This is the news for February 16th through February 22nd, 2010. Here is the news we covered:
TIMES ONLINE UK – Feb 14 – Facing a stagnant US online dating market, the top US dating sites are focusing more efforts in the UK. Comscore has reported a 1% drop in the global dating market, but the UK is showing a strong 16% growth. Match.com and eHarmony.com, each with a reported 20 million members, dominate the estimated £1 billion a year matchmaking business in the paid site space. PlentyofFish.com holds the crown for the free dating space, attracting 933,000 visitors in Britain last month alone. Kate Bilenki at Plentyoffish said the site appeared to be picking up business that would otherwise have gone to the paid sites. “If you are on Match then you may find that the same people are also on eHarmony. So a lot of people are signing up with us as well because we are free,” she said. eHarmony added 130,000 new UK members in January, bringing their subscriber base to 800,000. Match.com has long been established in the UK and boasts roughly 6.5 million members. FULL ARTICLE @ TIMES ONLINE
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EHARMONY BLOG – Feb 18 – As disclosed by eHarmony to an CNBC interview with Julia Boorstin last Saturday:
* Close to $250M in revenues in 2009
* Double digit registration growth in 2009
* Profitable since 2004
* eHarmony is currently focused on building itself as an independent business.
The full article was originally published at eHarmony blog, but is no longer available.
This is the news for February 10th through February 15th, 2010. Here is the news we covered:
LA TIMES – Feb 14 – "Matchmaking should have been dead by now," said Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch, a site that's been tracking Internet dating since 2004. Instead, the opposite has happened, he said. Matchmakers not only have survived but are thriving, having been aided and legitimized by the entity that was supposed to have killed them off — the Internet. Like social networking, which had many dating industry experts inaccurately predicting the demise of paid Internet dating sites, Internet dating hasn't killed matchmaking, but fed it. In fact, the three go hand in hand, leading relationship-minded singles to ever higher levels of paid service. Though social networking sites such as Facebook may bring people together and do it for free, there's no guarantee that those brought-together people are available and looking for a relationship. Matchmakers charge $1,000 to $100,000, depending on the exclusivity of the service, the number of matches and how willing they are to go the extra mile.
"You're the therapist, the mother, the best friend, the sister, the nonsexual girlfriend. You have to be everything," said Patti Stanger, star of the TV series "The Millionaire Matchmaker" and proprietor of the L.A.-based Millionaire's Club matchmaking service. Stanger charges men $25k+ a year and female "millionairesses" $55k for 28 months of unlimited introductions. (She finds her female clients take longer to match.)' "
Increasingly, Internet dating is bringing in a matchmaking component. Match's Daily 5 delivers "five matches based on our prediction of which two people would most want to engage in a conversation together," said Match CEO Greg Blatt. Another matchmaking feature called Singled Out, is for "when we have a match with a stronger likelihood of connecting and want to highlight that to our users," Blatt said. "A lot of people put their relationships on the wrong course because they select the wrong people," said Gian Gonzaga, senior director of R&Dfor eHarmony. "A lot of the things that are powerful forces for initial attraction are different from what makes a relationship successful."
"Women are very attracted to the [matchmaking] concept because it's private. They can't be browsed," said Julie Ferman, founder of Cupid's Coach in Westlake Village, a matchmaking service that charges $2,500 to $25,000 annually for an average of 2.2 introductions per month and takes both women and men as paying clients. Matchmaking is strongest among thirty-, forty- and fiftysomethings, according to Ferman. Her average client splits the difference at a median age of 46 and makes at least $50,000. There's thousands of singles using hundreds of matchmakers — eLove, It's Just Lunch, the Millionaire's Club.
It's worth dropping $5k to $10k on a matchmaker if you've got the cash and are looking for a serious relationship, but online sites that charge or have extensive questionnaires can also be a good option, Brooks said. Nonetheless, matchmakers may not have many prospective dates for men in their 20s or women in their 60s, he added.
"The Internet dating services are flawed because they lack service — they have great price, great choice, but not a lot of service," Brooks said. "The matchmaker services are severely flawed because they lack choice."
FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES
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LA TIMES – Feb 14 – "Keep profiles brief and specific. Leave the novel at home. Don't put pictures of you and your pets or children. Don't post party photos."
— Julie Spira, author of Cyber-DatingExpert.com and the book "The Perils of Cyber-Dating"
"It's great when people put five or 10 pictures of themselves that depict things they love to do, pictures that communicate your personality. It's about making it personal [with] adjectives, interests, descriptions and honesty."
— Bob Holden, EHarmony's VP North America
"You should always have one close-up to the face. Post three to five photos. Also run 50 or so through HotorNot.com [and let people vote] for which ones score the best."
— Mark Brooks, editor at OnlinePersonalsWatch.com
"Get a friend to help you write it. Be honest about who you are and what you're looking for."
