Online dating is big business, drawing about 4 million U.S. Internet users daily in June 2006 (and 25 million monthly), and they spend a daily average of nearly 17 minutes each on these sites. That adds up to a lot of page views – almost 4.5 billion per month (source: Comscore). And that doesn’t take into account the billion-a-day Myspace page views, which many people argue is basically a very large dating site. All told, at least 15% of U.S. Internet users visit an online dating site each month.
The two largest dating sites are Yahoo Personals and Match.com, respectively, with a combined 9.3 million monthly visitors. Both allow free browsing, but to communicate with other members you must pay a fee. Match.com charges $30/month for the basic plan; Yahoo’s fee is $25/month. Both sites also offer premium plans that attempt to help you find a compatible mate.
An entire batch of next generation dating sites have emerged that are starting to nip at the established players. One, PlentyofFish, launched in 2003 and has over half a million monthly U.S. visitors. Recently, even Google has entered the space through their Google Base product.
One big difference is that these sites are (mostly) free, making revenue from ad sales alone. But many of these sites are also experimenting with new ways to introduce people who may be a good match. More on each below.
Consumating
Consumating launched in the summer of 2005, was acquired by CNET in December 2005 and relaunched last month with a new interface and features. Its tagline is “Find People Who Don’t Suck,” and tagging plays a big part in the service. Consumating is clearly aimed young hipsters, who can make themselves more “popular” by answering questions to fill out their profile. Users search by loose age ranges (20s, 30s, etc.) and tags to find friends and partners. The site also seeks to engage users through a variety of contests and weekly user quizzes. Other Consumating features include a widget that streams member information to a web page based on parameters you set (everyone, zipcode, by tag). The site also has message board features. We’ve included a version of the widget below.
Engage
Engage seeks to hook up couples Fiddler-on-the-Roof-style through matchmaking. Users sign up with the usual descriptive profile, but then take on the role of either “dater” or “matchmaker” (or both). The fact that Engage uses its own member to set others up is their key differentiator, and gives the site a viral touch – even non members can be suggested for a match.
Users can browse as either matchmakers, recommending their friends, or as a dater looking for that special someone for a wing(wo)man to introduce them too. Daters can also directly email each other, however. Added features include user voting on potential couple’s compatibility as well as both dater and matchmaker reputations. Engage will charge members but is offering a 6 month free trial currently. Non-dating matchmakers can use the site for free.
Google Personals
Google Base (TechCrunch profiles here) allows users to enter personal profiles highly targeted towards dating (fields include gender, marital status, sexual orientation, etc.). Other features include labels (tags), a short description, location mapping, and an anonymous email to be reached at. So far, the personals section has been primarily used as a personals aggregator for Hot or Not and FindingSingles.com, a consequence of the mass upload feature. Also, for a bit of humor, check out this post by Damien Mulley on how to use Google to get laid.
GreatBoyFriends
GreatBoyFriends, which was acquired by TheKnot in 2005, tries to remove the exaggeration (or lie) factor inherent in online dating. Friends, family and ex’s are asked to leave feedback about them. GBF then verifies the endorsement or removes it. A key selling point is that married or otherwise unavailable people don’t use the site.
Guided by the recommendations, users search for themselves or recommend matches for their friends. The site drives referrals by waiving a week of the $20/month subscription fee for referrals and adds users by creating accounts for non-users when they are referred on the site.
MatchActivity
MatchActivity is a new site that sets up a date before the introduction. Users post activities in their area by tags and then chose the respondent they like the most and carry out the plan. Added features allow you to add buddies, rate user reliability, target invitations to a specific person, and be notified when that certain someone you admire posts an activity. For an activity based site, it’s surprising there is no date/time filtering for searches and a lack of standard messaging features makes it hard to use the service to keep in touch with successful dates using the site. See a positive review here. MatchActivity is free, but offers a $8/month premium version to allow one-on-one communication outside of activity planning.
MatchTag
MatchTag has the same core activity tagging feature of MatchActivity.com, but wraps it in a more complete social network. Users post activities to the general population and chose partners from respondents, but also has more complete messaging and commenting features to fill out the user experience outside of activities. This is because MatchTag’s founders view it as a service not only to meet new dates, but also friends in your area. MatchTag’s added calendar feature makes it easy to not only find activities you know you like but also stumble upon new ones.
