Jupiter Media estimates that about 40 million singles are using online dating services in 2004. There are thousands of dating services hosting in the Internet. Most sites charge monthly fees in order for members to contact other members. These monthly fees usually range from $10 to 50 dollars. The average yearly cost to join a dating services is about $300. If 5% of dating singles are the paid members, then the dating service market will reach 1 billion dollars membership fee in 2005. Besides membership fee income, all big dating services still have huge amount of revenue from advertisement and local dating party events. That's why many people still want to get into dating service market.
Inadequate membership size is the biggest issue for online dating services. Many dating sites keep ambiguous reporting of the size of the membership database. When a company reports that they have millions of members, actually only a small percentage of members are active or subscribing members. Since the dating services accept the members worldwide and half of the members are of the opposite sex, so the chance of you to find your right match close to your city is very small, unless the database is extremely huge.
The good search function of dating services should help people to find and reach the right match. The basic search function is to filter matches by member's profile, state, city, zip and distance. Also, they provides a quick search function, which means they want to find someone for you, in case that you cannot find any match for the standard search function. In order to make sure you can reach someone, the advanced search function can look for current online members, new members, most active members, most popular members, most networked member, most inviting member, keywords in the profiles and even members of today's birthday.
The key is to contact the match. Some dating services allow people to create multiple profiles to increase the matching possibility. Therefore, to find the company owns a very large membership database is a better bargain to join. According to traffic report in June 2002, Match.com had more visitors than all other competitors.
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You might want to know who is the largest dating services today. Since most of dating services are exaggerating their member's size. However, the Internet traffic won't lie. Most of Internet traffic data have the commercial value, which needs to pay to get it. The alternative way to find the online dating site's traffic is from the alexa.com to find the the traffic ranking. If the ranking is higher, then the database must be larger.
Dating Services | Alexa Ranking | Note |
www.match.com | 331 | Match.com launched in 1995, has 8 million members in 2004. More than 89,000 members reported they found the match in 2003. It operates more than 30 online dating sites (28 international dating sites), in 18 local languages. Member's profiles are viewed more than 6 million times a day. It's the world's leading online dating site, according to the global ranking by Media Metrix in March 2004. Kiss.com and Udate.com are its sister sites. |
personals.yahoo.com | 4 | Alexa ranking is for entire Yahoo site. Therefore it's ranked number 1. Yahoo! Personals has well over 9 million members with profiles. It has more than 10 sites, including the international sites. There was over 7.2 Million Unique Canadian visits to Yahoo! Personals in 2003. |
love.aol.com | 50 | Alexa ranking is for entire AOL site. Now it's a partner of match.com |
www.tickle.com | 125 | Tickle.com was Emode.com, which founded in 1999. Tickle launched the Tickle Social Network in October 2003. Tickle was acquired by Monster Worldwide in May 2004. The matchmaking, and social networking services have more than 18 million active members worldwide. |
www.americansingles.com www.relationships.com |
274 | AmericanSingles.com has over 7 million members. According to comScore Media Metrix, about 5.3 million unique monthly visitors to 10 sister sites including Jdate.com and Glimpse.com. |
www.lavalife.com | 503 | Lavalife markets its web and telephone products in over 60 markets across the United States, Canada and Australia. It has attracted over 6 million unique members. Its members exchange 1.3 million messages every day. Lavalife's revenues are in excess of $100 million in 2003 and growing. |
Gay.com | 1150 | Gay.com has over 3.3 million profiles including PlanetOut.com in 2004 and is growing by thousands a day. They are 100% gay and lesbian dating service that has a worldwide reach and is in 7 different languages. |
www.friendfinder.com | 1261 | FriendFinder.com was founded In 1996. It
has over 9 million active members in 2004. It's under
FriendFinder Network, which has 15 web communities, including
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Passion.com | 1437 | Passion.com has over 9 million members and usually has over 50,000 members online at any one time. It's under FriendFinder Network. |
www.eharmony.com | 1592 | eharmony.com has 4 million members in 2004 and 3,000 confirmed weddings since Year 2000. Members are over 228 Countries. Membership, which runs nearly $100 for three months or almost $250 for a year. eharmony.com's ad campaign cost the company more than $10 million in 2003.The company has had about 33 million members as of 2008. about 15,000 people take the eHarmony questionnaire each day. An average of 542 eHarmony members in the U.S. marry every day in 2010. |
www.face-pic.com | 1844 | Total member is 1.5 million in 2004. |
www.udate.com | 1990 | More than 6,000 people join udate.com every day in 2004 |
www.date.com | 2443 | Date.com has more than two million male and female members worldwide who actively use the site. The site is adding new members at a rate of 250,000 per month. |
DatingDirect.com | 2750 | |
www.imatchup.com | 3635 | |
www.singleme.com | 3979 | |
www.matchmaker.com | 4747 | |
OutPersonals.com | 4837 | |
www.webdate.com | 4904 | |
www.seniorfriendfinder.com | 5161 | |
www.dreammates.com | 5345 | |
personals.nerve.com | 5437 | |
www.megafriends.com | 6162 | |
www.loveaccess.com | 7361 | |
www.datecam.com | 7528 | |
www.cupidjunction.com | 8159 |
All the dating services don't provide professional astrology love match. The followings are the Love Match for people joining the dating services.
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