Yahoo! Personals Information, Statistics, Facts and History

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Yahoo! Personals History Summary

The personals site on Yahoo launched late 1998 and was part of Yahoo! Classifieds. Users could browse by States and major U.S. cities to find personal ads posted by singles. You could browse by relationship types (M4W, W4M, M4M, etc...) along with other relationship specifics like Long-Term, Short-Term, Alternative Lifestyles, Long Distance, and Activity Partners. At this point Yahoo Personals was very much like a normal classified website except the user could add their age, ethnicity, education and a few other attributes to their classified ad. Photos at this point could not be included in the ad. Like any other classifieds sites you had to pay a fee to have your ad posted.

With Yahoo being a major search engine with millions of visitors a day Yahoo Personals became extremely popular. By 2003 Yahoo! Personals had received a major upgrade and moved from using the classifieds website format (and from being under the Yahoo! Classifieds banner). A brand new website that was specifically for online dating was launched. This featured user accounts with full on dating profiles, photos, voice and video. Users could search for profiles and check out other user profiles. If they wished to send messages (either by email or instant message), they would have to then subscribe for under $20 a month. This new website was for the United States, Canada and Australia only. For other countries Yahoo would partner with a popular dating site within that country.

Planning for a new major update to the Yahoo dating platform started in 2005. This resulted with updates on the technical side and many new features rolling out between 2006 to 2008. New features during this time period included new photo capabilities, new searchable fields, and updates to the communication tools to increase the interaction capabilities between members.

By 2010 Yahoo! Personals had 4 million unique visitors in 1 month, this was just 1 million less than their top competitor at the time Match.com. In a surprise move on July 21, 2010 Yahoo! Personals partnered with Match.com to create Match.com on Yahoo. They closed down their own dating service and redirected all visitors to this new branded website. From this point on Match.com became the official dating site of Yahoo.

Yahoo! Personals Facts By Year

2011

• General Information
  • Zonacitas.com is the exclusive online dating partner of Yahoo! Argentina. [1]

References

1. Yahoo! Partners With Zonacitas.com

2010

• General Information
  • Yahoo! Personals partners with Match.com to create Match.com on Yahoo. They are now the official dating site of Yahoo. [1]
  • Yahoo! Personals will officially close on July 21, 2010. Current Yahoo! Personals members have the option to migrate to Match.com. [1]
  • In January of 2010 Yahoo had 4 million unique visitors, just 1 million less than Match.com. [1]
  • In September Lavalife become the exclusive online dating partner of Yahoo! Canada. [2]

References

1. Yahoo! Personals is Now Match.com on Yahoo!
2. Lavalife Partners With Yahoo! Canada

2008

• General Information
  • The US, Canadian and Australian dating sites are run by Yahoo. The other 10 are partner sites. [2]
  • It appears Yahoo! Personals was started in 1998. At the very least it was when the dating site started using the URL http://Personals.Yahoo.com. [3]

2007

• Members
  • Inactive profiles of more than 120 days will be removed from the system. [1]

References

1. Yahoo! Personals decides to settle lawsuit
2. Yahoo Personals has some Interesting Dating Partners
3. Wayback Machine

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