MingleNow
MingleNow, a new venture from BlueLithium, is pre-launch. You can add your email to the home page for updates, or see their blog here. Early reports from testers say that MingleNow aims to join online and offline social gathering. Users registering on MingleNow will group themselves by what real world locations they hang out at (bars, restaurants, cafe’s, etc.) so groups can mingle online and off. The site will also include a rating system to gauge member’s flakiness along with other metrics. We’re looking forward to reviewing this when it launches – it may be great for non-dating social interaction as well.
PlentyofFish
PlentyOfFish started as a way for Markus Frind to teach himself ASP, but quickly marched itself up to become a very large dating site, with nearly 600,000 unique monthly U.S. visitors (Comscore) and claims of 500 million monthly page views (Comscore says only 118 million, in the U.S.). Its look and feel is rough around the edges, but it gives users what they want: the ability to browse personal profiles free of charge. PlentyOfFish also crafted a simple bulletin board system that allows users to freely chat, vent frustrations, and offer up dating advice. The site is doing very well financially.
Poddater
We wrote about Poddater in December 2005. The basic idea is to allow people to create profile videos and allow others to download them and view them. With a bit of a stretch, they also assume people will download these to their video iPod or other video device and review them there. It is otherwise a fairly standard view profile/contact user type site. Users can browse via location, age, and tags. When you find someone you’re interested in you can message them or just admire from afar by subscribing to their RSS feed. Note: a lot of the profiles don’t have videos, and our view is that Poddater is too niche to succeed.
Prescription4Love
We wrote about this one last week. Prescription4Love is a niche site devoted to people facing the stigma of special conditions, such as deafness, HIV, or obesity. It helps members find a better romantic match by allowing them to be open about their conditions with potential partners while maintaining anonymity until users trust each other. Overall, the site’s search feature does the job for finding people in your area by personal traits and certain conditions, but lacks the visual customization of the profile that could be a useful fill-in for the lack of a photo. Commenters have also suggested that search for multiple condition be allowed.
RateOrDate
RateOrDate is a meta-dating-search site that features couple ratings, singles event listings, and a dating site directory. Users can use the directory to find the dating site that most closely fits their needs. A Google maps mashup lets daters can find singles events in their areas. Finally, users can rate potential couple comparability based on photos and a short blurb. They also have a good blog following dating site trends. Overall we found the site to be a bit confusing and lacking in much actual utility.
VerbDate
VerbDate is a new dating site, launched in March, that adds voice to the usual online dating experience via Skype. Verbdate has the usual user profiles with tags, but incorporates Flickr photo albums and allows users to not only email and IM, but initiate a Skype call by “winking” at each other. All-in-all, VerbDate allows the greatest amount of interaction while remaining physically separated. The site only has 117 profiles, however, and has some negative reviews. It’s very young, though, and needs time to fully bake.
Wikia Personals
Wikia Personals has yet to launch, but aims to create a free global personals page. Discussion so far is geared towards a site that allows users to search through personal profiles based on fields such as language, sex, religion, etc. Stay tuned for some more developments from this community created site. Our previous Wikia posts are here, and our podcast interview with CEO Gil Penchina is here.
Summary
We’ve included a summary chart of features but, frankly, such an objective breakdown of the services may be of little value to users looking to just find a date. Numbers of profiles matter – in that case PlentyofFish, a basic but free service, leads the pack. If you are looking for a more structures approach to dating, try one of the sites offering activity based meetings, or matchmaking. Our anticipated favorite is MingleNow – tying socializing to real-world hangouts is a great idea. Most of the sites above support gay and lesbian searches as well.
In few years we will only see 3 or 4 of these still online.
We’re still here!
Sure things are slowing with the advent of facebook but were not gone yet.
You forgot the “Plenty of Fish” site.
POF is almost nazi like now…way too conservative
Don’t forget vast.com (previously profiled on Techcrunch I believe) offers a personals search, claiming to index “11.2 million people profiles across 10,369 sites”
On a side-note, I’m surprised the number of male and female personals they index is so similar:
female 5,268,471
male 5,225,330
unknown 800,435
I also believe that in a few years only 3 or 4 big players will remain on the market. But then you will have lots of “niche” players focusing on specific groups, regions and the like.
