Hello, and welcome to Online Personals Watch’s Weekly News Roundup. I’m Mark Brooks and here are the latest headlines from around the industry.
This edition of the weekly news roundup is kindly sponsored by messmo Media.
According to ComScore Online Personals sites grew in popularity during the month of February, with a 5-percent increase to 24.2 million visitors. eHarmony ranked as the #1 personals site during the month, and attracted 5.0 million Americans alone. Match.com sites ranked second with 3.4 million visitors. PlentyOfFish.com attracted 2.8 million visitors, followed closely by SinglesNet with 2.6 million.
eHarmony recently invested in German dating site eDarling. eDarling was founded in the summer of 2009 and carries an estimated value of around 15-20 million EURO. eHarmony supposedly acquired 30% of the company as a result of the investment .
Match.com has officially launched an app for Android. The app gives users the opportunity to find their soul mates right from their Android handset. The best part is the app is free to download.
Australian dating site RSVP recently launched a new campaign focusing on RSVP’s dating success stories. The campaign known as ‘Everyday Moments’ features real life couples sharing their relationship experiences and success stories. The new campaign will see 15-second vignettes online and televised nationally.
According to studies by comscore, Canadians are the world’s most active online daters. Canadians supposedly spend more days a month and minutes per day on dating sites than users in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany. PlentyofFish is one of the most popular dating sites benefiting from Canadian daters. The site recently surpassed 105M logins in one month with as many as 1.5M people visiting daily, and as many as 380,000 messages being sent between members hourly according to Markus Frind.
UK based dating site BeNaughty.com has been growing rapidly over the past couple of years. The website has officially reached 3M member profiles.
Online dating for single seniors has also seen a substantial increase lately. According to the latest DatingData poll from SeniorPeopleMeet.com. 43% of single seniors named the internet as the best transformation in regards to dating and communication.
Dating service GameCrush has launched a new service to help connect male Xbox fanatics with game-playing females. Featured dates cost 400 GameCrush credits which can only be bought in batches of 500 for $8.25 USD. The service currently boasts ~1,200 profiles and hopes to expand to other game consoles in the future.
Cinema chain company Cineworld is partnering up with Easydate to form a new online dating service called Back Row Dating. The service will offer an innovative feature to help single movie lovers meet their perfect partner through similar taste in movies.
The official iDate Awards video is now live at iDateAwards.com. You can see all the award winners there, along with some video of the event itself.
Last but not least, the International Marriage Brokers Bill could seemingly prevent online dating sites from running gender specific pricing schemes.
According to Legislative staff member, Lisa Baugher, "the term “international marriage broker” does not apply to an organization that does not charge a fee based on gender or country of origin to any party for the services provided. This would apply to temporary promotions offering different pricing schemes based on gender or country of origin as well." It wasn’t specified whether or not the regulations will have an impact on a “ladies night” event in real time.
This edition of Online Personals Watch’s Weekly News Roundup has been sponsored by messmo Media.
Make real money with mobile dating. Talk to Brendan O’Kane of messmo Media.
That’s all for this week’s news roundup. Tune in again next week as we bring you the latest and greatest from the world of online dating. No ads, no fluff, just raw news and CEO interviews. I’m Mark Brooks . Thank you.