— Greg Liberman, president and COO, Spark Networks
"If you start on a date with a picture from 10 years ago and you've gained 10 pounds or if you have a lot less hair now, you're starting on false assumptions. Your profile should be three paragraphs. It should be a conversation piece."
— Whitney Casey, Match.com's relationship expert and author of the book "The Man Plan."
"The more someone knows about you, the less they want to date you. If you write a massive essay, they're going to find something to dislike about that person. If you don't know something, everyone assumes you're the same as them. Let everything else come out during the dates."
— Markus Frind, founder/CEO of PlentyofFish.com.
FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES
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LA TIMES – Feb 14 – Piper Jaffray Investment Research predicted U.S. spending on online dating would reach $1.7 billion annually by 2013, and $1.2 billion was spent in 2008. The Internet is essentially the world's largest bar, explains Mark Brooks, editor of OnlinePersonalsWatch. The first step is figuring out which nightspot is for you: There are those with no cover charges, PlentyofFish and OKCupid, and hookup spots Fling.com and OnlineBootyCall.com. There are "theme nights" geared toward particular interests, such as BikerPlanet.com, and "neighborhood watering holes" based on religion or culture, such as JDate or AsiaFriendFinder. There's comfort in name recognition from eHarmony and Match. Or get a yenta through eLove.com.
"One of our more popular sites as of late is DateaCougar.com," says Stephen Ventura, VP of First Beat Media, which owns GothScene.com, BikerPlanet.com, FitnessDates.com and others. Want a dash of romance with your social networking? Brooks says to look to Zoosk. It syncs with a users' Facebook's profile page. Spark's Kizmeet is attempting something similar. Still, Brooks says it's unlikely that social networking sites will kill the online dating market. "If people are anonymous, people tend to be more aggressive and more outspoken," he says. "On an Internet dating site, if you want to cut somebody off, you can easily. When you're on a social network, you have to be [polite] because their friends are watching."
Match.com's mobile members alone grew 250% from 2008 to 2009, says Whitney Casey, Match's relationship expert. Industry experts Brooks and CyberDatingExpert.com's, Julie Spira also praise GPS-based mobile applications like Skout and Foursquare. "I'm looking forward to people using Internet dating on the iPad," Brooks adds. "You can look up a profile very easily on that format. The iPhone is still a phone." Spira says to look to webcam dating sites, Speeddate.com or WooMe.com. Hitwise reports that visits to free dating sites like PlentyofFish rose 19% over the previous year.
FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES
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SOUTH JERSEY MAGAZINE – Feb 11 - Internet dating is not only more common; it’s also becoming the norm—no different than, say, meeting a partner at a bar or party. Kate Bilenki, PlentyOfFish.com’s “director of love,” revealed that her free site gets 1.8M hits from the Garden State on a monthly basis. A 2007 study eHarmony found that 19.4% of respondents met their spouse through the Internet, a 5.3% increase from 2005. “It’s time and money saving,” Bilenki says. ”With online dating, you don’t spend $50 on drinks or dinner or a movie.” There is also the advantage of finding people outside of the usual circle of friends, said Whitney Casey, relationship expert for Match.com. The other big draw is the enhanced comfort level that occurs when you take the “blind” out of “blind date. “You can pre-screen people pretty well before you meet them,” Bilenki says. “If you want tall dark and handsome, you can punch that into the search criteria and, voilà—there it is.” There are niche dating sites that can point you in the right direction such as TrekPassions, RepublicanSingles, VeggieConnection, DateAGolfer, WealthyMen and more.. FULL ARTICLE @ SOUTH JERSEY MAGAZINE
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MONEY CONTROL – Feb 9 - Singles looking for love put too much emphasis
on looks and passion in trying to find their perfect match, according
to research released ahead of Valentine's Day by eHarmony. Single women
aged under 45 were 13 times more likely than married women under 45 to
stress the importance of feeling passion and desire toward their
partners. Single women aged over 45 were twice as likely to stress the
importance of love, compared to their married peers who were more
likely to cite companionship. FULL ARTICLE @ MONEY CONTROL
DISCOVERY NEWS – Feb 7 - Online dating can be misleading from the
get-go, starting with people's dating profiles, research shows. Nicole
Ellison and her colleagues measured the difference between dating
profile "facts" and reality by comparing posted information with what
was on the test subject's drivers' license. ~52.6% of men lied about
their height, as did 39% of women. 64.1% of women lied about their
weight. Age in profiles is also suspect, since 24.3% of men and 13.1%
of women were untruthful about their age. "Never before has the dating
world been so handy for married men and women looking for a fling,"
said Beatriz Avila Mileham, who studied online infidelity while at the
University of Florida. 83% percent of Mileham's study participants said
they did not consider themselves to be cheating. Despite the pitfalls
of online dating, experts say certain people may benefit. A 2004 study
by eHarmony's Steve Carter and Chadwick Snow shows "significantly
higher levels of relationship satisfaction for married couples who met
through eHarmony as compared to a group who met offline". FULL ARTICLE @ DISCOVERY NEWS