A pattern that we can observe and several other segments.
Link Correction: (Wikia Personals) http://www.wiki.../wiki/Personals should be http://personal.../wiki/Personals
http://www.wiki.../wiki/Personals is just a wiki entry.
I’m amazed that you haven’t included the only site that is 100% free throughout, and has been on the front edge of the business for ages AND has a better matching algorithm than any other site: okcupid.com
I did a business analysis of dating sites when a client wanted me to help him get into the market, and my conclusion was that it was a hard-to-enter market anyway (you need profiles before you get anywhere, so it’s chicken and egg) and to be honest, I couldn’t see how we could build a system better at helping find matches than OKcupid.
oh thank you very much. i understand who you are.
Hi,
You could also compose a bouquet, consisting of your favorite flowers and send it family, friends and loved ones…all over the web…and for free.
Check it out here:
http://www.chal....se/?webflorist
Hello am Potia 33 years old single looking for the right man for my life pls u can add me here so that i will tell more about me to u or u can send me ur yahoo id in my mail okay..Cute_Lady412001@yahoo.com thank you
There is also beautifulpeople.com – which is definitiv a niche dating site – you must be rich and famous to get into and you need to pay a montly fee. I read that they have only 63000 users but they are well selected and a very good target group for special companies and their products.
you left off okcupid.com
Here we go, now every one of the 10,000+ dating sites feels they are left out and is now spamming here to get a few more clicks. Funny thing about beautifulpeople – they rejected my profile but now won’t leave me alone with their spam emails asking me to try again. I’m not interested, but there seems to be no way to stop the emails!!!
Just a quick note to Verbdate:
Over 300 profiles live: Female 89 Males 218
and approx 700 hidden and feeling out the site!
Those 700 are mainly Indian and Asian and so we are localizing for them ASAP.
Kindest from Canada!
J
So cynical, James
. Is it not possible that Mike actually DID leave off some quite cool and/or innovative social / dating sites? I, too, think okcupid is pretty cool.
Just a few comments.
Plentyoffish has an IM, Video Chat, Anon Calling voice etc. Like most other sites plentyoffish uses the Userplane IM.
Comscore says Plentyoffish had 200 million pageviews in the USA in may, For June they say 118 million. In march they said it had 20 million. Comscore is about as accurate as alexa, as they use the same distribution method. Comscore Canada reports huge numbers for plentyoffish though.
The only wanna be dating site that is missing is Okcupid. They just closed a 6 million round of funding.
Okcupid gets the vast majority of their signups come from people they force to register so they can take tests. There are over 20,000 blog links for this single okcupid test alone in google. “commonly confused words test” -site:okcupid.com
http://www.goog...art=80&sa=N
Okcupid is like emode 2.0… Of all the sites listed here I’d consider Okcupid the most serious contender, because they have funding, and they have big distribution, although the site doesn’t get that much real traffic.
Paird.com will be launching next week and offers a bit of a twist on the whole online dating scene. A “hot or not” flare is introduced and peoples egos are put to the test as they post their pics to be “paird” with people of the opposite sex. They are compiling pics and putting final touches on design at the moment, but overall a pretty cool concept that will be available early next week.
Surprised no one has mentioned http://matchmake.us/
It’s a really simple, fun site, and that’s its strength – it does one thing, and does it really well: allow random folks to matchmake any couple.
Michael, how about a post summerzing the web 2.0 companies which are actually making money and if possible the details?… I am not kidding you but this is a serious request.
As Plenty of Fish’s Markus has mentioned on many occasions, I think the dating site market will come under greater and greater pressure from social networking sites that continue to encroach on the singles market. Generating revenue through advertising and other ancilliary services will slowly push the paid subscription model into tiny boutique niche.
I wonder how you picked your list of sites? You missed the two most profitable sites: eharmony.com and jdate.com. You also missed my favorite site: http://www.lovehappens.com – which is like engage but with 20 times the traffic.
There’s also chemistry.com which is fairly new.
