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.
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I’d like to add my site, lifeknot.com, to the list. 12,000+ members, 51% Women, 49% Men. Completely free and free of advertisements. I’ve also recently launched a mobile version of lifeknot for cellphones.
I created lifeknot after doing much online dating myself and wanting to find a more natural way to meet people online. To accomplish this, lifeknot members may create detailed Activity Profiles, listing any of over 1,000 activities across 45 categories; member-suggested activities are added all the time and are as diverse as sled dog racing, sailing, home brewing, hiking, beekeeping, and photography (see more activities).
Surf by and take a look (did I mention it’s completely free). “Share your interests and passions in any activity imaginable. Live your life. Let love follow.”
I’m a big believer in online personals, but I don’t agree with Susan Mernit’s comment. Heavy social networking users are not the same folks that are heavy personals users. Social networkers, who tend to be younger, are getting by without personals. As these folks age into what Susan refers to as a “lifestage event,” it remains to be seen whether or not these users will find the need to use personals sites. This is complicated even further by the likelihood that social networking sites will improve their dating functionality over time. The personals sites need to find a way to work with the social networking sites to get to these younger users. It will likely mean new revenue models and having to share a bigger piece of the pie.
I’ve cross posted this comment on my blog and on Susan’s blog.
I’ve just launched a new dating service, and it seemed appropriate to plug it here. It’s completely different than any other as I have written the software for it from scratch.
Cheeky monkey dating is supported by advertising; I have to make money with the service or I won’t be able to continue to run it. The advertising is low-key; I’ve no intention of using pop-ups or anything evil like that. To add your profile is a relatively fast, one-page sign-up process, and I’m offering a free online dating guide to anybody that does so.
RSS feeds are available to be added to My Yahoo etc, and you can choose the feed you want, filtering profiles by location, sex and/or age range.
You can publish your email address at the service, and it will be shown as an image to help prevent spam harvesters from automatically gathering it. You can also publish your Skype ID, and viewers of your profile will see “Call me” and “Chat with me” Skype buttons. The owner of the profile decides whether to make these details public to everybody, to members only, or to keep these details private.
Any member of the public can view your profile directly from the search listings.
As I said, the service is new. It literally went live two days ago. I’ve posted a profile so that people can see how profiles look. Other than that, there are no profiles on the service at present. Every service has to start somewhere! Of course, the good thing about this is that the best names are not yet taken. If you’re using online dating, signing up with us is done by filling in a quick, one-page form, and as you need to write a profile anyway to use any dating service, why not list your profile on my new site as well?
Thanks.
Anyone with good programming background and determination can get one dating site up. As always. the hardest part is promoting and maintaining user base.
I heard that match.com is losing money as they are advertising heavily but coudn’t maintain their user base.
Helpful list.
You look like you know a lot about online dating? Do you know if this website is any good?
http://www.matchamateur.com/
Most dating sites are mild. A couple are wild. We’re mild AND wild!
I’m adding my new online dating site here too - http://www.zazavu.com.
It just went live a couple of weeks ago and are busily signing up new members. Unlike the majority of dating sites out there . . . . you must be a member to browse and search on the site. All of our profiles have member photos posted! The response has been tremendous! Membership is free and registration is quick and easy!
Thanks!
Is this a place where all world-dating-partners.com affiliates come to promote there sites??
You forgot our site: http://www.collabordate.com and also 4ppl.
My Friend WillamTerrance
Is Looking ForAGirlFriend
That is BetWeen55 and61
and He Work At FJDellandra
and He Likes Karoke
andHe Enjoy Music
and Loves Hockey
and BaseBall
and FootBall
and He Is Looking
For SomeOne That IsTruthful
andKin and Respectful
and Caring and Does Not Lie
and He Doesn,t Mind Girl That Smoke OutSide
andHe Does Not Smokeanymore
and He Used To Smoke But Not AnyMore
and Please Call WilliamTerrance
and His PhoneNumber is 1705-4764663
and He Lives In NorthBayOntarioCanada
andPlease Email Me Petew38@hotmail.Com
100% free dating 2.0 for singles in Australia. Free Love Australia features a two-level folksonomy, AJAX form validation and submission, and a Comet chat room.
