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Kathryn's Blog: News About Dating Sites and Types
Internet dating is nothing but a growth industry. Disasters? People go online to look for love. The economy is in the pits? People go online to look for love. Bad weather? People go online to look for love. Holidays over? People go online to look for love. It seems any excuse will do. It’s cheaper than a date, saves time, and it works. Go for it!
Online dating soars as temperatures plunge
By Will Smale
Business reporter, BBC News
Singletons seem to be using their time stuck at home to join dating agencies
As the UK’s big chill shows no sign of ending, people appear to be seeking to raise the temperature with a bit of online romance.
With millions of Britons unable to make it into work because of the snow and ice, one of the unforeseen effects has been a reported surge in the number of people exploring website dating agencies.
Stuck at home and bored with daytime television, singletons are seemingly turning their attention to finding a new partner via their laptop, with two of the UK’s largest online dating sites both reporting a big increase in traffic over the past two days.
Mysinglefriend.com says visitors to its website soared by 55% on Tuesday alone, with its busiest time coming at 1500 rather than the traditional 2200.
Meanwhile rival site Singles365.com says its visitor numbers grew 27% across Tuesday and Wednesday compared with a year ago.
‘Icebreaker’
“January is our busiest month anyway, as many single people make it their new year’s resolution to find a partner,” says Singles365.com spokeswoman Katie Mowe.
“However, the increase in traffic over the past two days has been very unusual, as typically they are quiet days for us - we are usually busiest at weekends.
“We can only put this down to the bad weather meaning more people are staying at home. We saw a similar picture when we had snow last year, but obviously the weather is a lot worse at present so the increase has been much more marked.”
Sarah Beeny, founder of Mysinglefriend.com, says the snow was “proving to be an icebreaker for singles out there”.
“January has always been our busiest month, but this surge in traffic is unprecedented.”
The big increase in people using dating websites comes at a time when the industry is already booming.
Online websites have helped remove the stigma attached to dating agencies
According to a study by market research group Forrester Research, the number of Britons paying to use online dating agencies is set to grow from 2.6 million people in 2006 to six million by 2012, creating revenues of around £368m.
This vast increase has come as more adults are computer literate, the old stigma attached to joining dating agencies has dissipated, and the ability to join an agency via a laptop makes people more comfortable and confident to take the plunge.
However, it is not just traditional dating websites that have reported a big increase in business over the past few days.
IllicitEncounters.com - a website which provides a platform for married people to conduct affairs - says it gained a record number of new members on Wednesday, with the majority coming from areas of the country worst hit by the extreme weather, including Hampshire, Berkshire, and the wider West Country.
The firm says that over the past six days as a whole, it gained 2,567 new members, 37% more than usual, and as a result has needed to take on additional staff to cope with the rush.
“In light of these figures, I’d be interested to see how much work those working from home have actually done,” said spokeswoman Sara Hartley.
But with the bad weather set to continue into next week, many people who have found a prospective new partner via a dating website may have to wait sometime before they can actually meet up for their first date.
Yea, Spark.com! Fatties of the world, unite!
Spark.com Thinks BeautifulPeople.com Acted Ugly
New Online Dating Site Offers Free Subscription to ‘Booted Beauties’
BEVERLY HILLS, CA--(Marketwire - January 6, 2010) - Spark®.com, created by the same people behind such successful online dating sites as JDate®.com, BlackSingles.com® and ChristianMingle®.com, announced today that they will offer a free subscription to all 5,000 members ousted from BeautifulPeople.com yesterday for allegedly putting on a few holiday pounds and being “newly chubby.”
“As a company based on inclusion and creating communities where people feel comfortable and safe, we’re outraged over the widely publicized actions taken by BeautifulPeople.com,” said Adam Berger, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Spark Networks®, the parent company of Spark.com. “We created Spark.com to be a place where all are welcome and we adhere to the philosophy that any two people willing to take the time to first know themselves, and then learn about others, can improve existing relationships as well as form new and rewarding ones. We are so disappointed in how that ‘other site’ behaved, and feel the right thing to do is to offer a free one-month subscription to anyone who was kicked off that other site for putting on a few extra holiday pounds.”
To take advantage of this special offer, all people have to do is log on to Spark.com, complete a free profile and email their Spark.com username and rejection notice from the other site to , and they’ll receive a free one-month subscription within 24 hours.
Easily one of the LEAST attractive attributes I see in both men and women is fat phobia, followed quickly by looks snobs—those folks who look for perfection, even thought they are far from it themselves. Here’s a dating site that is a wonderful refuge for them both—fat phobics and looksists. And see what BeautifulPeople.com, a dating site that has a “strict ban on ugly people” did after the holidays. Charming, huh? At least they have a place of their own to hang out, away from the rest of us who are a bit more tolerant.
Dating site for beautiful people expels ‘fatties’ after holiday weight gain
By Mallory Simon, CNN
(CNN)—A dating site that markets itself as an elite community for beautiful people with a “strict ban on ugly people” has axed about 5,000 members for packing on the pounds during the holiday season.
The international site BeautifulPeople.com threw out members after they posted photos “revealing that they have let themselves go,” according to a company statement.
“As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld,” said Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com. “Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”
The site describes itself as an “elite online club, where every member works the door”—that is, users can join only after enough members vote them “beautiful” during the 48 hours after their profile is uploaded.
And apparently, enough beautiful people were angry that some members had enjoyed a bit too many treats during the holiday season.
So BeautifulPeople.com sent those flagged members e-mails, according to the company statement, telling them they could register again for the site when the extra pudge was gone.
“We responded to complaints by moving the newly chubby members back to the rating stage. This is the same as having them re-apply,” Greg Hodge, managing director of BeautifulPeople.com, said in a statement.
The company said it “expelled” 1,520 users from the U.S., 832 from the U.K., 533 from Canada, 510 from Poland, 425 from Germany, 402 from Italy, 323 from France, 220 from Denmark, 176 from Turkey and 88 people from Russia. In the e-mail, it gave users suggestions for boot camps and workout facilities to get themselves back in shape.
Some gave the site a shot again, hoping fellow users might not see them as the “fatties” others had.
“Their re-applications were reviewed by existing members, and only a few hundred were voted back in. Over 5,000 were rejected,” Hodge added.
Hodge admits, and has admitted from the time his company started, that his site may not be fair, but people want to date someone they are attracted to.
“Is it elitist? Yes, it is, because our members want it to be,” Hodge said when the company started out in 2005. “Is it lookist? Yes, it is, because our members want it to be. Is it PC? No, it’s not, but it’s honest.”
And on this site, beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder; only one in five applicants is normally accepted, a company statement said.
Maintaining those standards is what the site is about, Hodge said, and that’s why people were expelled.
“Every year we see that some of our members from Western cultures eat and drink to excess over the holidays, and clearly their looks suffer,” he said in a statement. “The U.S.A. has been grossly over-indulging since Thanksgiving. It’s no wonder that so many members have been expelled from the network. We hope they will be back after shedding the festive pounds.”
Love those facts and figures. See my underlines for particularly interesting numbers about good old AshleyMadison.com I actually had someone call me up the other day, thinking that I somehow had something to do with Ashley. Only to say bad things. The only good thing I can say about AshleyMadison is that perhaps it gives married people who want to fool around a place to go. I haven’t heard so much lately about married folks trolling the dating sites and pretending to be single, so maybe Ashley is doing her job.
Marriage and divorce ... with a modern twist: PDQuotient
By John Campanelli, The Plain Dealer
(edited)
8—Percent decline in the divorce rate from 2003 to 2008 in states without constitutional bans on same-sex marriage.
20.7—Percent decline in the divorce rate from 2003 to 2008 in Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage (2004).
0.9—Percent increase in the divorce rate from 2003 to 2008 in the states with constitutional bans on same-sex marriage.
About 20—Percent of new divorce cases that contain the word “Facebook” in their petitions.
30—Percent of “singles” on online dating sites who aren’t single.
More than 4.5 million—Members of AshleyMadison.com, the dating site for married people that carries the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair.”
70—Percent of AshleyMadison.com members who are male.
I love it when I see science catching up and studying what is actually going on in the dating world. Here’s proof of what I have been saying and seeing about the use of dating sites by older singles: Underlines are mine.
Online dating more popular
NEW YORK - ANY lingering stigma about finding true love online seems to be fading, particularly among older adults, researchers found.
In a study of 175 newlywed couples scientists at Iowa State University said those who met through online dating agencies, or social networking sites, tended to be older than other couples who met through traditional ways offline.
They were also less likely to be marrying for the first time and had shorter courtships before tying the knot - 18.5 months instead of 42 months.
‘In many cases, there are real structural forces that encourage the support and use of these technologies,’ said Alicia Cast, an associate professor of sociology at the university. ‘And one of them is just structural constraints on people’s time - such as people who have kids, or have full-time jobs, or work long or extensive hours,’ she added in a statement.
But the online spouses were as attractive, intelligent and had the same self-esteem levels of the offline couples.
Prof Cast and her graduate assistant Jamie McCartney studied data on the couples over a three-year period. Twenty five couples in the study had met online. ‘My understanding is that there are very few studies that have been able to simultaneously get access to a source of couples who met through more conventional means, along with those who choose to meet people online,’ said Prof Cast.—REUTERS
I love how you can find just about anything you want on the Web, even, as we well know, Sweetie Pies. But I do have difficulty with the thought that busy people can’t make the time to manage their own love life. How do they expect to make a relationship work, with all the time that THAT takes, if they don’t even have the time to find the guy or gal in the first place? But where there is a need, a service appears. Here’s one that may work for you, if you can’t find the time to do what needs doing.
Busy Women Can Now Outsource Online Dating to VirtualDatingAssistants.com
With the loneliest time of the year right around the corner, Virtual Dating Assistants LLC, a company that has allowed men to outsource online dating since June of this year, has decided to open its doors to time-strapped women. Now busy female professionals can fully delegate their online dating duties to an expert team of virtual dating assistants for only $480/month.
Miami, FL (PRWEB) December 1, 2009—
On June 10th, Virtual Dating Assistants LLC entered the online dating scene with a unique concept. The company proposed to enable busy men to fully outsource their efforts on internet dating sites such as Match.com and OkCupid.com to a team of seasoned pros. The company’s virtual dating assistants handle everything from profile creation to online interaction and, ultimately, bring online dating offline for its male clients.
Since its initial launch, the company’s executives reportedly came to the realization that not offering to service women was a big mistake. According to Scott Valdez, Co-Founder and President of VDA, “While our service was initially designed for men, countless women have gone out of their way the past five months to make it clear to us that they could benefit from a service like ours. Once we were certain we had made a strategic error, we began testing profile strategies, emails and other factors to determine what approaches men respond to on internet dating websites. We had to make sure we were able deliver the same level of service and overall results to women before we officially opened the door.”
What we realized though, after talking to countless time-strapped women, is that they need help weeding through the masses for potential keepers. Plus, many of them want to take a proactive approach to pursuing the most eligible bachelors possible online.
That time is now. For $480 per month, the company’s virtual dating assistants will devote 40 hours towards helping busy women to identify and meet high-quality men through a variety of online dating websites.
“I had always assumed that professional men would find our service most appealing since they have to take a proactive approach and craft hundreds of customized messages to women online, which takes considerable time” remarks co-founder Mark Anderson. “What we realized though, after talking to countless time-strapped women, is that they need help weeding through the masses for potential keepers. Plus, many of them want to take a proactive approach to pursuing the most eligible bachelors possible online. Like our male clients, many female professionals simply don’t have the time to handle these difficult and time-consuming activities themselves.”
The company will guide female clients through the process of defining exactly what they are looking for in a partner (age, ethnicity, body type, physical distance, “deal breakers”, etc.) and then help them to brand themselves properly online so that they attract him. The assistants will continually weed through incoming emails (sometimes hundreds per week) looking for keepers but since the keepers aren’t always the ones doing the emailing, the assistants will also be filtering the databases of various online dating sites to find men that meet the client’s requirements. Once identified and approved by the client, the assistants will craft and send customized emails to them on the client’s behalf.
The company guarantees at least 2 dates per month that meet each client’s criteria but, based on pilot testing results, anticipates arranging an average of 6 dates per month for its female clients.
Statistics show that 58% of single women have tried online dating and that women, on average, have 30 minutes less free time each day, which means less time to devote to finding that special someone. Virtual Dating Assistants now has now opened its doors to these time-starved women looking for companionship.
ABOUT VIRTUAL DATING ASSISTANTS LLC
Virtual Dating Assistants is the first company to allow time-starved singles to outsource their online dating. The company handles everything from profile creation to online interaction and effectively brings online dating offline for its clients by setting them up with dates that meet their specifications.
The company is the brain child of Scott Valdez and his partner Mark Anderson, who originally had his virtual assistant schedule 79 first dates using online dating sites over a 12 month period. These dates eventually led Anderson to his wife and a happy family life.
For more information, view Virtual Dating Assistants’ website at: http://www.VirtualDatingAssistants.com
Erg. Ashley Madison. But here’s an article that focuses on an interesting slant, that Ashley exploits what is an essentially conservative market: those who see themselves as conservative and married, but want a little spice without upsetting the apple cart. Makes me think of our old buddies Ted Haggard and Jim Bakker. The Shakespeare quote “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” is apt, except the lady in these cases tends to be men. Did you know that Ashley M is trying to recruit Tiger to be a spokesman? It fits their demographic.
