THE NEXT WEB – Aug 14 - eHarmony has released a universal iOS app. According to the App Store description, the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app
for eHarmony users lets you:
– View your matches
– Receive match updates
– Upload photos
–
Communicate with your matches
FULL ARTICLE @ THE NEXT WEB
CHICAGO TRIBUNE – July 23 – Online dating is now an accepted and commonplace way to meet someone, having largely shed its stigma as an option for only socially stunted nerds. Match.com celebrated its 15th anniversary in April. Online dating has grown into big business. Match.com is part of IAC/Interactive Corp. and recently became the exclusive dating service on Yahoo, while eHarmony has acquired other Web properties related to weddings and parenting, including Weddingbee and JustMommies. Another twist on the model was launched this year through WinkVid, which offers online speed dating through webcams, with each date lasting four minutes. Although some dating sites brag about their ability to match up life partners, other services acknowledge their limitations."I really think of our responsibility as 'no bad first dates,' which seems like a low bar, but the reason is we can't promise you a soul mate," said Sam Yagan, co-founder of OKCupid. "That's ridiculous. That's chemistry and what happens when you see each other."
The full article was originally published at iStock Analyst, but is no longer available.
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PASADENA STAR NEWS – July 13 – eHarmony is moving its corporate
headquarters out of Pasadena to Santa Monica. Eric Duyshart, Pasadena's
economic development manager, said he and others in the city held talks
with company officials in an unsuccessful bid to convince the firm to
stay. While eHarmony provides very little to the city in direct sales
tax revenue, Pasadena greatly benefitted from having the jobs in the
city. FULL ARTICLE @ PASADENA STAR NEWS
WSJ – July 12 – Founded in 1999, eHarmony started off in a space with sites like Match.com and Yahoo Personals that catered more to men, emphasized free services and enabled users to sign up and begin using the service quickly and easily. But eHarmony emphasized privacy, which made it popular among women. CEO Greg Waldorf would not discuss exact revenue figures but said reports of the company generating $250M in revenue annually are "in the right ballpark." There are no immediate plans for an IPO, Waldorf said. The company has raised ~$110M from Sequoia Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures and Fayez Sarofim & Co. and doesn't need any more venture funding, he said. "eHarmony has an advantage over other dating sites in that its users tend to be more serious about dating since they must fill out a long questionnaire. Therefore those people who are interested are willing to pay up front to subscribe", said Mark Brooks, a consultant and editor of OnlinePersonalsWatch.com. eHarmony is now in the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Canada and is soon going to announce its move into more countries. However, can eHarmony be a victim of its own success if its users get married and leave the site? That is a challenge to the company, as its U.S. user base is already large and its U.S. user growth is probably flat, said Brooks, the industry consultant. The company is still growing in other countries though, he said. One small way eHarmony addresses this is through an "elongated" communication process, longer than other dating sites, which ensures safety but also makes it take longer for people to get to know each other, and thus stay on the site longer, Brooks said. FULL ARTICLE @ WSJ
THE BIG MONEY – June 27 – Most subscription-based sites have been
battling a downward trend for a while. And since last year, Match.com's
traffic has been flat at best. As Techcrunch notes, Match.com does most
of its growing these days by buying competing Web sites, rather than
reinventing the world's oldest dance. Match.com is also becoming
Yahoo's official personals service. In the same vein, eHarmony found
itself last summer trying to explain how a 20% increase in
registrations led to a 33% drop in traffic. The numbers suggest that
while singles in search of a match may post a profile, they're not
finding who they're looking for. The true threat is "noneconomic"
competition that steals market share and has no interest in selling
out. Markus Frind created Plenty of Fish as a coding exercise in 2003.
Primarily supported by advertising, Frind this year introduced a paid
membership level for users who are "serious," but the site still has
free access. But as in any good arms race, even Frind is now promising
that his site can predict whom its users will end up marrying, so he is
taking the fight to paid sites' intellectual turf. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST
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DAILY NEWS – June 12 – Between 2007 and 2009 alone, a study titled "The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary", found that 30% of couples in the survey met their partners online. Only friends help to hook up more couples than the Internet these days. Nevertheless today more than 120,000 marriages a year owe their origin to the Internet, according to Online Dating Magazine. A 2007 Harris Interactive survey of more then 10,000 people for eHarmony found that 31%of married couples age 45 to 54 met on the Internet, compared with 18% of 20 to 44-year-olds who did. 40M Americans look at online dating sites each month, with online dating revenues growing 10-15% per year and will hit $1.9 billion within three years, according to Piper Jaffray & Co.
The full article was originally published at Daily News, but is no longer available.
SMART COMPANY – May 26 - eHarmony is one of the global industry leaders, with revenue estimated at ~$250M and more than 30M registered users worldwide. Today we're talking to VP of international marketing, Sean Cornwell, about the keys to customer acquisition, the balance between quantity and quality in the dating world and why Australian married couples are happier than couples overseas.
Q: When you started here and how big your presence is?
A: We launched the site in November 2007. And now we are one of the largest online dating services in Australia. We have ~650,000 registrants.