Otown – I picked new, young sites for the most part, or sites with an interesting twist. Eharmony is old school. And I can’t stand their patronizing tv ads.
No question that smart advertisers can reach a very specific, and coveted, target market by advertising on these websites.
Or you could just use Google: http://www.mull...l-and-get-laid/
While the whole Web 2.0 social bookmarking/matchmaking/figuring out a date thing may be cool, these sites still need profiles that aren’t necessarily in NYC or Silicon Valley.
I’ve browsed these sites using criteria – well for the, uh, men who should be local to me – and, uh, I’ve been seeing the same few guys over and over again. (Unfortunately, some with pictures of themselves shirtless.)
Snarkiness aside, I’m near Philly and there’s not enough profiles on these sites to make it worth my time – unlike match.com or Yahoo personals.
http://weeeh.com/ is “another one” under development.
We’re hoping to make a big difference.
Work in progress.
Thanks for the accurate comparison.
cheers.
After reading your blog, I decided to checkout all of the sites. I liked only two of them. I liked the MatchActivity.com site, because it’s a fresh concept to both online dating and social networking. I also really liked the Consumating site, because it is truly fun, cool and different. I just created a profile on MatchActivity and quickly got added to a bunch of hot girl’s buddy list (sweet).
And http://www.impersonals.com
I’m surprised these dating sites still exist with the growing popularity of myspace
well i have to say i think you saying only three or four will eventually exist doesn’t make sense. There’s many things like dating in which something like how cool and hip you are matters a huge deal. There will always be niche sites that grow beyond their core market and gain a critical mass. In the end, all i’m saying is the opinion of some that eventually there will only be three or four is crazy. There will always be many niche markets with the big players changing continually.
Re: “I’m surprised these dating sites still exist with the growing popularity of myspace”
Very few 30-somethings and up are on Myspace (outside of the “digerati”). I’m 36 and I can’t imagine using Myspace to find dates. There’s absolutely room for sites that are strictly for people who are interested in finding a relationship.
http://friendfinder.com/ is the biggest dating site hands down
现在的交友网站多如牛毛，管用吗？I doubt it.
On behalf of RateOrDate, the bulk of the utility will come from twists on the standard user-review format, which does not really work for dating services.
User Reviews 2.0, Radical Presentation, whatever the name… that is the next step in trying to bring real comparison shopping functionality to this category.
Interesting post, Mike. One of the advantages of a big player like Yahoo! Personals (disclosure: I work there), is the very large number of profiles and the sophisticated searching and matching tools. For many people, especially outside of bigger cities, or with more niche or specific interests,the smaller sites offer too few prospects, even though their communities and activities are really engaging. I personally don’t see social networking encroaching on online dating sites–I think SN helps build a market for online dating, actually. Why? Well, online dating users have hit a lifestage event–they want to meet someone better or different than the people they have in their expanded personal network and they want to take focused action and meet people within a limited period of time. This is quite a different impulse than using a social network to find people to have drinks with, or very casual meetings–You can be linked to thousands of people on a social network, but for most people over 30, that doesn’t mean you are going to find a great date, a lover or a soul mate.
Thanks for the info Mike, this was really helpful. While we are on the subject, how is the love life?
Susan: goes to show how behind Yahoo are. Social Networking sites are a threat to the traditional personals model. And who would you rather date – someone a friend of a friend knows, that you might be able to get direct information about, or some random guy who could well be seriously messed up?
I’ve tried dating sites ’searching and matching tools’ and lets be honest, life isn’t quite so black and white. My number 1 match is consistently a good friend who I’d NEVER date. She’s a bit nuts – Yahoo can’t determine that.
Whereas, I could ask on a SN site if she’s nuts to one of her other friends… and find out. That way, avoid the problem.
Realistically, the best way to meet partners is through your friends network. That, followed by college, work, hobbies etc. You can test the waters without offense.
james
Hi Sherna – fancy seeing you here.
pls get to me as soon as possible.
Craigslist definitely has some share in this space, right?
adultfriendfiner is by far the biggest dating service globally, thanks to their extremely sucessful affiliate program. plentyoffish rules, okcupid is a great service too. The services featured here (besides plentyoffish and google base) will probably only have a short life…
Adding to the list of “hey, what about us??”…
Maybe it’s a good thing that we (HOTorNOT.com) are not labeled as a “Web 2.0″ company, or as a dating website, but frankly, both situations have confused me for the longest time..