Ashley Madison’s Conservative Values
Posted by Amanda Hess
AshleyMadison.com, an online dating site that facilitates extramarital affairs, has never been too popular among moral conservatives. Earlier this year, Deroy Murdock argued on Human Events that Ashley Madison has edged out gay marriage as the number one threat to traditional matrimony. Now, cluck-clucking conservatives won’t have to choose between the cheaters and the gays: Ashley Madison has begun marketing itself as a place where the married can pursue their same-sex attractions, too.
Ashley Madison’s gay (and bi-curious) population is modest, but growing. Worldwide, the agency hosts 4.7 million members seeking extramarital affairs. Of those, only 143,427 are seeking some same-sex action. About two-thirds of Ashley Madison’s same-sex seekers are women looking for women; one-third are men seeking men. Noel Biderman, Ashley Madison’s CEO (married, two kids), says that his service provides a necessary sexual outlet for gay men and women who are trapped within the confines of traditional marriage. “There are men and women who, for whatever reason, might have been motivated to pursue a traditional marriage because they did want to build a family,” Biderman says. “Unfortunately, in our culture, their sexuality is still at odds with that arrangement.”
In an age when marriage equality is gaining serious steam, helping closeted gays escape their repressive straight marriages seems downright altruistic. But Ashley Madison isn’t so progressive as to encourage gay men to marry each other. “They’re not looking to leave their families,” Biderman says of the same-sex contingent. “They’re looking to have this on the side.” Ashley Madison is not here to release gays from the closet—it’s here to offer them a peek outside before returning them safely to nuclear family life. Meanwhile, it invests in the repression. “I don’t want to call it ironic, because people who find this ironic assume that we’re a home-wrecking service,” Biderman says. “We’re not. We are a marriage preservation service.”
Nobody relies on the preservation of traditional marriage like Ashley Madison. Ashley Madison’s motto, “when divorce isn’t an option,” seems strange in a country where no-fault divorce makes it easy to reset one’s relationship status to single. But Ashley Madison is not designed for folks willing to ruin their home lives so transparently. The service relies entirely on secrecy and discretion—what skeptics might call “lying” and “self-delusion.” “This is not a service for people in open marriages,” says Biderman. “There are sites out there for the courageous ones—the swinger couples who have found the courage to say, ‘I love you, but I need to do something different in the bedroom,’” he says. Ashley Madison, on the other hand, is for people who “can’t voice their sexual concerns to their spouses, because they are terrified of the repercussions,” he says. “There’s this notion that people who engage in infidelity are lying and deceitful,” he says. “But people wouldn’t have to lie if these more realistic sexual options were socially acceptable.”
As soon as those “realistic sexual options” are accepted, though, Ashley Madison goes kaput. The service wouldn’t be making any money if people weren’t terrified of communicating with their spouses. Besides, secrets are hot. Ashley Madison’s branding centers around the service as a sexy, hush-hush taboo. Ashley Madison may have built an empire out of facilitating transgressions, but its continued success lies in reinforcing the traditional. Biderman’s business will only remain viable so long as its members continue to invest in conservative, heterosexual marriages which reinforce monogamy. “People have told me, ‘Oh, you should open Ashley Madison in France,’” says Biderman. “I tell them, ‘You know, I don’t think they need me.’”
To date, Ashley Madison has only identified a need in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. In order for the service to expand, Biderman has got to locate other cultures that are currently struggling between the repressive and the progressive. “Places like Brazil offer an interesting dynamic, where infidelity among men is extremely high and among women it’s much lower,” he says. “There’s no reason to believe you can’t be wildly successful there. There is an incredible opportunity for a global phenomenon.”
Biderman’s latest campaign to make this an Ashley Madison world has, so far, failed to reach its full potential. “We always thought there would be a marketplace for same-sex affairs, but it’s been difficult to cultivate it,” says Biderman. “We could probably stretch those legs further, but there are so many obstacles to advertising our brand. We have enough difficulty advertising infidelity—think about the problems we’d have marketing to same-sex infidelity. I cant even tell you one avenue where I could effectively market that.”
Ashley Madison’s target demographic —people who lead conservative lifestyles but secretly yearn for a transgressive kick—is difficult to target. Social conservatives, remember, are obligated to respond to businesses like Ashley Madison with concern, outrage, and calls for banning. Ashley Madison claims to support the institution of marriage. Other American institutions have proven less than supportive of Ashley Madison. Recently, police kicked a tanker truck advertising Ashley Madison affairs out of the city of Philadelphia. Earlier this year, an Ashley Madison commercial was deemed too hot for the Superbowl. “We’ve got the Parent Television Council saying these ads are reprehensible,” says Biderman of the Web site’s conservative backlash. “There’s this huge fear to have any sort of conversation about sex.”
As a result, Ashley Madison’s marketing strategy has attempted to awkwardly straddle the divide between the conservative and the progressive. In one television spot, targeted toward women, Ashley Madison is offered as an alternative to a life married to a sexist pig. This husband arrives to an anniversary dinner late, leaves early, and in the meantime, ogles other women and implies that his wife is fat. Cheating on this guy practically constitutes a feminist act. The ad targeted at men contains no such progressive bent. In this version, the poor man’s wife isn’t a jerk—but she’s fat, and she snores, too! This man is encouraged to cheat on his wife for more, shall we say, traditional reasons: he just wants to fuck someone else behind her back. And there’s nothing progressive about dudes doing that.
Ashley Madison’s new PR push advertising same-sex affairs may further alienate the conservative base it requires to stay relevant. Then again, perhaps the gay element is just what Ashley Madison needs to keep conservatives abreast of its services—and curious about exploring its taboos. Every time a religious conservative declares a sexual practice an affront to human decency, a new conservative kink is born.
Matchmakers, beware! And also, singles: just because the service claims to be matchmakers does not mean that you will find what you are looking for.
Woman sues dating service after several dates and no Mr. Right
CHICAGO (STNG)—A woman who signed up for a Chicago-based dating service hoping to meet her soul mate filed a lawsuit against the matchmaking company Thursday, claiming all the service brought her was heartache, disappointment and stress—and cost her $3,500.
In May, Sheena Finnegan signed a contract with Élan Relationships, which has been “Chicago’s premiere personal introduction service” for 18 years, according to its Web site.
Finnegan, who refers to herself as a “busy, professional Chicago single” whose “time constraints prohibit [her] from getting the kind of exposure necessary to find a life partner” claims she counted on Élan to find her a suitable life partner, according to the suit filed in Cook County Circuit Court Thursday.
In exchange for $3,500, the service allegedly promised Finnegan to find her “genuine, high caliber, professional” matches by setting her up with six “qualified introductions” in a six-month period, the suit alleges.
As opposed to Internet dating, Élan’s Web site claims they “value the significance of personal introductions based on true compatibility and priorities.”
In May, Finnegan met with the company’s director, Mary Harris and owner Eileen Messier for over an hour, explaining what she was looking for in a mate. Harris and Messier are also named as defendants in the suit.
On May 30, Finnegan had her first date scheduled with a man named Mark—he canceled due to “car trouble,” the suit said. On June 6, she went on a date with a man named Steve, who she felt was not a good match. On June 28, she finally met Mark—who bragged about his homes and money, which Finnegan was not pleased with. On June 20 and June 27, she was scheduled to go on a date with Chris—who canceled both times.
On June 26, Finnegan contacted Élan, asking that her membership be extended due to the cancellations. The company agreed to extend it for one month, the suit said. After a few more dates, and two more cancellations, Finnegan said she realized the men she was meeting were not serious about finding a relationship—and that one of the men did not even sign up on his own accord, someone else signed him up.
She again contacted the company, claiming the service was not what she was promised and asking for a full refund. The company refused.
Finnegan said the company’s contract was “misleading…false…fraudulent” and did not make any favorable matches for her. The suit claims Finnegan endured heartache, stress and disappointment and has nothing to show for the $3,500 she spent trying to find a committed relationship.
The suit accuses Élan, Harris and Messier of breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud, deceptive business practices, intentional misrepresentation of material fact and negligence. The eight-count suit asks for an unspecified amount of money in damages as well as an injunction to prevent Élan from continuing to practice deceitful business techniques.
Anyone who reads what I write for more than five minutes knows that I say “Don’t be cheap with your future—pay the bucks and join a good dating site.” Match.com is my favorite. But the free Plentyoffish.com is now the industry leader and there must be reasons why, beyond free. Here’s a report below by Dave Evans who writes Online Dating Insider. He critiques from the inside, actually using PlentyofFish for a few months. Markus is the developer and owner of PlentyofFish, which has made him marvelously wealthy on ad revenue alone. I’ve underlined in the article what I think is particularly interesting in Dave’s report.
Free Dating Overtakes Paid Subscriptions, Now What?
by David Evans on September 24, 2009
Markus at Plentyoffish let me know about his post today, Worlds top dating sites for August from comscore.
I’ve stopped using paid dating sites for a few months to gauge firsthand how effective free dating sites are. Basically I’ve been on Facebook dating apps, Plentyoffish and OKCupid. Someone asked me about mobile apps recently. I personaly don’t use mobile apps for the most part. Why squint at the screen when I can go home and view on a 24″ monitor. I’m not in that much of a rush to get a date. I know, thats just me, but mobile clones of the desktop just aren’t interesting anymore.
Based on a few months on Plentyoffish, here are a few personal observations, some of which go against what I’ve been saying for years, but things change as the online dating industry evolves.
I wouldn’t date 98% of the women on Plentyoffish, but the 2% I would date is getting to be a huge number and I can’t avoid this anymore. There seems to be a lot more attractive women on the site compared to a few years ago. Some people are going to hate me for saying that but it’s true.
Match says you are paying for customer service. Sure Markus has lots of complaints in the forums but if you don’t get in trouble and act accordingly, who needs customer service? How much customer service is related to billing at a site like Match or eHarmony? Can a free site with no paid help deliver results like a free site? I used to think not, and the fact is that people pay for assistance. Would you buy a free car if there wasn’t a dealership to take it to?
Plentyoffish is like crack, the whole site is built to keep you clicking on faces through a variety of means. The embarrassing “people who haven’t gotten email in 24 hours” display and the constant barrage of photos on every page keeps me clicking like crazy.
The more you click the more likely you are to come across someone you want to meet. This is what kills eHarmony. I’m hearing of people getting 7 matches a month, which is ridiculous.
I end up clicking on a lot of Plentyoffish profiles because so many women (men too) have terrible photos or one blurry photo and that has me moving on without a glance. If a photo isn’t up to par, it should be removed. I don’t know how that would be measured but it sure would help. I would also outlaw people who hold camera in front of themselves in bathroom mirror photos, personal pet peeve. Women, go ahead and continue to show too much cleavage on Plentyoffish. That’s why many men consider it a pickup site. If I could filter on women in suggestive poses I would, because they are 99.999% of the time not my type.
So what if the freemium model at Plentyoffish isn’t compelling? Does it really matter? I’m the first to admit that I sometimes need to get off my high horse when it comes to the perceived quality of dating sites. Most people just want a date and could care less what a site looks like or functions. They just want to be discovered.
A few constructive criticisms that no doubt Markus can refute. I am completely aware that on many sites, things that don’t make sense to me, or seem broken, are actually designed that way on purpose. This is why having access to dating site statistics is so incredibly important and why it’s unfortunate that generic dating sites never do anything with the wealth of information at their fingertips.
Fix the photo system, the display doesn’t work very well, I’m always mousing over the photos and having to readjust to view the profile. Go browse a few people and you’ll see what I mean.
The profile layout needs to be redone. Put everything above the fold, don’t make me scroll down on each and every profile. Match is brilliant, you see everything you need to see immediately. On Plentyoffish I have to focus, scan, scroll and interpret the text, which is a pain and takes too much time. Markus can afford a designer now, change the serious member logo, it’s awful. This is why I am not a designer and I outsource all client User Experience and UI stuff to Thought-Rocket. If it was up to me everything would have lots of whitespace around it and look like it was designed in Europe.
I despise the big-boobed ads for human pheromones next to every single woman’s photos. That’s tacky and crass. The crap-tastic ads for the competition are getting stale as well. Then again, I’ve been looking at the site for five years inside my little bubble. People will put up with a lot of junk if something is free.
I’m amazed at the amount of traffic Plentyoffish is getting, north of 100 million visits a month I believe. And the visits per month kicks everyone else off the chart. These numbers are so much higher than Compete reports it’s ridiculous, although Quantcast seems to peg them at 200 million monthly visitors.
The exact numbers don’t matter, what matters is that Plentyoffish is destroying the free dating competition and paid dating will now always be a smaller market than free. This doesn’t mean that free is better, just, free, which is enough of a value proposition for millions of singles to join free dating sites. There will always be those who will gladly pay for the privilege of meeting online for many other reasons. Do you want to go to a KOA Campground or a boutique hotel? The choice is yours to make.
Food for thought: anyone can go buy a boatload of traffic like Singlesnet and True and get into the top ten dating site list. How can we as an industry gauge how good a dating site is when not taking traffic into account as the sole metric by which success is measured?