A: Users only receive matches that are compatible with them.
Q: Are there instances where someone who's got a unique personality might go for a little while without getting any matches?
A: In Australia that's unlikely. We certainly have a very strong and healthy matching pool.
Q: Tell us a bit about the business model.
A: We're a subscription business so we're not free.
Q: In some ways you don't want to retain customers for too long because you hope they've found a terrific much, but if it doesn't quite work out for them I guess you want to keep them on the site. How do you get that balance right?
A: We're all about helping people to find a long-term relationship, hopefully to help them find "the one" as it were and it's like anything else, you know the more you put into eHarmony, the more you get out of it.
Q: What works from a customer acquisition point of view?
A: We're always testing new marketing channels, new techniques, new tactics and so forth. We use TV, we use radio, we use all sorts of online channels and so forth.
Q: Have you noticed any differences in the Australian market to some of the other places that you're in?
A: Australia is no different to other markets, English speaking or non-English speaking. There are certain differences in the media markets. There are also subtleties and differences between each market in each culture that have certain things that they tend to value more strongly than others. One of the interesting things that we have discovered through eHarmony Labs, is around Australian couples. When we've compared them to the US or the UK, overall Australia's married couples are the happiest with their marriages. They tend to put in more effort.
Q: Has the rise of social networking helped or hindered you guys?
A: I'm not sure that we have a clear answer on that. I'd say probably with the 25 to 30 age group, there is a greater comfort through finding potential dates through networks like Facebook and the like. But then again it's much more around the casual end of the spectrum rather than serious long-term relationships.
The full article was originally published at Smart Company, but is no longer available.
ABC NEWS – May 21 - eHarmony claims it is responsible for 236 marriages
a day — marriages that have already produced 100,000 babies in this
country, the company says. All of the relationships were born of a
secret computer algorithm that matches people. "I think of our
algorithm as a starting point," said eHarmony CEO Greg Waldorf. "It's a
way to say to the user, 'Here are a whole bunch of matches that you're
compatible with.' I wouldn't presume to tell anybody that I know
exactly which user they're going to be interested in. We're giving them
a really good set of users to start with, and then it flips to that
very personal approach of, 'Wow, I think I have something in common
with this person.'" Waldorf said his goal is to reach America's 90
million eligible single people. FULL ARTICLE @ ABC NEWS
MINYANVILLE – May 19 – It's been stated that faith and rationality are
two models of belief that are resolutely incompatible. Marrying faith
and rationality is not only spiritually beneficial, but can be
profitable as well. Just ask psychologist and eHarmony founder, Neil
Clark Warren, a man who has effectively integrated moral elements of
his evangelistic religion with practical constituents of business
management to create the most popular dating site. After appearing on
Dobson’s radio show in August 2001, eHarmony received 90,000 new
referrals. However, in 2005, Warren began to distance the company from
the conservative Christian community to try and achieve greater
mainstream involvement. This decision — while profitable for the
company — caused grievances on both ends. Running on a platform open
to only heterosexual applicants, eHarmony suffered an inevitable fate
when a New Jersey man complained to New Jersey’s Division on Civil
Rights that his registration to eHarmony was rejected due to his
homosexual classification. The company settled the suit, created a
satellite site Compatiblepartners.net, and offered the first 10,000
same-sex registrants a free six-month subscription. Many evangelists
felt that eHarmony should have gone down fighting, and even argued that
allowing a same-sex service was a betrayal to the Christian community. FULL ARTICLE @ MINYANVILLE
Mark Brooks: eHarmony raised $110 million in June 2004. Neil Clark Warrens stake and control was diminished at that point. As much as he may object to having a same sex dating site under eHarmony's wing, its the right thing to do and a good and appropriate extension of the eHarmony service. Power to eHarmony for doing the right thing, and settling in this manner. Here's OPW's comparison of eHarmony vs Compatible Partners from September 2009.
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CREDIT CARD – May 3 - A study about online dating and credit habits by ProtectMyID.com, Experian's identity theft protection program, found that 50% of the respondents never verify the authenticity of their chat mates, and ~10% sent them their SS numbers or bank account. According to ConsumerFraudReporting.org, as much as 30% of online personalities are bogus. More, sharing personal details is intrinsic to forming a relationship, but it also can expose you to fraud, says Paul Falzone CEO of eLove. They may ask for your home or work address to send you a gift." Such tidbits are invaluable currency for identity thieves. Of course, online dating companies strive for customer protection. For instance, eHarmony's publishes safety tips on their home page, in "5 Dating Rules You Should Never Break," including "if a potential date's actions or words set off an internal alarm system, you owe it to yourself to pay attention and act accordingly." Falzone, though, recognizes that it can take more than caution to stay safe when conversing over the Internet. Their members all go through criminal background checks, but filtering fraud is not guaranteed. eLove is making an extra effort, however, with a new product called eLove Select. Before getting the company's seal of approval, participating daters must physically go to one of their 50 locations and get checked, screened and cleared. FULL ARTICLE @ CREDIT CARD