Statistics

It appears that AshleyMadison.com has been doing very well this last year. According to Fox Business they have doubled their membership from 1 million to over 2 million. This online service is geared toward people looking for one night stands and they specialize in married men and woman looking for affairs.

This Canadian based dating service has seem huge growth numbers in the United States with the state of California seeing the highest at over 200%. New Jersey and New York also saw great numbers with membership jumps of 172% and 155%. Pennsylvania and Florida saw high numbers as well. This is in part do to the increased exposure of this site on TV talk shows like Montel, Ellen and Dr. Phil where marriage, infidelity and divorces are hot topics.

One rather unique concept that Ashley Madison does (now days) is their dating service is based on a credit system instead of a monthly payment system (like Lavalifes use to be). Basically this means signing up as a member is free but if you wish to contact someone (not including winks) you need to purchase credits to perform the task. You pay for what you use. The other unique thing Ashley Madison allows which I think all dating services should is, it is free for guest members to reply to any mail message from a full member. This is a perfect way to increase communication between members of a paid dating service.

Reuters has an article in their Lifestyle section called Older Japanese go online in search of love. It reviews the experiences of Kawamura, a 65 year taxi driver in Japan, when he decided to try out online dating to find someone to share what he calls his "second life". The dating service he signed up for was Match.com's Japanese site. Match.com launched this site 4 years ago and now has almost 850,000 profiles from singles in Japan. The 30-39 age group makes up almost half the members but the 50 and over age group is almost at 9 percent. This age group is also the fastest growing segment at Match.com Japan. One reason for this is, 1 in 5 Japanese are aged 65 years or older and this is expected to double by 2050, plus Internet use is sky rocketing among Japanese seniors.

For more information about Match.com, please read our Match Review (match.com).

IT News mentions that research by Parship, a large dating service in Europe has found that more and more singles in the United Kingdom are looking towards the rest of Europe for finding love. Of Britain’s 15 million single people, 20 percent or 3 million would consider a serious long distance relationship. This is 3 times more singles considering a long distance relationship than a year ago. The article goes on to explain that a major reason for this shift of views in the relatively cheap cost of air travel when compared to train tickets in the UK. On average a flight to Europe is 40% cheaper than a return train ticket from London to any other major city in Britain.

The same article as mentioned in our previous post also had some traffic details for February (the busiest month for the dating industry) on some of the more popular online dating sites. First of all, traffic in general for dating services fell 5 percent, when compared to last year. For the most part this decreased is blamed on the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.

According to comScore Match.com came out on top in February with 3.9 million unique visitors. Yahoo! Personals was second, followed by Singlesnet.com and then eHarmony with 2.8 million (a 30% increase over last February). In February, 2007 eHarmony had 1.8 million unique visitors.

For the most part the major dating sites had similar or increased traffic this February when compared to last. I think the dating sites that took the hit, traffic wise where probably the smaller niche dating sites. The social networking sites with their interest groups makes finding people with a specific interest easier sometimes.

You may have noticed Singlesnet.com is in the top 5 most visited dating sites and that we do not have a review of them. I haven't done a review because, when I initially looked at them a couple of years ago I had a few issues with there site. There where also a few too many negative user comments about them. I should check out Singlesnet.com again and see if anything has changed.

According to Metro.co.uk 7.8 million people in Britain used internet dating last year. This is up 33% over 2005. With this growth spurt, Mad.co.uk has news that Match.com UK looks to be doubling its £4 million marketing budget from last year to £8 million. This is not surprising since the North American online dating market growth has slowed. Online dating companies now have to think globally and concentrate on the double digit growths of dating services in the European and Chinese markets. This is not easy as it sounds for North American dating services since ads and the dating sites themselves have to be tailored to suit the cultural difference from country to country.

I usually don't post much about non-English dating sites (since I don't speak any other language, except a little French), but it looks like German online dating services are doing just as well as North American sites, according to Just 4 Business. German online dating sites generated 85 million Euros in 2007, a 27% increase from 2006. Jupiter Research has predicted 103 million Euros for 2008.