If you are in a relationship, no matter how you met, your participation is needed in a new study on couples. It only takes a few minutes to fill out the online questionnaire (I took about 10 minutes, vs. what the suggested time was of 30 minutes). We need data comparing relationships that met online vs. those who did not. Either way, if you are in a relationship, go to this website and answer the questions:
http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/” title="http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/">http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/
Are Online Relationships More Successful than Offline Relationships?
OnlineDatingMagazine.com Launches Groundbreaking “Modern Love Study”
(September 29, 2009) Online Dating Magazine, a consumer watchdog publication for online daters, has just launched a new modern love study of the factors that determine relationship satisfaction and whether couples who meet online have the same or better quality relationship when compared to couples who meet through more traditional methods.
“We are seeing the media increasingly challenge the claims of dating websites that online matching methods produce high quality relationships for singles,” says Joe Tracy, Publisher of Online Dating Magazine. “In fact, the debate continues around the world as to whether online dating is really effective at creating successful long-term relationships. We want to see a conclusion to that debate through this study.”
The study will measure different aspects of committed, romantic relationships in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships and then determine whether relationship satisfaction and stability is different for couples who meet online compared to couples who meet using traditional methods.
“This type of study has never been conducted before, and a major goal of the research is to create the most comprehensive and valid measure of relationship quality in the academic field. Much research on compatibility is based on outdated questionnaires and theories,” said Dr. James Houran, spokesperson and feature columnist for Online Dating Magazine, who heads the team conducting the study.
According to Dr. Houran, “This project aims to bring cutting edge analysis to the question of what really defines a successful relationship, regardless of sexual orientation or how a couple meets.”
Anyone who is currently in a committed relationship or who has been in a committed relationship, is eligible to participate in the study. Participants are asked to respond to a series of questions about their current or most recent serious relationship. The basic results of the study will be released upon the study’s conclusion. The questionnaire has approximately 130 items and takes about 30 minutes to complete. It may be accessed via the link below:
http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/” title="http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/">http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/
I’m always on the look out for facts and figures about being single and wanting to be paired up. Here’s a new set from People Media, underlines are mine.
Half of Single Americans Prefer a Partner over Staying Solo, According to New Survey from People Media
As “National Unmarried and Single Americans Week” kicks off, more than half of that group – 52 percent – say they would opt to have a partner over having the freedom to date, live independently or spend their time or money as they choose.
At the same time, an almost equal number – 48 percent – appreciate the myriad freedoms afforded by single living, naming one or another as the best aspect of being unhitched.
Those are the principal findings of a new nationwide online poll conducted by People Media, Inc., the No. 1 provider of targeted online dating communities. Running from September 20-26, National Unmarried and Single Americans Week is an annual commemoration which, for the past 20 years, has given recognition to single life and the contributions of singles to society.
According to the People Media poll, the craving for companionship cuts across virtually all demographic lines. At the same time, the poll found that many singles are, in fact, willing to acknowledge the benefits that arise from living solo.
The findings came from statistically significant responses at 13 of People Media’s sites – including those that cater to seniors, African-Americans, single parents, Christians, baby boomers, and other people of like interests—in a poll posted from late August through early September.
More than 27,000 single Americans answered the question, “What do you like best about being single?” with the following responses.
- “Nothing; I’d rather have a partner”—52 percent
- “The freedom to spend my time as I choose”—33 percent
- “Living alone”—7 percent
- “Being able to date”—4 percent
- “The freedom to spend my money as I choose”—4 percent
Although a slight majority of respondents believe there is no real benefit to being single (52 percent), nearly half recognizes the advantages of being unattached. A full third of all respondents named “the freedom to spend my time as I choose” as the top benefit of their single status (33 percent), along with smaller percentages that value solo living (7 percent), freedom to date at will (4 percent), and having total control over the purse strings (4 percent).
“Would you call this ‘making lemonade out of lemons’ or is it about appreciating the taste of lemonade? I think it’s really both,” said Josh Meyers, CEO, People Media, Inc. “There’s no question that people have a deeply rooted drive for connection and companionship, whether it’s about friendship or marriage, and that’s why online dating communities are thriving.
“According to 2006 US Census data, there are 92 million American adults who are single and unmarried,” added Meyers. “Whether one is single by choice or by circumstance while searching for a relationship, there can be an upside like having total decision-making over how to spend one’s time, which one-third of our respondents named as the best thing about being single. As National Unmarried and Single Americans Week signifies, it’s more than okay to be single.”
Dissecting Singlehood
In addition to top-line results from the more than 27,000 poll respondents in total, the data has been analyzed according to the specific People Media site to which respondents chose to join. Among the findings.
- Those most likely to say there’s nothing best about being single (52 percent on average) include members of the Christian-affiliated LoveAndSeek.com site (64 percent), SingleParentsMeet.com (59 percent) and Mormon-oriented LDSPlanet.com (59 percent).
- Members of SeniorPeopleMeet.com are more likely than others to appreciate the freedom to spend their time as they wish (39 percent vs. 33 percent on average).
- On the other hand, those who identify around religion such as members of LoveAndSeek.com or LDSPlanet.com place the least value on deciding how to spend their time unilaterally (24 percent and 26 percent respectively, vs. 33 percent on average).
- Members of LatinoPeopleMeet.com are the most likely to appreciate the freedom to date (10 percent vs. 4 percent on average); members of BlackChristianPeopleMeet.com and those at SeniorPeopleMeet.com place the least emphasis on this (2 percent each).
- Compared to other groups, members of LDSPlanet.com are the least likely to name living alone as the best thing about being single (4 percent vs. 7 percent, on average).
- Having solitary control over money doesn’t register high as a benefit of being single. Just 3-7 percent of respondents across all groups cited financial autonomy.
When viewing responses by age, the younger the respondent, the more likely he or she is to appreciate the freedom to date: 10 percent for ages 18-24 and 8 percent for ages 25-34; 2 percent for ages 55-64 and 65+.
- The same age breakdown essentially applies to the benefits of living alone: younger respondents enjoy it more (9 percent for ages 18-24 and 10 percent for ages 25-34) than older singles (5 percent for ages 55-64 and just 4 percent for those 65+).
- At any age, controlling one’s money does not register as an important advantage of being single (4 percent for all age categories except 25-34, which came in at 5 percent).
And here’s what Forbes says is the Top 10 Dating sites:
Forbes Top 10 Dating Sites
1. eHarmony
Unique visitors in June: 4,252,000
Growth since last year: 48%
Avg. time spent on the site: 24.5 minutes
How it works: “With eHarmony members, there’s a high level of engagement around a clarity of purpose,” says Greg Waldorf, the site’s chief executive. “When you subscribe to eHarmony, you’re saying that you’re interested in a serious relationship.” Indeed, there are four stages of communication to determine your match’s level of interest--and members can only see people they match with. Other features include secure calling, which ensures members’ phone numbers are kept private.
Price: $60 per month
2. Yahoo! Personals
Unique visitors in June: 4,130,000
Gain/loss from the same period last year: -7%
Avg. time spent on the site: 11 minutes
How it works: Nothing special here, save for its brand name. See which users have done a drive-by on your profile. Free browsing and free basic profile. Offers a dating advice section.
Price (for full service): $25 per month for men and women
3. Match.com
Unique visitors in June 2009: 3,379,000
Gain/loss from the same period last year: no change
Avg. time spent on the site: 49 minutes
How it works: Each day, members receive their “Daily 5"--five people selected for them by Match’s proprietary pairing technology. A “Profile Pro” will help you spruce up your profile for a $35 fee.
Price: $40 per month for men and women
4. TRUE
Unique visitors in June 2009: 3,134,000
Growth since last year: 33%
Avg. time spent on the site: 13 minutes
How it works: Offers video-chatting and a free three-day trial period.
Price $50 per month for men and women
5. SinglesNet
Unique visitors in June 2009: 2,615,000
Gain/loss from the same period last year: -31%
Avg. time spent on the site: 47 minutes
How it works: Build a profile and chat with people who look interesting. Offers a “Dating Forum” where members ask questions like: “How should I break it off?” Also has regional chat rooms
Price: $25 a month for men and women
6. Plenty of Fish
Unique visitors in June 2009: 2,198,000
Gain/loss from the same period last year: 94%
Avg. time spent on the site: 91 minutes
How it works: “Half of our members have tried online dating, half have not tried it before,” says Plenty of Fish founder Markus Frind. “We tend to attract busy professionals who want to check it out.” If you see someone you like, you can view similar matches by physical features or personality traits. If you’re free on a particular night, add yourself to the list of other available singles looking for date. In searches, women are only shown men who are taller than them.
Price: free
7. DO U LIKE
Unique visitors in June 2009: 1,992,000
Gain/loss from the same period last year: N/A
Avg. time spent on the site: 3.5 minutes
How it works: User friendly, photo-based service. “Do You Like Me?” feature offers a clickable “Yes” or “No” above each picture. See who says “Yes,” to your photo in your “Mutual Sympathy” inbox and decide if you like them, too.
Price: $20 per month for men and women
8. Spark Networks
Unique visitors in June 2009: 1,223,000
Gain/loss from the same period last year: -14%
Avg. time spent on the site: 21 minutes
How it works: Owns niche sites like jdate.com, blacksingles.com, catholicmingle.com and kizmeet.com. Has a “compatibility compass” on each member profile; a dating hotline ("We get questions like: ‘I had a great date last night, but now I see she’s back online. Does that mean she’s looking for someone new?’ says Spark President Greg Liberman); and hosts in-person speed-dating events.
Price: no additional fees on top of what each site that Spark owns would charge.
Source for traffic figures: Nielsen.
9. Mate1
Unique visitors in June 2009: 1,173,000
Gain/loss from the same period last year: -18%
Avg. time spent on the site: 14 minutes
How it works: Chat with crushes online. If you see a profile you like, click “Add To Hot List.” A little shy? “Online Ambassadors” serve as hosts to loosen up new members and encourage them to mingle.
Price: Woman pay nothing; men pay $50 per month
10. AOL Personals
Unique visitors in June 2009: 957,000
Gain/loss from the same period last year: -53%
Avg. time spent on the site: five minutes
How it works: Aggregates and compares other dating sites in one stop. Each site uses the same AOL layout, so it’s easier to focus on which site has the best features for you. Offers articles on dating from other popular sites, like askmen.com and asylum.com.
Price: no additional fees on top of what each site it aggregates would charge.
I love it when Forbes magazine takes Internet dating seriously enough to write a story about it. Read below and see what good business finding love is…
The Top Online Meat Markets
Courtney Comstock,
Courtship via pixel is no fad. Here’s where most the action takes place.
There was a time not long ago when the Internet was about shopping for a good book, maybe a CD or even a few squishy toys for Oakley, your cuddly yellow Labrador. Now you can pluck a mate (or just a date) from the virtual shelves.
Call it calculating, unromantic and maybe even a bit unnatural, but online dating--now a $950 million industry, including membership fees, advertising revenues and Web products like chat services and virtual roses--is here to stay. Throngs of hungry hearts now cruise online dating sites for companionship.
According to Nielsen, an audience tracking firm, dating sites snared 27.5 million unique visitors in June. That’s a ton of traffic--about half the amount logged by heavily taxed job-placement sites during what has been called the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Indeed, all the doom and gloom about the economy may be helping virtual love brokers. “The stress makes it clear when you’re in not such a great relationship,” says Greg Waldorf, chief executive of eHarmony.com. “People can feel pretty frustrated.”
Dating sites don’t just gin up the guest list; they do their best to get the sparks flying. Some track their members’ searches and look for patterns; others poll couples to find out why some relationships worked and others didn’t. Spark Networks ( LOV - news - people )--owner of a hodgepodge of niche sites like jdate.com (for Jewish singles), blacksingles.com and catholicmingle.com--hosts a popular “Rabbi of the Month” contest on jdate.com. Still other sites host member forums where the tortured masses can bleat about how to survive a break-up.
Some sites generate revenue by selling advertising, while others charge monthly subscriptions fees. (Men and women may not pay the same rate.) And like many other Web businesses, dating sites often sell different levels of service at different price points.
Forbes used Nielsen’s latest unique-visitor data for June 2009 to rank the 10 most popular dating sites. (The number of unique visitors, a common Web-traffic metric, is the total number of people who visited a Web site during a particular reporting period; anyone who visited the same site more than once during the period is not counted again.)
At No. 1: eHarmony.com, with 4.25 million visitors, up 48% from the same period a year earlier. Users spent an average 24.5 minutes on the site per visit. Looking for a casual fling? Keep moving. “There’s a high level of engagement around a clarity of purpose,” says Waldorf. “When you subscribe to eHarmony, you’re saying that you’re interested in a serious relationship.” Indeed, there are four stages of communication to determine your match’s level of interest--and members can only see people they match with. Price: $60 a month, for both men and women.
Yahoo ( YHOO - news - people ) Personals came in at No. 2, with 4.1 million uniques, followed by Match.com, with 3.4 million. At Match, members receive their “Daily 5"--five people selected for them each day by the site’s proprietary pairing technology. A “Profile Pro” will even help spruce up your online image. Membership fee: $40 a month, plus another $35 charge for the profile consulting.