To give my cofounder Jim and our engineers their due web 2.0 props, I’ll be the business guy and brag a bit: we’ve had tagging since 2000 (in my mind, true props on tagging as well as the first decent implentation of friending go to Brad at Livejournal), we have done webservice integrations since 2003 and have a public Webservice API out there (which the guys at frozenbear seem to keep doing cool things with). We’ve had RSS feeds for a while too, like this one where you can see our daily top rated people.
I’m not sure exactly what the definition of Web 2.0 is, there seem to be a lot of them out there, but I think we definitely qualify for most of them. By many of the definitions i’ve seen, some of the sites listed above don’t even qualify.. So i’m guessing web 2.0 might just mean “brand new”?
There is the question of whether HOTorNOT is a dating site, since ours is a more casual “meeting” site.. but we do hear about marriages on a daily basis, and we’ve had over 3 or 4 million people create accounts in the “meet me” section of our site. From a business perspective, as far as we know from the data we’ve seen, we are also more profitable than all the web 2.0 dating sites listed, although our revenue and earnings are purely from subscriptions. (Of course when it comes to subscription based businesses in our space, there are tons of people who stay below the radar that are even more profitable, the wunderkind really being andrew conru at friendfinder..)
In any case, there are a lot of cool innovations being done by a lot of cool companies/people out there, and I wish them all the best of luck. I agree with susan above that social networking does not destroy online dating (heck, sometimes it’s better to date OUTSIDE your network.. in reality, as a user, i don’t really care how i meet the right person, as long as i meet her… anywhere.).. but i would not sit quite as comfortably as susan implies yahoo can.. lots of these smaller competitors have lower cost structures than the big sites, and if they executed perfectly (with a dating context), they could someday hurt the bigger sites. Friendster certainly could have threatened the larger dating sites had they been able to scale their technology properly, but they lost their momentum and now it’s (probably) too late. All the current major SNS sites don’t really have a dating context, so they probably won’t impact the Matches and Yahoos of the world, but that’s not to say another one won’t come along..
Dating sites are never ending sites and will always grow irrespective of present sites.
Everyone feels they are young.
I say the best way is the free way, as http://www.livedatematch.com is on my top 10 list, just put your picture up, get rated, and hookup, pretty cool site for anyone.
I really thing if “I ever get this desperate”… I’ll pay one of my close friends to drive me to the “Back 40″ and basically shoot me…
Don’t forget the startup trying to make online dating less stressful by empowering members to keep each other honest in their profiles….
http://www.honestyfirst.com
Click on the cartoon dude at the bottom to see a funny animation on the truth about online dating.
Before I joined a dating website I went to http://www.friends2meet.com to discuss which site I should join with others the same situation. They have an online forums which provides support for like minded indivuduals.
Love is an illusion anyhow. You can be a great person in life and still wid up with a lying cheater who has no regard for you or who you are. Online dating is no different. women are evil and most of us guys are no better.
that us so so true….
I used to really enjoy http://www.datecam.com and I actually did get alot of dates, but the site hasn’t been updated in quite some time which is too bad, because they are missing out on some cool features. I thought they would be bigger than friendfinder.com or match.com and I could date forever.
Someone just showed me gottaflirt.com the other day. I can’t say that I “get” or like it, but I suppose somebody might/must (damn millenials). It’s sort of a self-administered dating game show, except that you have to schedule a time (since it’s the sole activity of the site and is featured on the fornt page) and any interested suitor can participate. Wahoo.
Let us not forget the most bizare of all the new dating 2.0 sites… http://www.MyFreeImplants.com/ where couples meet based on the common theme of breast implants!
I think the new big dating sites to come are those that do “8 minute dating” type of deal. Where you sign up to an event through the site and go to an event and meet lots of people in one night.
another one you left out… true.com. It says its endorsed by “Pscyhology Today”… which must mean a lot.
I know a lot of late teens on the site. They advertise a lot on MySpace
can u help me with 1 its u gently