Statistics

There is a small article at the Calgary Herald which mentions a Ipsos Reid survey about Canadians. The survey asked 1,033 Canadians several questions about relationships and love. The following conclusions where reached:

• 70 percent of Canadians are in love (80 percent of woman and 67 percent of men).
• In total 16 percent found love online. When split into age ranges, the 18 to 34 demographic leads with over 25 percent finding love online. Only 7 percent found love aged 55 or older.

So what did we find out from this poll and how does it relate to online dating? Well it seems there are approximately one third of Canadians not in love. This means online dating sites who service Canadians has a market of about 10 million people. It also appears that 84 percent of singles who are in love found it offline, with the other 16 percent finding it online. It is too bad they didn't mention how many Canadians were not successful in finding a mate online, we would then have a more complete picture on how successful online dating is.

According to Reuters, Match.com has partnered with two more companies to exclusively offer their internet visitors an online dating service. The first partnership is with the Latin America web portal called Terra. This web portal serves 7 countries and is considered the largest in the region.

The second multimillion dollar partnership is with NineMSN in Australia. This web portal owned by Microsoft and PBL Media receives almost 8 million visitors a month. Match.com also powers the dating service for MSN here in the United States.

This is a smart move by Match.com as internet dating becomes more crowded here at home. It's difficult to start a new business in a foreign country and attract visitors quickly. It is a lot easier and smarter to find a web site with a large amount of traffic in your demographic and partner with them to offer your service. Match.com has the software and knowledge of what works with online dating while the other companies offer their traffic and website. Match.com has been quite successful in the international arena. In the first quarter of this year their international subscribers grew by 8%.

Read our Match Review (match.com) or our Match.com UK Review to find out more information about this service.

I've been meaning to post this information for a while.

Spark Networks released their First Quarter 2008 Financial Results on May 1, 2008. Spark Networks revenue for this period is $15 million. This is $1.8 million less from the first quarter 2007 and a decrease of 6% over quarter 4, 2007. It is not all bad news though as operating expenses where cut 27% over quarter 1, 2007 which resulted in a $1.6 million net income. Spark Networks reported a net loss of $1.4 million last year in the first quarter.

As far as subscribers are concerned, Spark Networks in the first quarter of 2008 had 195,325 subscribers. This is a decrease of 16% from 231,313 from the first quarter in 2007 and a decrease of 3% from the fourth quarter of 2007.

I was reading an article at the Noblesville Daily Times about recommended online dating sites and I came upon a statistic regarding eHarmony's goal of reducing the U.S. divorce rate by 1 percent per year. I was surprised at this and I didn't remember hearing about it before. After a little more digging I came up with this eHarmony feature article called Religion, Marriage and eHarmony by the founder of eHarmony Dr. Neil Clark Warren which talks a bit about eHarmony's mission to lower the divorce rate by 1 percent (but not in a year as the other article suggests). I have a feeling the article is a few years old but there is no date so I can't be sure. They do have a success story listed with the article that is dated August, 2004.

Currently the divorce rate in America is around 50% and if eHarmony could effectively reduce this by 1% this would mean 500,000 couples would not have divorced because of eHarmony's matching them. When will they be successful? Let's see, currently according to eHarmony's "Why eHarmony" web page, 90 members get married every day. Lets assume these members met each other because of eHarmony, so in reality it is 45 couples who got married. If this rate was static, it would take over 30 years for eHarmony to reach this goal and this is if every single couple did not divorce and was still alive (to meet the 1% of divorce reduction). eHarmony got its start in 2000 so they are in their 8th year or over a quarter of the way to 30 years. I wonder what the current statistic is for eHarmony on how many people who met on eHarmony, got married, and still are?

I doubt eHarmony would ever release this type of information since I am sure some of their couples have gotten divorced and the news would be spinned to eHarmony's disadvantage. I do think eHarmony matching system does work better than most matching systems, so this statistic would probably be much less than the current 50% divorce rate for all of the United States. In the end eHarmony should of really come up with a more realistic achievable goal. Maybe it should of been based on the number of eHarmony married couples every day. I just would have made one that would have been accomplished within a few years.

For more information about eHarmony, try reading our review.

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).