Plentyoffish.com--at No. 6, boasting 2.2 million viewers, nearly double the amount a year ago--offers its brokerage services for free and looks to turn a profit selling advertising. “We’ve been growing so fast, I don’t even know what normal is,” says founder Markus Frind. Perhaps more noteworthy than the site’s $10 million in annual ad revenue is the 91 minutes that an average users spends per visit. One reason for such impressive stickiness, perhaps, is that unlike other dating sites, Plentyoffish relies less on a marketing blitz than on word of mouth from satisfied customers, who in turn know the kind of people who don’t have merely a passing curiosity about online dating, Frind says.
Edgy newcomer Do U Like hasn’t been around a full year but has rocketed to No. 7, with 1.9 million uniques per month. Unlike other dating sites, users must post their photos--racy poses encouraged. If you like what you see, you click on the photo; if you want to see who “liked” you, check the “Mutual Sympathy” inbox. Price for such near-instant gratification: $20 a month.
Happy hunting.
This piece of news, that Yahoo! is in talks to sell off its personals branch. Yahoo! Personals has GOT to be a big money-maker. If it gets bought by IAC, which also owns Match and lots of other dating sites, that could mean a mega-mega site as a result. Think of the millions and millions Yahoo and Match have signed up!
Yahoo in talks to sell dating service
SUNNYVALE—Yahoo is in talks to sell its dating service.
The news came Wednesday, during a conference call with the CEO of IAC (NASDAQ:IACI), an Internet company that owns 35 web properties, notably Match.com and Chemistry.com.
CEO Barry Diller said Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) was willing to sell off Yahoo Personals, because it was no longer one of the company’s core products.
Yahoo doesn’t publicly disclose how many people pay for premium features on Yahoo Personals, so it’s difficult to determine how effective the service has been compared to other dating sites.
IAC remains in negotiations with Yahoo over terms of the deal.
I’m always on the lookout for facts and figures about online dating. Here are a few more…
Online dating services booming in bad times
From an artcile by Liyun Jin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
According to Forrester Research Inc., online dating is the third largest producer of revenue out of all paid content sites, generating $957 million in 2008, a figure the firm predicts will grow 10 percent by 2013.
Dating site Match.com now has more than 20 million members, a figure that grows by 60,000 daily. The company charges members $35 per month and had a total revenue of $366 million in 2008, a 5 percent increase from 2007.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, couples are more likely to stay together in times of need than in plenty. The number of divorces and annulments dropped by 16,000 from 2006 to 2007, a decline of 2 percent.
The desire for a loving escape from the tough economy isn’t restricted to the real world. U.S. retail sales for Harlequin Enterprises, a publisher of romance fiction, rose 9 percent in 2008 compared to flat sales in the four years prior to that.
If you have wondered about the Sugar Baby/Sugar Daddy websites, here’s an article from the NYT that spells out what happens in more detail than you probably will ever want to know…
Keeping Up With Being Kept
AT FIRST GLANCE, the Web site SeekingArrangement.com seems like any other dating site. Most of the men are looking for fit, sexy women, and most of the women want nice guys who can make them smile and laugh. But if eHarmony or Match.com is a chatty social mixer, Seeking Arrangement is a down-and-dirty marketplace where older moneyed men and cute young women engage in brutally frank transactions. They’re not searching for longtime soul mates; they want no-strings-attached “arrangements” that trade in society’s most valued currencies: wealth, youth and beauty. In the cheesy lexicon of the site, they are “sugar daddies” and “sugar babies.”
There’s the 18-year-old from France asking for $5,000 to $10,000 a month from “a mentor who can provide me with the finer things in life and keep me happy!” And the 49-year-old investor from upstate New York willing to pay $5,000 a month for a “daytime playmate” for “intense connection without commitment.” Critics say the site is at best a convenience store for adulterers and at worst a virtual brothel, but Brandon Wade, Seeking Arrangement’s 38-year-old founder and chief executive, is unperturbed by the criticism. “We stress relationships that are mutually beneficial,” he says. “We ask people to really think about what they want in a relationship and what they have to offer. That kind of upfront honesty is a good basis for any relationship.”
The site now claims more than 300,000 registered members, far fewer than mainstream dating sites like Match.com, which has 1.5 million paying subscribers, but still a remarkable number. Sugar babies outnumber daddies 10 to 1, Wade says, providing what one sugar daddy called “the best fishing hole I ever fished in.”
This abundance of possibility is part of what the site is selling, along with fantasy. Some of these men — especially those shopping for women half their age — are digging deep into their pockets to pay for an illusion: that despite their receding hairlines and wattled skin, they’re still enchanting enough to charm pretty young women. One image on the site features a dazed, graying man doted on by two barely clad attendants — a caricature of an already caricatured relationship. But this marketing spin doesn’t capture the nuances of the relationships that often develop between the “daddies” and the “babies” who meet on the site — relationships that can turn out to be more complicated than even the members themselves expect. Men may use money as a way to buy themselves out of the normal obligations of romance, like accommodating a woman’s emotional needs as much as their own. But despite the power and security that the money buys, it can also undercut the very ego it’s intended to boost.
Consider B. K., a fit finance executive in his early 40s, who, last October, began “dating” a 20-year-old engineering major at a college 90 minutes from his house. Like nearly half the sugar daddies on Seeking Arrangement, B. K. is married. (Neither B. K. nor any other user of the site would allow full names to be published — certain the revelation would infuriate wives or boyfriends, shock colleagues and repel friends or family — and agreed to use only their first names, nicknames or initials.) B. K. and his wife opted against separation, for the sake of the kids, and for now, they have a policy — at least in his mind — of don’t ask, don’t tell. Between pangs of guilt about cheating, B. K. views his secret dallying as a safety valve, letting him feel desired so he can return home and appreciate the many things he loves about his wife, even if they don’t include giving him the attention he wants.
And so, nearly each week, B. K. gets together with Lola, the young woman he met on the site, for a meal or a gym workout and a few hours at a hotel outside the Western city where he lives. Their visits are generally no longer than four or five hours because Lola, a senior, has a full course load and also works 40 hours a week at two low-wage jobs. With no money from her parents, she was frank in her Seeking Arrangement profile, saying she needed “immediate financial assistance.” In B. K., she gets that in the form of $100 or $150 stuffed in her bag each time they meet. He feels good about helping her with her tuition, encouraging her studies and romancing her, albeit in hotel rooms. Most of all, he’s grateful that she doesn’t want a commitment. At least he was at first.
“It’s very clear with this site that she’s getting something out of this, hopefully emotional support and mentoring advice and fun in bed, but also something financial, so don’t come back to me and say that you were used or that I left you high and dry,” he said. “I like that aspect of it, but on the other hand, it would be nice not to have the money involved, because you always wonder: would she still want to be with me even without the money? Does the money make me more attractive than I really am?”
ABOUT 30 PERCENT OF ARRANGEMENTS on the site involve the daddy paying an “allowance,” usually a thousand or two a month, though the site claims some reach $10,000. The rest provide the baby with incidental cash, shopping sprees, gifts, travel or the fleeting illusion that theirs is a high-end, easy life. “I get flown to whatever city I want,” wrote a North Carolina college student, who goes by the name gurlnextdoor on the site’s blog, a mix between an online support group and a kaffeeklatsch. “He pays for it, takes me shopping, we talk, laugh, go out to eat and do whatever we want to do for our days together. . . . I don’t bring up mundane problems about my home life, and he does the same. . . . If I wanted someone to talk to about my life problems, I’d get a boyfriend or a therapist.”
Like B. K.’s companion, Lola, many women on the site are in their 20s, though plenty of others are in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Some are looking for attention, some have financial problems and some are seeking refuge from romantic pain. On the blog and in conversations with me, still others said benefactors provide a way to get the extras they want — the Fendi bags, the to-die-for shoe collection or the breast enhancement. A surprising number of babies say on the blog that they don’t need the money at all, either because they have decent-paying jobs or bottomless credit cards from their parents. What appeals to them about the arrangements are the expensive gifts — “I just LOVE being spoiled,” gushed one 19-year-old woman on the blog — because those gifts make them feel valued, as if the money spent measures just how desirable they are.
Other women on the site would happily forfeit conspicuous prizes and go for the cash instead, especially for tuition. One woman’s profile says, “That you can help me get through school and achieve financial stability through support and mentoring is more important than wowing me with diamonds and Prada.” In fact, Seeking Arrangement pays to have its ads pop up on search engines whenever someone types in “student loan,” “tuition help,” “college support” or “help with rent.” Lola was one of many to stumble on the site that way, when — behind on her rent and tuition and down to one meal a day — she Googled “student loan.” What popped up was hardly what she expected, but she was willing to try almost anything to stay in school.
Her first sugar daddy, a man in his early 50s, turned out to be a terrible kisser and too dominating in bed. “I had to grit my teeth every time we met,” she told me. In four visits, she earned $550, enough to cover the rent, and then dropped him. A month later, she connected with another sugar daddy, a man in his late 50s who lived in Louisiana. The only thing he wanted, he told her, was that she do well in school. He insisted she send her transcript, and once satisfied, he sent her nearly $500 a month. Though they never met, never even talked on the phone, he wrote her long letters by hand encouraging her studies and advising her on finances and sent her novels, newspaper clippings and a J. K. Rowling commencement address for inspiration. He never once mentioned sex.
Six months later, the man in Louisiana had to cut back on expenses, so Lola began looking for a new source of income to supplement the $8 an hour she earned working in a lab and the cash she picked up cleaning houses and selling her plasma. Last October, Lola and B. K. had their first date.
Though petite, Lola seems older than she is, maybe because she is so matter-of-fact in her manner. On the day I met her, on her way to meet B. K., she was wearing jeans, a striped T-shirt and no makeup. Her hair was pulled back, no-nonsense style, making her look more as if she were about to go camping than rendezvous with her sugar daddy. She brought along a textbook and her GRE vocabulary flashcards, in case B. K. was late.
“At first, it was a job, then it became a pleasant job and then it was getting together with a friend,” she said, describing her relationship with B. K. “With him, I don’t feel like a prostitute, though maybe I am. It’s not just the sex with us. We care about each other, we talk, there’s a connection, not just business.”
Whether sugar relationships amount to prostitution is hotly debated among the site’s members. “Let’s get real here,” wrote GoldenGate on the blog. “I’m with a guy who’s old enough to be my dad, short and balding. Not to mention his other shortcomings, ahem. But he gives me a great big fat allowance every month. If that wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be together.”
Others on the blog were shocked, saying they could never be with a man, even a rich one, if they weren’t somehow attracted to him. Indeed, most go to considerable effort to distinguish between “sugar” and prostitution. (Legally, at least, they are right; since the 1970s, courts have ruled that as long as the woman is paid for some service besides sex — housecleaning, companionship — the arrangement is not the equivalent of prostitution.) They say being a sugar baby is no more an occupation than dating is, especially when the goal of dating is to find a rich boyfriend or a wealthy husband. They routinely turn down creeps interested in nothing but sex.
Some sugar babies also insist that wives who stay in miserable marriages for an American Express black card, mansion or country-club membership are more like prostitutes than they are. And yet the blatant financial transactions leave many uneasy. Even Seeking Arrangement’s chief executive uses a fake name — his legal one is Brandon Wey — partly because he’s afraid his association with the site might dampen his chances of raising capital for a more mainstream enterprise in the future and partly because he thought the name Brandon Wade sounded more Hugh Hefneresque.
In interviews and on the blog, the site’s members parse the nuances of the sex and money transactions. “I read on a post about asking 10k if you’re model material . . . so because I ask for so little, am I ‘on sale’?” wrote one woman. “I don’t think I can accept more than 1k a month plus gifts, because then I will start feeling compelled to do ANYTHING for him.”
E. C., a 23-year-old sales-and-marketing coordinator in Toronto, says she already earns $40,000 a year as well as commission and the use of a company car. But having grown up in a wealthy family, her current salary doesn’t allow her to live in the manner to which she’s accustomed. So E. C. dined with a banker from the site who was charming and attractive. His breath, however, was so bad she decided he wasn’t sugar-daddy material.
Then she met a charming 43-year-old businessman from the site with nice breath. She tried to steer their conversations to the question of an allowance, unsuccessfully. On their third date, they slept together. Afterward, she was glad no money had changed hands. “If he’d given me money after that, I would have felt he was paying me for the sex,” she said. “And if he’d paid me beforehand, I would have felt I owed him something, and the whole thing would have gone from charming to being bought.” Instead of paying her, he takes her to swank restaurants and penthouse suites in Niagara Falls. “He shows me off to the whole place, and it makes me feel good.”
Her parents, she added, would be appalled if they knew she was on such a site — except if they thought it increased her chance of meeting an eligible and rich young doctor.
MOST PEOPLE WOULD LIKELY BE appalled to learn that a daughter — or father — was using SeekingArrangement.com. Beth Bailey, a Temple University historian of courtship, said that her first reaction to the site was “revulsion.” But when she reconsidered it within the historical context of dating, she had a somewhat different response.
Heterosexual relationships, including marriage, have long involved economic transactions, but Bailey points out that when men provided financial security, they traditionally did so in exchange for a woman’s sexual virtue (and potential to bear and rear children), not for sexual thrills. For that, they often turned to prostitutes and mistresses, involving a more frank money-for-sex exchange. It’s only in the last century that money has been traded — albeit indirectly — for sexual attention from “respectable” unmarried women. In the early 1900s, courtship shifted from girls’ porches or parlors to a commercial venture: a date. Etiquette manuals of the time were explicit — boys were to pay for meals, entertainment and transportation, and in return, girls were to provide well-groomed company, rapt attention and at least a certain amount of physical affection. His money bought not only companionship but also her indebtedness.
