. See our eHarmony Review for more information on this dating service.