Category: Match.com

BALTIMORE SUN — Sept 25 — When Dinah Larson was single, she and a friend used to read e-mails from guys and decide if they were potential dates based on their e-mailing ability. "If he wrote like he talked, and was funny? An e-mail is a first impression, like a first date face-to-face. Match.com advises members not to stay in the e-mail stage for long. "Just because it’s online dating doesn’t mean you’re dating online," Kathleen Roldan says.  Here are some suggestions: 1. Write the way you talk. Read it aloud to see if it sounds like you. 2. Be clever but not cute. 3. Be plain-spoken, but not stilted. 4. If it’s early in the relationship, keep e-mails short. 5. Punctuation and grammar matter. 6. Remember that tone doesn’t always translate. 7. Use emoticons and IM acronyms like LOL sparingly.

HISPANIC PR WIRE — Sept 12 — Terra Networks has teamed up with Match.com to enable U.S. Hispanics the search tools necessary to find their ideal partner from Match.com's more than 1 million registered users in the Spanish version of its service in the U.S.  Terra's Amor channel, which heavily promotes Match.com, previously averaged 1.5 million chats per month.

The full article was originally published at Hispanic Business, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: Matchmaker.com?  Que?

PR NEWSWIRE — Sept 15 — 60,000+ people register on Match.com daily. National Singles Week is September 18-24.  According to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau and other research: <1> We stay single longer; the estimated U.S. median ages at first marriage in 2004 for women and men are 25.8 and 27.4 respectively, an increase of 5 years for women and 4.2 years for men since 1970. There are more than three times as many never-married women and men ages 30 to 34 today as there were in 1970.  <2> The number of older single people is growing; There are 14.9 million unmarried and single Americans aged 65 and older. People aged 50 and older represent the fastest-growing segment of the Match.com community. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, more than 1.6 million men and women aged 65-plus visited online personals sites in April 2000.  <3> Being single doesn't necessarily mean being alone; there are 12.4 million single parents living with their children. Between 1970 and 2003 the number of single mothers increased from 3 million to 10 million; the number of single fathers increased from less than half a million to 2 million.

Mark Brooks: It would seem the institution of marriage is out of fashion. Is this because we have become a throw-away culture?  Are we just not willing to accept or work through a failing relationship?  Is this a bad thing?  We're living longer, women are more financially independent and the 'institution' is losing it's utility.  Should we drift through a series of relationships and forego marriage?  Perhaps we just need more help choosing the right partner…and help in early identification of incompatibilities and patterns of poor communication.  Online personals strive to help users make better matches by increasing the selection pool.  Sites such as eHarmony, TRUE, Perfectmatch and Tickle are focusing on guiding people to better relationship matches through personality profiling. 

MARKETING VOX — Sept 15th — According to two sources, Time Warner is in talks with Microsoft about selling a stake in AOL and then combining it with Microsoft’s Web unit MSN. Under the plan being considered, Microsoft would pay some money to Time Warner for the AOL stake, leaving the two companies approximately equal partners in the venture.

Mark Brooks: Match currently provides AOL’s and MSN’s online personals.