Well I look with envy at that list and wish my genre site was that successful. It looks like you’ve got to be completely general and have bells and whistles to get traffic. My site is very basic, completely free and is specifically for people interested in Japanese Language and Culture. Any suggestions as to how to improve it without changing the genre would be greatly received!
Sorry, it’s called OzDeai
Don’t forget eRomance.com! eRomance is 100% free and and provides a blend of a magazine format (about relationships and reomance) and a social dating site. Very soon the site wll also offer a premium subscription service, to extend upon its standard dating features.
I started my first dating site in June 2004. It’s for aviators and airline staff (Love Air http://www.loveair.co.uk). Since then I’ve added several more and I have the basis of a good business in this medium. See http://www.loveservices.co.uk.
However, the market is evolving fast as this article and thread demonstrates. Let’s hope that in time the dross falls away leaving mostly sites of integrity and quality. I don’t rest on my laurels and seek to improve mine all the time by acting on the feedback received by members.
100% Free dating for UK and US singles @ http://www.groovylovedating.com!
What’s old is new again. Honesty. Real People. http://www.singleswithscruples.com has thousands and is growing. My fav place to meet nice, real people.
after reading about these - and people’s problems w/ the crazy’s on them -I like James idea (from another post) about the site used to help you get out of a bad online date. http://www.mobilealibi.com
justsayhi.com
100% free… bigger than all these except POF
CozyDating.com will be going through some changes will be finished with the new design end of this month. CozyDating.com has casual dating, romance for people looking to build serious relationships and intimate dating for people seeking sex. Make sure to check out http://www.CozyDating.com and it’s 100% FREE
Good Morning,
is anyone able to tell me what the ratio of members/employees in dating services is? I’m a German Blogger/Journalist and try to help people finding the right dating service. Furthermore - how many (new members a day) or just members does an on-line service need in the USA (or maybe Canada or elsewhere) to be successful - in your opinion?
sehpferd
your consumating widget shows an erect penis right now (not that i’d care too much, i’m from europe).
great dating tips /articles
lookinf for love
Hi victoria, you should go through the above listed sites to find love.
Nice reviews of the sites, very informative Michael. Thanks
Check out 3LOVES, the newest Australian free online dating site. Free photos, free video, free sound, free winks, free messages, free profiles. http://www.3loves.com.au.
Thanks for the review…
Did you know that even audit firms (”big four”) have lauched their own dating site?
http://www.worldnews-factory.n.....index.html
Not sure it’s gonna work…
has anyone checked out Lavalife?
You forgot For Someone Special http://www.forsomeonespecial.com
i need a real love. my email is marisbettey@yahoo.com
The online dating sites are sprawling like mushrooms after the rain. Wandering which one is right for you? Or may be you are looking for ways to “beat the system” of the online dating? This site spills the beans on how to be the king of online dating:
http://free-dating-site-secrets.com
Matchdoctor has been moving into the web 2.0 arena over the past year.
The site offers up many free features such as blogging, discussion
forums, friend lists, email, winks, events, detailed profiles, search,
and more. The site is geared toward creating interaction and mingling
amongst members. Matchdoctor is the third largest free dating site in
the USA according to hitwise.
I think a dating site where you have to pass a literacy, spelling and usage of caps lock test would be great
Perhaps as more people spend time on social networking sites and the internet in general, they will become more dependant on social networking sites and dating sites to meet people.
