Statistics

A Press Release by Date.com talks mainly about the results of a poll Date.com conducted on their dating site (seems like these days everyone will release a press release about anything). The poll asked female members if they would wait for Mr. Right to come along to get married, and then have children or would they have children without the commitment of marriage. 58% of the respondents said they would not wait with only 42% saying marriage should come first.

The release never mentioned how many actually took part in the poll but I am surprised by the results. I would have thought that at least 75% of people would have wanted to wait until marriage before having kids. Every one of my friends would only want children after they are married so I am a little sceptical of these results. I have a feeling ,surprising results like this gives companies an excuse just to post a press release. Another example of this is, Chemistry.com survey.

Advertising Age has an article about Perfectmatch and 50 something daters. From 2005 to 2006 Perfectmatch have seen a 60% increase in 50+ singles. From 2006 to 2007 this growth has surged to 140%, making senior singles one of Perfectmatches most important demographics. This week to help attract more 50 plus singles, Perfectmatch.com has been featured on the TV dating show called "Another Chance for Romance". This show is aired on the Retirement Living TV channel that appears on Comcast and DirecTV in the United States.

Please read our review, for more information on Perfectmatch.com.

According to JupiterResearch (a respected service which creates detailed reports from analyzing internet traffic) online personals is expected to have steady growth in the coming years of roughly 16% per year. As a whole it has been estimated that the online personals industry revenue for 2007 was $900 million. By 2012 revenue is projected to be $1.9 Billion, more than doubled. This is all happening when according to some experts Social Networking was going to have taken over online dating by now.

See the full press release here.

An article called Complaints soar against online dating services in Northwest talks about the rise of complaints against dating sites in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It states, consumer complaints filed, rose 73%, in 2006 over 2005. In 2006 there were a total of 2,525 complaints to the Better Business Bureau in the area of Alaska, Oregon and Western Washington. The year 2007 is expected to increase as well. The complaints in the article where broken down into the following groups:

• 35% of the people complained about the quality of the singles available and matching system.
• 17% was for poor customer service.
• 15.1% of the complaints was in regards to the number of dates from the service.
• 13.7% where about high pressure sales tactics.

This is a sharp increase in complaints, especially since dating services have been established since well before 2005. So what has changed? I think it has a lot to do with the rise of niche dating sites. These types of sites are a lot smaller than the popular dating services and tend to be run on a shoe string budget. For this reason some niche dating site owners may be making exaggerated marketing claims on their site to try and lure in paying members. It is also pretty easy for any website to make itself appear a lot larger than it is, to trick people into a paying membership. A lot of the smaller dating services are also just a one man show which makes customer service for the site hard to keep up with, even if they have a limited number of members. Of course not all of these sites are bad, just a small percentage. Unfortantly though, it may be giving the online dating industry a bad name.

If we take a look at the numbers again 2,525 complaints are not a whole lot when you consider it has been estimated that between 30 and 40 million Americans have logged into a dating service in 2007. So let's assume a lower number of 25 million Americans who used a dating site in the year 2006. Now the question is what percentage of the population does Alaska, Oregon and Western Washington make up for in the United States. It's not large, so let's be conservative and say 3%. Now, 3% of 25 million Americans is 750,000 singles. When you measure this number against the 2,525 complaints, you get less than 0.4% of singles using dating sites actually complain to the Better Business Bureau. This is a very, very, very small number of complaints. So in a way, this article makes it seem that there are a large number of complaints against dating sites by just comparing the number of complaints with last year and not taking the total number of complaints and the actual number of singles using dating services. So what do my numbers not take into account (you are probably asking yourself)? Well, obviously not everyone will take the time to complain to the BBB. Also, not all dating services belong to the BBB, so complaints would not be filed for them. How does this affect things? I'm not totally sure but, after looking at other industries and companies in the BBB database and looking at the complaints, I feel online dating sites as a whole don't have any more complaints than any other industry on the internet. As with each industry, someone will always not be satisfied with what they bought and there will always be companies that do not have the best intentions for their customers.

So, how do you find a reputable online dating site? A good start (besides reading our site and user reviews) is the Better Business Bureau. From here you can search for the dating service to see if it belongs to the BBB. If so, it will show the complaints (if any) and if they where resolved. Remember, most large businesses will have complaints. The key here is to see if the complaints of the company where resolved to the satisfaction of the BBB. The article at kgw.com also contains some very wise tips when considering a dating service, especially one that is not as well known.

With New Years Eve just past and Valentines Day just a month and a half away this marks the busiest time period for online dating sites. Singles are either fulfilling their New Years resolution to take time out of their hectic lives to find love or, they want to find someone before the day of expressing love, Valentines Day. Several dating services such as Match.com, eHarmony and PerfectMatch.com all start major advertising campaigns or increase spending in advertising this month to try and capture these additional online daters. This marketing is done mainly via both the internet and with TV commercials. Most dating sites hope to get at least a 15% increase in singles signing up for their service.

An article by the Seattle Times has a few more statistics for you about dating in the month of January. Mark Brooks from OnlinePersonalsWatch.com is quoted in this article as well.

The New York Times has published an article regarding Chemistry.com new attack ads on eHarmony. Chemistry will be launching ads this week in newspapers and magazines which strike out at eHarmony for not accepting gay members. eHarmony counters Chemistry.com's attacks by stating:

eHarmony's matching system is based on psychological data collected from heterosexual married couples, and we have not offered a service for those seeking same-sex matches. Nothing precludes us from offering a same-sex service in the future, but it's not a service we offer now.

You may remember, last April Chemistry did a similar ad campaign called "Rejected by eHarmony". They spent $20 million on that campaign which helped raise their membership levels by 80% and gay members have increased by will over 200%. Currently it is estimated that Chemistry has 3.7 million registered members and eHarmony has 17 million members.