“It made a lot of people uneasy, because if men’s money was central to the dating relationship, what distinguished it from prostitution?” Bailey says. Seen in this context, Bailey argues, Seeking Arrangement “is a piece of contemporary society. It’s simply more explicit and transparent about the bargains struck in the traditional model of dating.”
Though one-quarter of the site’s sugar daddies (including married ones) are looking for male “babies” and 1 percent of the site’s members are “sugar mommies,” they still tend to fall into traditional roles, where the one who is paid supplies sex, admiration, comfort and the kind of status conferred by any other expensive consumer good. The “baby” is the one who regulates her appearance, schedule, behavior and emotions to make the payer feel special.
Still, a 22-year-old named Mercedes told me, “I don’t see how people can view this as exploitation.” Mercedes is a junior who pays her own tuition at a Georgia university. She has had six sugar daddies in the past year to supplement her wages busing tables and washing dishes at a bar. “I could go out and work three jobs and still go to school and probably make decent grades, but is that really what I want to do? I make more money this way, and I have a lot more fun because I get to go out to concerts, go shopping, see movies and make money off of it. If instead of this I was just dating a rich guy, it’d be almost the same thing, and society wouldn’t look down on that. You know with a sugar daddy that they’re spending a lot of money on you and they clearly want something in return, but is that really any different than how it is with a boyfriend?”
BRANDON WEY GOT THE IDEA for the site from his own dissatisfying love life as an M.I.T. student and then as a well-off but awkward tech executive. Traditional dating Web sites were no help. “It was difficult to advertise the assets I had compared to hundreds of thousands of guys who had better looks or better pickup lines,” says Wey, now married to a woman 13 years younger than he is, whom he met before the site went live. “I needed to find a way to put myself at the front of the line.”
Wey unveiled SeekingArrangement.com in 2006 and aimed to keep the site well stocked for his wealthy customers. Babies can join free, while daddies pay $44.95 a month — and an optional $5 to ensure the site’s name doesn’t show up on credit-card statements. For another $1,200 a year, a sugar daddy can become a Diamond Club member, with his income and net worth verified and his profile featured at the top of the home page.
B. K. joined the site about a year ago, swapping flirtatious e-mail messages with potential sugar babies, taking a few out to dinner and romancing one for a few months before he found Lola. He was drawn, he said, to her independence and intellect, her humility, her academic determination and, of course, her looks. He loved their time together — dancing, snuggling, the whole bit — and, at times, feared he was falling in love.
From the start, Lola was clear that her heart lay elsewhere. Her boyfriend of four years lives 1,000 miles away, and though they see each other only a few times a year, Lola maintains that she is deeply in love with him. When B. K. asked Lola what gift she wanted for Christmas, she demurred, but when pressed, she asked if he would pay for plane fare to visit her boyfriend. B. K. said yes — and felt great about it. “Isn’t that what love is?” he told me later. “It’s not about trying to own someone.”
While Lola was gone, B. K. sent her e-mail and text messages virtually every day but heard nothing back. Pining, he began trolling the site, window shopping, and noticed Lola had logged on. He feared that she was looking to replace him. “I was like, What the hell is this?” He e-mailed her, asking why she was on the site, but got no answer. “Maybe I’m the needy one,” he mused. He wondered if Lola was trying to end their relationship or if her boyfriend had found out. “The no-strings-attached assumption is hard on my heart sometimes, but I don’t think she will just disappear.”
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN RICH men and kept women have been around for a very long time, of course, but the Internet makes hunting for such arrangements easier. Quickly and privately, a well-off man can find a young woman wherever in the world he wants. And he can find someone who fits his needs, however unconventional they may be.
One sugar daddy whose screen name is Sam has tried long-term girlfriends, mistresses, prostitutes and a brief marriage. Now single, the 39-year-old entrepreneur has found the arrangement that suits him best: a monogamous business-associate-with-benefits deal in which he pursues an entrepreneurial project with a young, beautiful, intelligent woman. He provides financial backing, mentoring and networking; she provides sex, fun and, inevitably, a bit of worshiping, all of which make him feel virile and influential. In between vacations using his private jet, both work hard on the project. They don’t tend to see each other much, as he travels frequently for his work.
Sam’s profile on Seeking Arrangement is audacious. He advertises for a woman who is “drop-dead beautiful, sexy, fun and elegantly mannered in a fancy setting. She must turn heads . . . and make me the envy of the crowd.” He wants no tattoos, no cosmetic implants, no vegetarians and no Gen Yers who begin their e-mail-message sentences with lowercase letters.
When I asked to chat in person, Sam suggested meeting at CORE, a private Manhattan club where membership is by invitation only and costs $65,000 the first year and where Sam’s assent was required before I could be admitted. Sitting alone at a long conference table in a room set aside for him, he looked utterly unremarkable, a man of average height with a buzz cut and an aloof air. But once Sam got talking, he became affable and witty, especially as he described his unorthodox history with women. He started college when most kids his age were still in middle school. “When you go to college at that age, you’re pretty undatable,” he said. “I was somewhere between a curiosity, a mascot and a friend. I tutored freshman physics and calculus so I could at least be near women. Of course, all they’d do is talk about their boyfriends.”
He has an almost mathematical approach to assessing relationships, and once even computed the costs for a girlfriend, mistress, prostitute and wife — mistresses turn out to be most expensive by the hour; wives, by the year; girlfriends are cheapest all around. But he’s not as calculating as he seems. In fact, he concluded there’s little correlation between cost and quality. Still, he is relentlessly searching for an algorithm that will predict relationships’ success.
Sam is also more determined than most to try separating a sugar baby’s affection and the money she’s paid to provide it. In his arrangements, he says, he establishes a trust in the woman’s name that pays a monthly stipend of at least $5,000 for the length of their contract. If the woman decides to quit sleeping with him at any point, he may quit serving as adviser and pamperer, but the stipend continues regardless. “If I didn’t do that, then it’s like a leash I’m putting on somebody, and that seems really unfair,” he said. “Besides, then I’d never know what the relationship was really about.”
Sam runs these relationships with an explicit business plan, a set budget, measurable goals and quarterly reviews. From the outset, the contract has an end date. It’s a brilliant, if contrived, way to protect his pride. The contract specifies that the romance and sex are to end by the preset date, so there’s no break up, no rejection, no bruised ego. She’s not dumping him; the gig’s just over.
He was involved in three relationships this way, helping the women establish a school overseas, start a tech company and help run a nonprofit, he told me. He declined to put me in touch with the women but said each had been successful. He is like Pygmalion, smitten with his own creations.
He found those three women through word of mouth, long before he discovered Seeking Arrangement and its rush of possibilities. Between November and shortly after I met him in mid-January, he had winnowed down 140 candidates to four finalists. “It feels so good to have so many people paying attention to me,” he said. He met all four, interviewed them extensively, coached them on their business plans and took two of them on multiday outings. In each case, he told them he preferred to put off sex until he’d settled on a candidate, though he did end up sleeping with one of them — but only, he says, because she so aggressively pursued him.
NOR ARE MEN THE ONLY ONES seeking relationships within particular parameters. A. B. was 18 when she first went on the site, in 2006, looking for extra money. She had started college at 15 but quit when her money ran out. She was soon contacted by a well-to-do, married filmmaker whom she liked immediately. He encouraged her ambition to become a professor of art or philosophy. For a few months, they saw each other frequently, visiting museums, discussing Camus and Nietzsche, taking in films, sharing their poetry and artwork and sometimes romping in bed. He gave her $500 each time they met, whether or not they had sex. In between visits, he sent her money for art supplies. He said if she got a part-time job, he’d pay the tuition and living expenses she couldn’t cover.
Ecstatic, A. B. re-enrolled at her Southern college. Her sugar daddy flew her up to Pennsylvania to meet him a few times. But he became increasingly peeved that she also had a boyfriend at school. And though her boyfriend understood why she was in a relationship with a sugar daddy, A. B. felt compromised, as if she were leading two lives. She ended that Seeking Arrangement relationship.
About two years later, A. B. met another sugar daddy from the site, a single father who seemed pleasant enough but unlikely to entangle her emotions. Still, after a few visits, he wanted nothing but sex, so she stopped seeing him.
“When these sugar-daddy relationships go the way I think they should go, the lines are pretty blurry between that and a typical boyfriend-girlfriend relationship,” she said. “And when they go the way I don’t think they should go, the lines are blurry between that and sex work.”
In February, A. B. met a third benefactor. This one was a pleasant and clever psychologist in his 40s. He flew her to San Francisco. They went to jazz clubs and a tony restaurant, talked about philosophy and shared a bed but stayed on their own sides all night. But the next night, after they’d both been drinking, he pressured her into forgoing a condom during sex. “I yielded because I thought that if he came away from the weekend having enjoyed himself, he would be more likely to want to see me again and want to support me,” she said. The experience soured her on flagrantly transactional relationships, because she realized the power dynamic would always be lopsided. She is done being a sugar baby, A. B. said, even if it means delaying her education even longer.
AT TIMES, B. K. DEBATED WHETHER to turn off his Seeking Arrangement profile to honor his relationship with Lola. But whenever communication from her would go dark for a few days, he was glad that his profile was still active. The e-mail messages he got from women were an ego balm. After all, it’s not often a man in his 40s is wooed by a former surfer in her 20s or a 26-year-old model looking for the “finer things in life.”
During the two weeks over Christmas that Lola was incommunicado and B. K. worried that he’d just been dumped, he received a suggestive note from a woman close to his age from another state. She sent him long enticing messages, which boosted his morale. Unlike Lola, she was mercurial and dramatic, and he was drawn by her damsel-in-distress air. He loved feeling like her savior. Neither Lola nor his wife seemed to need saving, just help with tuition (in Lola’s case) or with kids and chores (in his wife’s case).
Everything about the woman seemed enticingly dangerous, and B. K. became obsessed with her and told me their interactions were like the “thrill” of running through a burning building and making it out alive. And then it imploded: a combination of hotheadedness, different politics and her resentment that he wouldn’t pony up a regular allowance.
By then, Lola was back at school. She said she’d been out of touch during her visit with her boyfriend because her cellphone battery died. She told B. K. she hadn’t bought a charger because she was out of money, even using Target gift cards she received at Christmas to pay for groceries. She reassured him that she wanted to keep seeing him but also reminded him that she had several looming deadlines at school and at the lab where she worked. Delighted that she was still in his life, B. K. turned off his Seeking Arrangement profile. But with Lola’s packed schedule, their visits dwindled to every other week. It took days for her to respond to his e-mail messages. Even a text message he sent asking “Are you O.K.?” went unanswered for days.
Eventually, she e-mailed him in her typically even-tempered way: “I am all right. When I don’t respond it means I don’t have time at the moment and then I forget because I’m running from one place to the next.”
Restless, B. K. switched his profile on. He got a Seeking Arrangement message from a graduate student in her mid-20s who lived just 10 miles from his office. They met for a quick coffee, long enough for the woman to grab B. K.’s hand and put it on her ripped abs, just to show him what she was made of. He was thrilled by her aggressiveness. Afterward, when he suggested by e-mail that he could pay her $1,500 a month, she objected that she was worth much more. He decided to play it cool and wait for her to come begging.
And then in the midst of all that, he got a message from Lola that she could meet him the following Sunday afternoon, after a study session. Upon getting her note, his message to me was effusive: “YAY!!! I’m almost giddy like a schoolboy!!”
When they finally met in late February, B. K. asked Lola more about her boyfriend than he ever had before. Lola told him she loved her boyfriend and that she hoped he would propose after she graduates later this year. Once engaged, she added, she would stop being a sugar baby. B. K. felt devastated.
Lola seemed particularly tender in that meeting, he told me. Moved by his deep affection for her, B. K. offered her an extra $200 to see her boyfriend over spring break. Afterward, he was scared he would soon lose her and also scared at how much his feelings for her had intensified. If she asked him to leave his wife, he told me, he would seriously consider it.
In the days after their meeting, B. K.’s moods shifted rapidly; he was dreamy one minute, testy or melancholy the next. Then, after weeks of silence, the graduate student with the taut abs e-mailed him, and they agreed to meet at a local bar. “I may be a fool for love, but I’m also practical,” he said before going to meet her, adding that, then again, “maybe I am just a big wallet, and I’m getting played on all sides.”
On a weekday evening, B. K. sat in a back booth, waiting for his new potential sugar baby. She showed up in a tight, low-cut blouse and scooted up next to him, he told me, purring that it had all been a misunderstanding and that $1,500 a month would be just fine. To his delight, she said none of the other men on Seeking Arrangement had impressed her the way he had. B. K. explained that his current sugar baby might soon get engaged and disappear from the scene. At that point, he assured her, he would want to pursue things. She snuggled in closer and told him that she would wait. And then she started kissing and nibbling on his ear.
Ruth Padawer is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. This is her first feature article for the magazine.