I think it will be pretty difficult for new players to enter the market and feel the social networking segment will continue to erode dating market share. I created http://www.freedatingsearch.com as an experiment to see how difficult it is to gain members.
i love the site
It’s awesome to have the numbers on dating sites! You may also want to know what to do with the online profile…. Here is a cool site that goes way beyond the standard “dating advice”:
http://free-dating-site-secret.....-women.jsp
this site is very loving
I just discovered a great new safety tool for those who make use (or who are
contemplating such) of any of the online dating sites, of which there must now be
thousands available on the Internet. Only a few of the most major such sites offer any
type of psychological testing and/or background informational searches to be
accomplished on the users of the sites. Compatibility testing and matching really does
not help filter out those who are attempting to make use of the sites based upon
scamming, criminal, or otherwise harmful motivations. Reviews of the only couple sites
that offer users some degree of criminal background history checking and unfortunately
these checks have been reviewed as being too limited in scope; generally only limited to
the police records in a single State or else useless as the focused upon individual is
making use of an alias or pseudo name in his/her communications with the site.
Just very recently, a new approach has been developed that addresses this very problem.
A psychologist who has an extraordinary background in psychological test development,
as well as in security related integrity or honesty testing. This psychologist has developed
a rather short/quick psychological test, based upon well-established and sound
psychological test construction logic, that is designed to assess almost a dozen problem
areas that are highly associated with personal integrity/honesty. This 72-item,
multiple-choice test, the Personal Security Standards Psychological Questionnaire
(PSSPQ), has recently gone through a rather thorough testing when used to screen or
otherwise evaluate the general integrity of persons who were attempting to contact
potential ‘dates’ through the services offered by online dating sites. The PSSPQ is now
commercially available to users of online dating sites. An extremely complete (and quite
lengthy) description of the PSSPQ when used for individual evaluation purposes is
available on: http://www.home.earthlink.net/.....ngtest.htm . On this
PSSPQ website, many helpful links are provided that greatly aid a reader in
understanding and evaluating the PSSPQ, its developer, as well as the many dangers that
face anyone making use of the online dating sites.
Along the same avenue… I was looking at matchinform. For a free site I found it useful. Since it appears to be an independent site, you rely on user content. But at this point anything helps to weed out the losers! I hate going out with someone and wasting a whole evening when I can tell in 5 minutes he is not serious about a relationship!
Check out matchinform and let me know what you think?!? At least it was entertaining to read!
By following these suggestions, an estate auction can be not only a place of great bargains but also enjoyment and fun. Listening to and watching others can also prove beneficial. More often than not, they will furnish you with clues about a great many items. The more you learn, the better your buying habits become and you learn more each time you go to an auction. Having worked a lot of sales in my time, I can tell you that an auction is a wonderful place to meet people, find good deals, make connections and learn a lot about buying, selling and collecting http://www.ubuysell.ca, here are some other great free sites.
http://www.gbuysell.com
http://www.clickbuysell.com
http://www.matchmate.ca
http://www.iraniansite.ca
http://www.jdtalentmanagement.com
http://www.talentworkbook.com
what I find funny is that most of these sites listed here, and the top are plagued by the usual Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote D’Ivoir Spam that plagues the industry day by day!
how about http://www.elovespot.com
these guys have hit on something interesting.. a completely location based mobile dating service.. you text your address in and it give you hits of people who are close to you.. much more spontaneous than match or eharmony
MeetMoi.com
Hi Everyone, I am very interested in starting a online dating service. I’ve been doing online dating for a while and would love to start my own site. I would like to know what do you ( the forum) think some things are that I need to consider? And what are the top features that make a site successful? Any tips would be great.
Thanks
I will introduce myself I am Mr.Lan Park a Banker working
in a bank in south Korea. I need someone (trust worthy and brilliant) who is interested in a business partnership.
this is my email lan_park23@yahoo.com
If interested mail me to know more about what this partnership.
NOTE:this is note related to any spame of anykind.
Hello,
I am combined online dating service and social networking community together in one site freechatndate.com, this site goes beyond the standard dating site, and it’s 100% FREE.
I am interested in dating site because of PlentyofFish, the first dating site I know
I am a beginner and need some advice about my site, please feel free to leave any comment for this site freechatndate.com.
Thanks.
http://www.freechatndate.com
hey guys it really nice hearing from you guyz can some one tell me a real site to meet a real one?