Yes, folks lie about age and income, but still, here’s what Match.com says that users say about themselves:
Figures below from IAC Advertising Solutions
Match.com users --
Six month average, July - December 2008:
Age (self-reported—I would guess that many over 40 lie about their age, so the percentages in the older categories are probably higher):
18 - 24 13%
25 - 34 27%
35 - 44 29%
45 - 54 18%
55 - 64 8%
65+ 5%
Household income (probably self-reported, probably some exaggeration on income):
15% > $100,000
8% $75,000 - 100,000
9% $50,000 - 75,000
44% $35,000 - 50,000
9% $25,000 - 35,000
14% > $25,000
This suit highlights a problem that I have been writing about for a long time -- Internet dating’s dirty secret. The paid dating sites like Match.com (and I LOVE Match.com) have allowed people to list for free, yet make people pay to email each other. But they make no distinction between the paid and unpaid profiles. At LEAST 9/10 of the profiles are those of folks who have not paid up, so can’t email you back without paying first. A powerful disincentive for answering is having to pay $25 or so to do it. So now Match is being sued. Well, let’s see if it makes any change....
Lovelorn Man Sues Match.com for Fraud
Sean McGinn Claims Dating Site Makes Canceled Members Seem Available
By BRANDY ZADROZNY
June 19, 2009 —
When Barry, a Brooklyn man signed up for Match.com, he was optimistic, he perused profiles, wrote and sent messages and winks, and then he waited...and waited.
When replies failed to come, Barry who asked we not use his last name, thought something was fishy. After all, he is young, arguably handsome, and gainfully employed.
“It was really depressing,” Barry told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
He came to believe that the Web site itself might be to blame for making him feel “undesirable and rejected” and that there might not be real people on the other end of all those messages.
He is not alone.
Barry is considering being part of a proposed class action lawsuit filed by another Brooklyn man Sean McGuinn who is claiming fraud against the online dating site.
In McGinn’s complaint, he alleges Match.com perpetrates fraud by returning inactive or canceled members in search results of seemingly dateable people.
He believes he was actually sending e-mails to ghosts of Match.com’s past.
Barry understands McGinn’s pain.
“I put a lot of time and effort into these subscribers, I feel they never existed,” Barry said. “You can find yourself staying up late at night waiting for e-mails that never come… its really sad.”
“With all due respect,” ABC’s Andrea Canning asked McGinn, “Do you think it could have been you? They just weren’t interested?
“Sure it’s possible,” Barry admitted.
But the lawsuit claims Match keeps profiles of canceled or inactive members on the site, creating false hope.
And McGinn’s attorney, Norah Hart, says she knows of other former Match members who were contacted after cancelling their subscriptions.
“They cancelled their subscriptions and then they still get e-mails from Match.”
She hopes to petition to have the suit raised to class-action status.
Match.com in a statement denied any wrongdoing. “The allegation that we would deceive our subscribers by encouraging them to connect with inactive members does not make sense and is contradicted by our 14-year record. “
Lawsuit Accuses Match.com of Fraud
McGinn’s suit is not the first against Match.com. In 2005, the site was accused of having their own employees reply to e-mails to keep members subscribed. That case was thrown out.
In addition to a $39.99-a-month membership fee, McGinn bemoans in his suit the loss of his “time, labor, and emotional investment,” according to the complaint.
Time he says he spent writing lengthy, witty messages, sifting through profiles, sending winks at what he thought were potential matches, and time waiting for responses, which never came.
Barry in the meantime has found true love and is now married he says it happened the old fashioned way. “I ran into her on the sidewalk...and we started talking and it’s happily ever after.”
Looks like dating sites are now tapping the under 21 market, lowering their minimum age from 21 to 18. Doesn’t surprise me at all. These kids came out of the womb with a key board. Why shouldn’t they look to dating sites the same way they do everything else online? Why is this article below so shocked?
Dating from the dorm room
By Laura Bennett
This spring, a male friend told me: “Meeting girls in college is hard. I’m signing up for eHarmony.’’ I was shocked. This was someone with the swagger of a bullfighter and a track record of female seduction. I’d personally seen him shepherd starry-eyed underclassmen into the recesses of frat houses with remarkable finesse. When I asked him why he wanted to try online dating, his answer was simple: He was tired of doing all the legwork. He liked the idea of sorting and screening his romantic prospects from the comfort of his dorm room. Why waste time sifting through the dating pool in college when a website can do it for you?
In 2007, eHarmony lowered the minimum age for completing its membership questionnaire from 21 to 18. When I inquired as to the reasons for this change, an eHarmony spokesman obliquely informed me that “people who share common values, attitudes, personality traits, and interests are more likely to understand each other better and have an easier time negotiating their differences, making for a happier relationship over the long haul.’’
But Mark Brooks, who runs a consulting firm for online dating sites, said interest in online dating among young people has increased over the past few years. “These youngsters started on social networks; they warmed up on Friendster, they drifted to MySpace, then Facebook,’’ he said. “They are used to having a world of choice under their fingertips, and they are more demanding of a good match. They’re already accustomed to, ‘Search, there it is. Search, there it is.’ They know they have options.’’ And so, according to Brooks, today’s 18-to-22-year-olds are far more likely to look for love online than previous generations were.
The online dating arena offers a dizzying array of prospects for the college-age set. Most dating sites like eHarmony, Match.com, and the Jewish dating site JDate accept members 18 and older. Others like Universityloveconnection.com (which boasts more than 50,000 users) and Campushook.com are restricted to people enrolled in school; Studentlove.com requires users to have a “.edu’’ e-mail address to sign up.
In the spirit of trying to gauge the pulse of the college online dating “movement,’’ I trolled some websites and spoke to a few students and recent college graduates about their experiences (none wanted their last names published).
James, 22, created an account on Match.com because he thinks young people are more likely to linger in the purgatory of “just friends’’ than they once were. “In my parents’ generation, if you were spending a lot of time with a girl, it meant you were dating exclusively,’’ he told me. “Now, the lines are blurred.’’ He has been on dates with five women he met online. His modus operandi is to pick out a few aspects of a woman’s profile and send her a personalized message. “I’m pretty selective, to be honest,’’ he said.
Nathan, 20, a college student from Cambridge, also signed up for Match .com. He hasn’t been on any dates so far, but he has exchanged e-mails with five or six women. He likes to scour a profile and stick to the basics: college major, favorite movies, music. Girls who like Johnny Cash get extra points. “Online dating is instant gratification,’’ he said. “You want to know right away whether someone is interested. For my generation, when you’re writing a research paper, you don’t have to go to the library - you just Google. And online, you can wink at a woman, and she either winks back at you or she doesn’t.’’
Rachel, 20, a college student in Boston, signed up for both Studentlove.com and JDate. She was tired of campus “hookup culture’’ and decided she was ready for a boyfriend. On JDate, she met a guy who went to Emerson. She liked his photo, which was black and white and mysterious. She liked that he did stand-up comedy and that he didn’t take himself too seriously in his profile. But when they met for lunch, her first thought was: “He did not look that short online.’’ By the second date, the chemistry had waned.
For a generation hooked on instant gratification, maybe online dating is a natural outgrowth of social networking. Maybe we can even genetically engineer the perfect date by weeding out unfunny profiles and ungainly photos. But for some, the Internet ultimately falls short. “I let my account run out, and then I met someone,’’ Rachel said. “In real life.’’
One of the best things for me—an inveterate do-it-yourselfer—about Internet dating is just that: the ability to take charge of your romantic life and do it yourself. But a frequent complaint that I hear from singles is the lack of time that doing it yourself takes. Just as “if a need exists, someone will fill the gap,” here’s a way to outsource your dating. While this does make me somewhat uncomfortable to think of able bodied folks hiring out mate finding, this does seem to be a worthwhile service for people who are challenged in some way that would make Internet dating difficult if not impossible, like severe dyslexics who write and read poorly, but might otherwise be good catches. What do you think?
‘Done For You’ Dating Service Proves Romance Can Be Outsourced
A Canadian company has introduced a brazen service that lets singles delegate their online dating to a representative who exchanges messages under their name. Done For You Dating combines the extensive selection of singles on the Internet with the convenience of a personal matchmaker.
Toronto, Canada (PRWEB) July 1, 2009 -- A Canadian company has introduced a new service that lets singles delegate their online dating to a representative who manages their profile and exchanges messages under their name.
Done For You Dating combines the extensive selection of singles on the Internet with the convenience of a personal matchmaker. Unlike traditional matchmaking services, which match clients within an internal database, Done For You Dating scouts millions of single women and men on the Internet for their clients’ perfect partner.
“Online dating is like hunting for buried treasure,” says Luke Chao, founder of Done For You Dating. “The treasure is there, but it takes an incredible amount of digging through dirt before you find it. And most busy professionals don’t have that much time or emotional energy to spare.”
Dating representatives at the company are selected to be socially savvy, skilled writers who are knowledgeable about popular culture. They receive specific training in online dating and personal branding.
“We promote the client’s best qualities,” says Sue Bedford, a representative at Done For You Dating. “It’s already a borderline immoral service, so we go the extra mile to represent clients fairly, accurately and factually.”
Company founder Luke Chao is the managing director of The Morpheus Clinic for Hypnosis, where he first started helping men overcome problems interacting with women. He is the ghostwriter of several books, including Sydnee Steele’s Seducing Your Woman.
I’ve been writing for some time now about the effects of the recession on online dating. This period is not too dissimilar to the period after 9/11 when singles rushed to Internet dating sites in search of meaningful connection in a suddenly unstable world. That rush after 9/11 pushed Internet dating into the mainstream where it has stayed ever since. This is a great time to be online and looking for love. Here’s an article below that talks about the current rise in activity on online dating sites, and speculates about what may turn out to be long term trends.I highlight in bold pieces that I think are particularly significant.
Downturn dating: Hearts flutter as markets stutter but it needn’t break bank
Ashley M. Heher
CHICAGO — Credit the recession for staycations and bringing us more game-night parties at home. But also give it a shout for spurring more first dates.
Economic woes, it seems, unleash something practically primal in many of us who find ourselves without a partner: a hard-wired desire for companionship.
Some singles are now hunting for dates with the same fervour others are showing hunting for jobs. On matchmaking website eHarmony.com, membership is up 20 per cent despite monthly fees of up to $60, and activity has soared 50 per cent since September at OkCupid.com.
It’s not just the frequency of our dates that’s changing — it’s also the people we’re choosing to spend time with.
“They’re looking for something that’s genuine in a world that isn’t very secure,” said Bathsheba Birman, co-founder of the Chicago dating event Nerds at Heart. “With headlines full of why you can’t trust established institutions that you thought you could ... people are re-examining their own values.”
Attendance at the monthly gatherings, where mostly young professionals pay $25 for a drink and a chance to spend the evening clustered around trivia and board games — was more than double expectations in April and has stayed high since.
“Misery loves company, especially if the prospect of romance and-or sex looms large,” said Craig Kinsley, a neurologist at the University of Richmond. “Really, dating, rather than being considered as expensive, can be a thrilling and inexpensive distraction. Like getting drunk without the wallet-hit or hangover.”
Kinsley said stomach-fluttering first dates also release brain chemicals that can temporarily erase worries, even about pensions, layoffs, falling portfolios and upside-down mortgages.
Still, Sam Yagan, the founder and CEO at OkCupid.com, sees the changing dating climate as a matter of dollars and cents.
The way he figures it, a man can spend $100 buying drinks at a bar trying to pick up a stranger and leave with little more than a cold shoulder. But, when he’s in a relationship, a Saturday evening can be as simple as Thai noodle takeout, Netflix and some fun under the covers. All in all, Yagan said, that’s “more bang for your buck.”
It’s more than just the recession. Experts say changes in behaviour can relate to other world events — with upticks when news is bad.
Last fall, comparing periods when the stock market fell more than 100 points and when it rose by the same amount, eHarmony found more members searched for matches when the financial news was grim. Activity also grew in the days after a tragedy like the Virginia Tech shooting, while it stayed the same during “good” global events, like the Olympics.
Unlike those one-day or weeklong events, the recession already has spanned more than 18 months, and its effects are expected to last just as long — and that likely will mean more discernible changes in human behaviour.
“It ends up being a reminder that you need to look for the important things in life,” said Gian Gonzaga, eHarmony’s senior research scientist. “It isn’t that surprising when you see people gravitating toward the most fundamental human relations.”
But the trend isn’t uniform.
Recessions can make some romances more challenging, experts say, especially for those who have already said “I do.” The stress that comes with fear, financial problems and economic uncertainty can drive a wedge between partners.
And the most committed bachelors aren’t developing a sudden hankering to buy princess-cut engagement rings.
Instead, the shifts are subtle: a devoted singleton going on more first dates; casual daters seeking long-term relationships; partners who might not have been attractive a while back — someone younger or older, someone who lives in a “geographically undesirable” area — looking much better.
At the Chicago wine bar In Fine Spirits, the changing dating culture has lead to a roughly 30 per cent increase in the number of parties of two, said general manager Brandon Wise.
“With such a tenuous climate right now, I think people are looking for stability in their partner,” he said. “I think it’s less haphazard dating and more pointed dating.”
A gentler tone is taking over, daters and observers say, with substance gaining over style.
For Mili Thomas, a 28-year-old graduate student in New York, that means she now spends time with men who didn’t show up on her radar screen before the recession.
Among them: a PhD who would have been nixed because he lives in New Jersey and an employee at a marketing firm who wouldn’t have made the grade because he is two years her junior.
“I figured this was the best possible time to explore other options since people’s lives have been turned topsy turvy,” she said. “I think everyone is more open to bucking convention given that ’the usual’ has gone out the window.”
I’ve been out of the Internet dating news/gossip loop for a few weeks now while we made our annual trip north to our house in Maine. Apparently, there has been some big news in the meantime: Match.com is being sued for what I have been harping on for years: The common practice on paid dating sites of allowing non-paying members to post profiles for free, but then not allowing the freebies to open and/or answer emails from the paying members. What really is galling about this practice is that there is no differentiation—a single cannot tell who is paid or not by the looks of the listing. Therefore, considerable time, effort, and emotions are spent by paying singles writing to non-paying ones who cannot answer without paying up—a powerful disincentive. I’ve called this “Internet dating’s dirty little secret.” Here’s a link to my first blog post about the practice. But I had been writing about this “dirty secret” for several years before.
Note too that the dating sites NEVER publish their member (paid and unpaid listers) and subscriber (paid only) numbers together. The most recent figuring I did was several years ago when the two very different numbers from Match seemed to indicate something like 13:1 non-paid to paid members.
Now, I still thing that Match is the best all-around dating site, but this all-too-common practice of Match and other paid sites is long overdue for a change. “Why don’t they answer my emails?” is THE most common complaint I hear from Internet daters. And probably the most common reason for non-replies is that the lister is a freeloader and not a paid member. It’s too bad that it make take legal action to get dating sites to stop this practice. All it would take is some small indicator on each profile of the lister’s status. I’d like to know. Wouldn’t you?
See this article below for more details:
NY man sues dating website Match.com for deception
Tue Jun 9, 2009
* Suit says site causes “humiliation and disappointment”
* Match.com says suit lacks merit, will defend vigorously
NEW YORK, June 9 (Reuters) - A New York man sued dating website Match.com on Tuesday for misleading members by posting profiles of prospective dates who are unable to respond to any interest in them because they do not have a paid subscription.
Sean McGinn, of Brooklyn, who filed the lawsuit in New York federal court, accused Match.com of causing “humiliation and disappointment” for some members who feel rejected when their attempt to contact a prospective date gets no reply.
McGinn wants Match.com to stop “its deceptive practices” and demands unspecified damages.
People can create a Match.com profile for others to see and search the database of prospective dates for free, but to be able contact someone of interest or respond there are fees, ranging from $39.99 for one month to $19.99 a month for six months.
The lawsuit said that “despite the emotional vulnerability inherent in the dating process, fraught as it is with fear of rejection and anxiety, Match defrauds the consumer of his/her time, labor, and emotional investment” by not telling them that someone they are contacting does not have a subscription.
“Because the writer has no way of knowing this, he or she may experience profound personal anguish, suffering which is easily preventable by Match,” the lawsuit said.
Match.com, which is owned by Barry Diller’s Internet media company IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI.O), is still reviewing the complaint, but said “we believe this lawsuit is without merit and we will defend it vigorously.”
“On any given day, upon information and belief, many thousands of members log into the Match site hoping to find someone special,” the lawsuit said. “At any given time, a significant percentage of the emails a member sends cannot be opened, read or responded to by the recipient.”
Match.com’s website it has had more than 100 million members since 2000, offers services in 24 countries and territories and hosts sites in 15 languages. (Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Eric Walsh)
Oooo. If you weren’t nervous already about dating online, you don’t want to read about the data you enter and what the sites do with it. Frankly, I’d rather not know.
Online dating: Your profile’s long, scary shelf life
By Robert L. Mitchell
Two years after meeting your one true love, you find yourself embroiled in a nasty divorce. During the proceedings, your spouse claims that you misrepresented yourself right from the beginning, and—surprise!—she has a copy of your original profile from the online dating site where you met to prove it.
Online dating services have privacy policies that offer some assurances about how that data will be used and not used, but they don’t necessarily delete your data after you’ve canceled your subscription and moved on. Many sites keep the profiles and related data long after you’ve left the service; some won’t delete it unless you ask—and others never delete it at all.
“We have an archiving strategy, but we don’t delete you out of our database,” says Joseph Essas, vice president of technology at eHarmony . In that way, users who return a few months—or a few years—later don’t have to fill out the 400-question profile again. “We’ll remember who you are,” he says.
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That’s important because a substantial percentage of users tend to return to online dating sites over and over again. eHarmony also uses that archival data for research purposes, according to a company spokesperson.
Yahoo Personals declined to say how long it retains customer information. True.com retains the data indefinitely. “The data just sits there. We don’t really get rid of those [old records],” says CEO and founder Herb Vest. But Plenty of Fish is more pragmatic about its disk space. It tends to delete records after six months to a year of inactivity, according to CEO Markus Frind.
Users should know the retention policy of the service they’re using, says Jonathan Sablone, a partner and chair of the e-discovery group at law firm Nixon Peabody LLP . “If you don’t know what the policy is, you have to assume that the data will be there for a very long time, if not forever,” he says.
Legal concerns
Users should be well familiar with a dating site’s privacy policy. Ideally, you should have a good idea what will happen if the site is presented with a subpoena or court order.
eHarmony maintains that its records are safe. It has a strict privacy policy and complies with the state and federal laws regarding the privacy of electronically stored information, “which prohibit the release of customer records in response to a subpoena in civil litigation,” a spokesperson says. “For example, the contents of users’ communications cannot be disclosed in response to a subpoena.”
That is true for cases where the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act applies, says Sablone, but litigants can still get the data. “If there’s information within that database that may be relevant to a divorce proceeding, then through a court order, it’s possible to obtain that. If the court issues an order, you’ve got to do it.”
While businesses routintely delete old records to protect themselves from future legal discovery requests, many online dating sites don’t. “The danger of retaining information longer [than is necessary] is that it opens the door for legal processes down the road,” says Sablone.
That means personal data within online dating profiles has the potential to haunt users months or even years later. “The risk is that the detailed personality profiles can be disclosed in a lawsuit and then used against you in novel and negative ways,” says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum . These include divorce or custody proceedings, employment-related lawsuits and potentially even medical-related lawsuits.
Though rare, legal actions have been filed in cases ranging from date rape accusations to sexual harassment accusations to a lawsuit ( preview the story here ) against former WellPoint Inc. executive David Colby by a woman who contended that he misrepresented himself on Match.com .
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In an ideal world, the service would notify the customer immediately of a subpoena so that he could get a court order to block it. But online dating services are not obligated to tell you when someone presents a subpoena or court order demanding your profile data.
“Whether or not a dating site will do this for each and every customer is an open question that only the site’s privacy policy can answer,” Dixon says. Those policies, she says, aren’t reassuring.
Some Web companies fight hard to protect records. “They will resist every effort to produce that data,” says Sablone. Others simply notify the user, particularly if the data resides on an active storage device and is inexpensive to produce. “They put the burden on the consumer to fight that battle,” he says.
Matchmaking or marketing?
Online dating services have good reasons for wanting to hang onto user data: It’s valuable. The sites gather extensive amounts of personal information about their customers that can be extremely valuable for marketing purposes.
When you sign up for an online dating site, you fill out a profile, which can run from a few dozen questions to several hundred. It includes both demographic data (age, gender, location, race and religion) and personal preferences even your mom might not know about. (You don’t want to date Hindus or Catholics. Who knew?)
Most services use this profile data to try to convert customers who are just looking into paying subscribers. But what else can they do with it?
For one, they can try and sell you other products or services from their own company. While Yahoo Personals, Plenty of Fish and PerfectMatch.com all say they eschew this practice, eHarmony uses the business intelligence it has gained about its customers to market related services on four advertiser-supported advice sites, including Project Wedding and Fertile Thoughts . More are planned.
Advertising issues
That same data also can be used by online dating sites that carry advertising to deliver ads or offers for complementary advertiser-supported services that are highly targeted to individuals. “Ultimately, we’re looking at hypertargeting individuals to deliver ads that way,” says a spokesperson for eHarmony.
Ross Williams, CEO at White Label Dating , which provides business and hosting services to dating sites, says the prospect of offering highly targeted advertising based on detailed demographic, behavioral and psychological data—and even very detailed profile data such as the color of your hair and that you’re balding—is attractive.
“We know that information. If I have a hair product for men, I don’t think there are any places online other than online dating where you can get that [demographic data],” he says. That type of information, Williams says, gives online dating sites a unique competitive opportunity, if they’re willing to exploit it.
That raises concerns for Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse . He thinks that users who sign up for online dating services may be giving up too much about themselves in the bargain.
“I would be reluctant to provide the level of information they are requesting. You’re essentially providing a gold mine of information, both for behavioral and marketing purposes. That information—on hobbies, interests, religion—is very valuable information that you are aggregating into one location,” he says.
Stephens also notes that it’s probably better not to reveal too much about yourself before you meet someone. As with a good resume, an online profile should be a teaser that makes people want to meet you, rather than a detailed biography. “You might want to use a bit of discretion and leave a little bit of mystery there,” he says.
Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch , a newsletter that covers online dating and social networking sites, sees highly targeted marketing as inevitable. He says traditional “interruption marketing”—rollovers, pop-ups and so forth—hasn’t worked well on Internet dating sites because users don’t pay attention to the ads.
Brooks thinks ad-supported sites such as Plenty of Fish (a former client of Brooks’ consultancy, Courtland Brooks) should leverage compatibility profiles to allow advertisers to target users with highly contextual offers that would be of the most interest to them. “Advertising is an annoyance. The only way it will work is through the power of the friendly referral,” he says.
But for now, Plenty of Fish’s Frind says the site’s current advertising model, which lets advertisers target users based on basic demographic information, is working just fine. He claims that the site has a higher click-through rate than social networking sites and generated about $10 million in ad revenue last year.
As these profile databases continue to scale, the economics of targeted adverting could one day switch the dominant model from subscription-based to advertising-based. “Once you build up a big enough database, advertising becomes quite interesting,” Williams says.
Protecting your personal data
Both Stephens and Dixon recommend that users who have concerns about how their data will be used should read the privacy policies of these services before signing up. Sablone suggests inquiring about user account data retention policies as well, which may not be in the privacy policy.
Once you’re through using a service, some sites will delete your data if you ask. If you think you’ll return to the site, it might be convenient to have your profile waiting. But users who value their privacy may want to ask to have their profiles deleted when they leave.
Plenty of Fish will honor that, says Frind. Vest says True.com will also delete user profiles on request. But Sablone warns that if there’s no stated policy or agreement in advance, a customer request to delete data is just that. “It’s a request that the company may follow—or not,” he says.
eHarmony has a different policy. “We do not permanently delete account information from our system, but when members ask to close their account, we ensure that their profile information is turned off and not shared with other members unless the member explicitly asks for the account to be reactivated,” says a spokesperson.
eHarmony also deletes the user’s e-mail account information once the account has been closed. Presumably, you won’t be hearing from them again. But that time capsule of data about you remains in the vault forever. And, says Dixon, “that [privacy] policy can change any time the site wants to change it.”
Social networking sites are the rage for sure. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and their derivatives are spouting like mushrooms. I just wrote a couple of entries ago about Zoosk and MyTweetheart. What do you think?
Facebook and MySpace are ‘most popular places to find love’
Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Friends Reunited have taken over from pubs and nightclubs as the most popular place to find love, it has emerged.
Three quarters of Brits believe there are fewer stigmas attached to meeting a love-match via Facebook, Friends Reunited or Bebo than normal internet dating websites like match.com
One in four British people are dating – or have dated – someone they met through online community websites.
And over a third have got back in touch with an old flame through the sites.
One in ten have even had gone a step further and had an affair or a one-night stand with someone they met via a social networking site.
A spokesman for internet market research company http://www.OnePoll.com, which carried out the study, said: “Traditionally the pub used to be a central meeting place where many couples met across the bar and got to know each other.
“Now social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have taken over as the dating hot spot with many singletons finding love online.
“The websites also seem to be a breeding ground for rekindling old romances and the results also show that many affairs begin by tracing ex-lovers too.”
The poll of 3,000 20 to 40 year olds revealed that almost half (46 per cent) believe it’s now easier to meet someone through social networking sites than in the flesh.
And 57 per cent of those admitted they are more confident communicating with a potential suitor online.
Over a third (39 per cent) said they preferred the method as it enabled them to get to know someone before actually meeting them.
And 27 per cent felt using social networking sites cut down the time to find love compared to having to having to meet prospective partners face to face.
Yet 44 per cent agreed it’s now considered “cooler” to find love via online community sites than traditional means.
This could explain why over a quarter surveyed confessed to purposely uploading nice pictures of themselves in the hope that potential love interests will spot their profile.
And three quarters of Brits believe there are fewer stigmas attached to meeting a love-match via Facebook, Friends Reunited or Bebo than normal internet dating websites like match.com.
A spokesman from http://www.OnePoll.com added: “You can see why the appeal for finding love through social networking sites is so strong.
“You can see someone’s profile online, trawl through their personal pictures and see messages from their friends – creating a far greater impression of what that person is like than a traditional internet dating site.
“The fact that almost half of the nation now considers finding love via online community sites cooler than traditional means proves the stigma that used to be attached to online dating is becoming a thing of the past.”
Everything indicates that a poor economy is great for looking for love. I just watched a Nightline segment featuring Match.com and Internet dating and Match had double the business in January 2009 compared with January 2008. DOUBLE! Here’s an artcle below about a dating site I hadn’t heard of before—Zoosk—that appears to be doing a booming business. But BTW, the quotes of Match.com prices is dead wrong. I just checked: Match is $29.99 for one month, but just $14.99 if you join for six months. Chances are very good that you will not meet your match in one month, so sign up for the six. And even if you do meet Mr. or Ms. Right the first day, isn’t that a great investment?
Can a recession seriously boost online dating? Commentary: Free and social services will see more of a boost than pay sites
By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch)—As empty pizza boxes piled up on office tables, tech-minded twenty-somethings swilled beer from plastic cups. In the corner, a DJ was spinning dance music. A guy donning a toga and blonde curly wig worked the room, pretending to be Cupid for Valentine’s Day.
No, it’s not the dot-com era rising from the grave. It’s a startup named Zoosk, hosting its own “Lunch 2.0,” a vestige of the recent Web 2.0 boom. It begs the question: At a time when many in the tech world are now job searching, what kind of company could host a free beer-and-pizza lunch?
Zoosk is an online dating site targeted at those in their 20s and early 30s, a demographic that spends a lot of time on social networking sites. Zoosk’s founders say their site is among the first to incorporate social networking into online dating.
Available both as a full subscription premium service and scaled-down free offering, it just may represent online dating of the future, where friends join the same sites and help find each other matches. It was started in December 2007.
I asked a Zoosk investor how the 13-person startup could hold a free lunch and have offices in San Francisco’s pricey Financial District. After all, startups were warned late last year to save pennies if they want to survive, and generate revenue.
Zoosk has received $4.5 million in funding from various venture capitalists, a fair amount but not really enough to warrant corporate indulgences, unless it was generating revenue.
“We had a subscription model at the outset,” explained Deepak Kamra, a general partner at Canaan Partners in nearby Menlo Park. Kamra was also an early investor in online dating pioneer Match.com, now part of IAC/InterActiveCorp.
Unprecedented growth
Kamra said Zoosk was seeing “unprecedented growth,” especially when compared with the early days of Match.com, when online dating was a new and scary concept. Zoosk currently has 16.5 million registered users despite being barely one year old, and it is even hiring a few software engineers. The company won’t disclose its revenue figures.
Dating services seem impervious to economic downturns, Kamra said. To illustrate the point, he borrowed a news hook from some pre-Valentine’s Day articles last week about traffic growth at online-dating Websites.
“Why would love be susceptible to a recession?” he asked.
Jeff Lindsay, an analyst with Bernstein Research, described the recession phenomenon in a report last week, in which he analyzed sudden boosts in visits to U.S. online dating sites.
“The explanation is not rocket science,” Lindsay wrote. ”People suddenly have 60 to 80 more hours free per week and are miserable—almost perfect conditions for the dating services. These conditions are particularly favorable for the online players because online is cheaper.”
Visits do not necessarily translate into revenue for all. Zoosk has applications for MySpace, Facebook and Twitter and calls itself a social dating network.
Not all Zoosk users—many of whom use free social networking sites—pay $24.95 a month. In return, though, they have fewer features. Zoosk offered a Valentine’s Day promo where users who signed up on Feb. 13 and 14 received full access to the site and members for those days.
Not all growing
But not all dating sites are growing like Zoosk.
Older pay sites have seen growth fall off in the last year or so. Last January, reports surfaced that Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Spark Networks Inc was looking to sell one of its sites, the popular JDate.com, a service geared toward Jewish singles. Sparks saw overall sales drop to $14 million for the most recently reported quarter ended Sept. 30, vs. $15.8 million a year ago.
On the other hand, Match.com saw growth in the quarter, albeit in the single digits, in part due to its expansion in other countries. Revenue at Match grew 5% to $93.5 million.
December 2008 monthly unique visitor data compiled by ComScore and Bernstein Research showed another player in the U.S. called SinglesNet.com taking the lead from Match, with a slightly cheaper monthly subscription of $24.99. Match charges about $35 a month.
Right behind SinglesNet and Match was a free offering, called PlentyofFish.com, based in Vancouver. It generates advertising revenue based on partnerships and links to other pay dating sites, said Dave Evans, who writes a blog called Online Dating Insider. PlentyofFish probably has one of the lowest-cost businesses models. Founder and Chief Executive Markus Frind is the company’s sole employee, though he gets some help from his girlfriend.
“The economy has affected online dating in recent months,” Evans said. “But to say that is the primary driver is just lazy. People are joining more free dating sites; that is a constant trend.”
Increased ads
Evans also said many sites, such as Match, increased advertising budgets to take advantage of the often gloomy time for those without partners. That’s the period from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day when many feel pressure from families about their single status.
The December boost in unique visits ahead of Valentine’s Day surely will slow at the pay dating sites as the recession wears on. While jobless people may be also lonely, many will find paying $25 to $35 a month for a dating service is a luxury when they have no income.
They likely will veer toward free social networking sites, social dating sites like Zoosk or free sites like PlentyofFish. No doubt some people are also now taking advantage of free promotions, and will cancel their subscriptions as soon as the free trial period ends.
“We see a real risk of a Craigslist-like disintermediation of the online dating space,” said Bernstein’s Lindsay.
So while the recession seems to have given a temporary boost to some of these sites, it may only be short lived. End of Story
Therese Poletti is a senior columnist for MarketWatch in San Francisco.
I’ve been experimenting with Twitter a few months now, and I’d have to say I am semi-hooked. How’s that for ambivalence? It’s fun watching the Tweets of the people I am following scroll down the left side of my screen (I use Twitbin to do it). And I like the quick, immediate way Twitter allows me to communicate with MY followers, which are accumulating every day. That part is fun to watch too, those folks who find me somehow and sign on for the ride.
People get hooked on Twitter. Interesting as well as useless applications turn up every day. But here is one that really floored me: Leave it to the Twitterites to come up with a DATING SITE base on Twitter: http://www.mytweetheart.com/ You’ve got all the standard dating match-up possibilities, men seeking women, women seeking men, men for men and women for women, as well as men seeking men/women and women seeking men/women. I just saw a posting by a man seeking men/women and the picture he had posted was with his wife and kids! Lordy.
But it is free, and it would be a real challenge to write a profile in less than 140 characters.
eHarmony is well financed, for sure. In nine months last year, it spent almost double what Match.com spent on ads.
EHARMONY BLOG—Feb 11 --
eHarmony spends $93.3 million in advertising in 9 months, almost twice as much as Match.com—see chart below, figures in the $100,000’s”
Rank Site Jan 07 to Sep 07 Jan 08 to Sep 08
1 eHarmony 79,019.631 93,255.171
2 Match.com 51,170.580 47,607.049
3 Chemistry.com 12,125.655 28,282.073
4 Cupid.com 1,067.142 847.231
5 Nocheatersdate.com 0.000 822.042
6 Blacksingles.com 272.964 510.251
7 AdultFriendFinder.com 0.000 243.553
8 AshleyMadison.com 59.977 243.420
9 Ciaorossano.com 0.000 212.750
10 ChristianMingle.com 0.000 201.213
Source: The Nielsen Company (2009)
And now Patti gives it to the guys. Go Patti!
Dating Tips From Patti Novak From Online Dating Magazine’s Online Dating Newsletter February 24, 2009
Here are some of Patti Novak’s dating tips for men:
> Make an effort to clean yourself up--it shows that you care about the date. Be sure to shave that day. Don’t wear wrinkled clothes with sneakers.
> When you’re on the date, be attentive, ask questions and really listen. And don’t forget to make eye contact. Eye contact and a nice smile can steal a woman’s heart.
> If you’re going out to dinner, brush up on your table manners. If you hold the fork like a toothbrush, please ask someone to show you the right way.
> If you want to go out with a woman on the weekend, don’t call her on Friday--I find a lot of guys make this mistake. In the first three months, she may not be dating exclusively so don’t assume she’s sitting back and waiting for you to call.
> No matter how excited you are, don’t send flowers after only a couple of dates. It makes women nervous if you come on too strong. Wait until you’re at least a few months in.
Patti Novak is the popular matchmaker from Buffalo, New York and author of the book GET OVER YOURSELF.
Patti Novak’s Dating Tips for Women
By Joe Tracy
(Online Dating Newsletter) Patti Novak is a popular matchmaker in Buffalo, New York and the star of the former TV series, Confessions of a Matchmaker. She’s also written a new book titled “Get Over Yourself!: How to Get Real, Get Serious, and Get Ready to Find True Love.
Leave it to Patti to put it on the line. Here she gives some blunt advice to the ladies:
Here are some of Patti’s Dating Tips for Women:
> Laugh and have fun. If you’re excited to be on the date, really show it. The guy wants to know you’re having a good time.
> Too many women (more so than men) conduct a date like an interview. Don’t ask him how much money he earns or if he has a 401k. You’re not writing his portfolio.
>If you have four cats, he may not need to know that right away. No one loves your pets like you do.
> Don’t ask him what happened between him and his ex. Women have the compulsive tendency to ask this one—we can be the nosiest creatures on the planet.
> In that first encounter, you don’t need to tell him you just lost 25 pounds—it creates a visual you may not want him to have so soon.
> Promote your intelligence, but don’t be afraid to show your softer side. A man wants an intelligent and independent woman, but he also wants her to be feminine.
Online dating is definitely maturing from what it was when I was first on Match.com in 1998. Here’s some observations about where things are now from the tech world:
Dating 2.0: Looking for Love in All the Online Places
by Ashley Laurel Wilson
February 17, 2009, 02:01 PM — CIO.com —
Sometimes looking for love takes a back seat these days-especially with demanding schedules that include working long hours and furthering educational goals. While technology is a very large factor in causing people stay so busy, it’s also helping people connect more, even in the romantic sense.
Not every person who dates online is as horribly geeky as Napoleon Dynamite’s brother Kip—there are some cool geeks out there just waiting for you to meet them. In fact, more than forty million Americans have tried online dating at one time or another and some have walked away very happy.
“My wife refuses to let me try it. Go figure.” Bryan C Webb, technical marketing professional from Ontario Canada
Though different people swear by certain online dating websites, the number one free online dating website in the U.S., U.K. and Canada is Plentyoffish.com, run by CEO Markus Frind. Since its 2003 launch, the site has grown by word of mouth to more than 13 million page views each day.
According to Frind, there’s always a jump in site traffic between the day after Christmas through the Wednesday after Valentine’s Day, as well as just before Thanksgiving. Singles tend to join the site around family-related holidays-anytime they’re reminded of being single, Frind says.
The mastermind behind this website, Frind claims anyone in his position has to be a romantic after reading so many happy stories from users who’ve met someone great on his site. “It’s part of the reward of doing this site,” he says. (Frind, however, met his own girlfriend offline.)
Denver-based Jon Freeman, however, chose to use an online dating website to as a platform to increase his chances of finding a suitable person.
“I was a two time ‘loser’ having used less than intelligent methods to find the ‘right person’ and figured I needed a better process-the Web gave me just that ability (I know, so romantic),” Freeman says. “I’d tried other sites and even online personals, but in the end I went for the site with the most people on it to increase my odds on finding the perfect one.”
While using Matchmaker.com, Freeman realized that the “percent match function” wasn’t helping him so he made some minor changes-his favorite color turned from orange into blue and his pet lizard became a dog-which actually helped him meet his future wife. Within a year of their initial online connection, Freeman got married. “We finish each others sentences and rarely argue or fight. We are very much in love with each other,” Freeman says, still satisfied with his online dating experience.
Brad Thomas, from Kentucky, met his wife through instant messaging and agrees that there isn’t any special recipe for meeting people online. “I’ve never used a dating site or agency. So I think online “dating” encompasses a whole lot more than just eHarmony, virtual worlds etc. You don’t need a virtual meeting “place” as such, just a mode of communication.”
Thomas—who met his sweetheart in the U.S., invited her to the U.K. with him, proposed in Paris and now lives with her in the U.S.-isn’t afraid to go the extra mile for love.
But even for those that never meet their love interest in person, some, like Jared Ubriaco from Florida, find online relationships rewarding. In 2007, Ubriaco was an online gaming fanatic, and after regularly playing World of Warcraft (WOW) for a few months, he realized he didn’t know anything about the other online gamers, especially one female player in particular.
“Sometimes we had this mind connect,” Ubriaco says about his relationship with the female player. After the two players began talking during game play, they realized they hit it off and kept in touch for more than a year while Ubriaco worked in the States and she taught English overseas.
Normal people write letters and talk on the phone, but we kept in touch through voice chat rooms and e-mails, Ubriaco says, adding that they also sent small presents to each other for holidays and birthdays. The two were, in a sense, dating.
However, after she returned home to the States, they lost touch for a few months before he found her on World of Warcraft again. Though they’ve still never met in person, they keep in touch through e-mail and he’s been invited to visit her in Washington.
While technology is streamlining how we meet others, sustaining a long term relationship with someone only online is tough. At some point, signing offline and meeting up for a cup of coffee is a much needed next step.
Just remember, to get to the coffee phase, make sure your Internet connection is strong enough so you don’t accidentally sign off in the middle of a getting-to-know you conversation or your potential love muffin might get miffed.
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