Online Personals Watch: News on the Dating Industry and Business

MissTravel Combines Romance And Travel

USA TODAY - July 18 - Miss Travel is a new dating service that matches travelers with companions. The majority of the site membership is generous men (27,000) who fund the travel, and attractive women. The site also has a sizable gay population. The site launched in April and has grown to 100,000 members. According to founder Brandon Wade, 74% of online daters queried had traveled with or traveled to meet face-to-face with someone they met online.

by Jayne Clark
See full article at USA Today

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Men, Women Flip The Script In Gender Expectation

USA TODAY - Feb 4 - According to a new survey conducted by market research firm MarketTools for Match.com, men are more interested in love, marriage and children than their peers in earlier times; women want more independence in their relationships than their mothers did; and hooking up and one-night stands aren't necessarily meaningless sexual encounters. "Men are now expressing some traditionally female attitudes, while women are adopting some of those long attributed to men," says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher. Data show men are quicker to fall in love and more likely than women to want children: 54% of men say they have experienced love at first sight, compared with 44% of women; among singles without children under 18, more men (24%) than women (15%) say they want children. 77% of women say having their personal space is "very important," vs. 58% for men; 78% of women say the same about having their own interests and hobbies (vs. 64% for men). And 35% of women (vs. 23% of men) say regular nights out with the guys/girls are important. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY. Also read in TIME or watch on ABC NEWS.

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China Smitten By TV dating

USA TODAY - May 18 - You Are the One and Take Me Out are China's top-rated TV entertainment shows. The programs, which both first aired in January, have generated discussion about money worship among China's younger generation. They also highlight how a perpetual human struggle, finding the right mate, presses harder than ever in the world's most populous nation. The shows' popularity is easy to explain, says Tian Fanjiang, CEO of baihe.com, a matchmaking website. "There are 180M single people in China," Tian says. "They and their parents are all worried about the marriage problem." "The Chinese family is unique in the world, as we have a one-child policy," says Take Me Out producer Liu Lei, "but parents attach great importance to carrying on the family name, so marriage is a big issue." Liu insists that the money-worship of some contestants does not reflect mainstream Chinese society, but she concedes, "Many girls really love rich men." 15 000 women applied for a chance to date a wealthy man at an event May 1 organized by matchmaking website jiayuan.com, says Zhang Guoyu, director of the company's Southwest China branch. In June, 50 of them will meet the men who paid $14,650 for the service. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

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Partners Cohabit To Spend More Time Together

USA TODAY -- July 8 -- Most unmarried couples who live together aren't trying to test their relationship. They just want to spend more time together. The latest U.S. Census for 2008 reported 13.6 m unmarried, heterosexual couples living together. Researchers say 50% to 60% of couples who marry today lived together first; some note that 70% of young adults will cohabit. Most couples who live together either marry or break up within two years. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Cupid's Arrow Lands In War Zone

USA TODAY -- May 18 -- Dating services such as Match.com and eHarmony are reporting that numerous members are finding romance with someone in the U.S. while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. The % of military members joining eHarmony increased by 56% from 2006 to 2008, says Gian Gonzaga, an eHarmony research psychologist. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

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Recession Boosts Condom Sales

USA TODAY -- Feb 13 -- With a crippled economy it's not surprising that condoms are seeing a sales increase. Sales of condoms in the U.S. rose 6% in Jan, year over year, according to Nielsen. "Obviously people in general want to avoid unintended pregnancies," says Jim Daniels, VP marketing for Trojan. "But in a down economy those costs are even more burdensome to bear." FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Headhunters For The Heart

USA TODAY -- Feb 12 -- Matchmakers seem to be popping up all over the country, many targeting their personalized services to eligible businessmen. Matchmaking has become such a buzzword that some dating websites use it in their marketing. In December, Match.com unveiled Match My Friends, which allows friends and family to play matchmaker. Engage.com came up with that premise when it launched in 2005. Matchmaking as a field also has grown since the 2003 opening of the Manhattan-based Matchmaking Institute, which sells a home study kit for $1,500. LaRosa's research suggests there are about 1,600 matchmakers in the USA, and about 100 are added each year. It is a very difficult business because matchmakers are dealing with emotional currency and extreme expectations. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Are you Hot Enough?

USA TODAY -- Mar 22 -- HotEnough.org is an online version of Studio 54; for "fit, good-looking" people.  Prospective members submit three pictures, including one body-shot, and must be rated an 8 or higher by people already in the club. Once they are in, they are permitted to e-mail other "hotties" for $9.95 a month.  25% of applicants make the grade. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Mark Brooks: Nice concept. Quantcast.com shows HotEnough at 4200 uniques a month. If only I were hot enough, I could get in and tell you more about the site.

Caller Privacy For Dating Sites

USA TODAY -- Nov 27 -- Are you ready to get Jangl'd? Michael Cerda, the co-founder of Jangl, a telephone service start-up, sure hopes so. "We give consumers the ability to call each other without giving out phone numbers," Cerda says. Go to Jangl.com, and sign up for a free account. Provide an e-mail address and telephone number. Create a "Jangl ID." Once you have your Jangl ID, Cerda says, "You can stop giving out your phone number and just Jangl." Callers must go to the Jangl website and key in their Jangl ID. To be accepted, callers have to provide enough personal information so that the Jangl system — which is bi-directional — can connect you with that caller. Once the required information has been keyed in, the Jangl system hands over your contact "phone number." In reality, however, it's a unique telephone ID for that particular relationship. As soon as the call is placed, Jangl forwards it to your real phone number. The privacy protection is bi-directional, so recipients don't know the real numbers of callers, either, Cerda notes. For security reasons, each call is announced with a short preamble that includes the caller's name. Recipients can accept, reject or block any call. Jangl is a natural for online dating services, which have long favored anonymous e-mail systems to protect the identity of users. On Nov. 2, online dating giant Match.com started offering Jangl as a free service, called "matchTalk."  Jane Thompson, a Match VP, says response to the feature has been "extraordinary."  She says 275,000 people already have used the feature.  One surprise: Match.com had expected the service to be used mostly by younger romance seekers, she says. But so far, 50% of users have been in the 35 to 49 age bracket. About 8% are over 55. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

AOL, Start-ups Emerge to Challenge MySpace

USA TODAY -- May 22 -- MySpace's user base quadrupled to nearly 80 million over the past year, with as many as 270,000 joining every day. CollectiveX launched this month as a network for professionals and other pre-organized groups. Famoodle started in April as a MySpace for families. Tagged and Varsity World are billing themselves as safe havens for teens. AOL's AIM Pages is building upon its IM user-base of 49 million. A Microsoft spinoff company plans to launch Wallop later this year. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Mark Brooks: The social networking snowball keeps on rolling. 

Invite the Gang for a Night of Online Dating

USA TODAY -- Mar -- TeamDating and eTwine (in the USA) and Compa (in the UK) users can sign up in groups of two or more and correspond with other duos, trios or quartets. Group online dating is safer than traditional Internet dating.  "You do everything else with your friends," says Ray Doustdar, president of Los Angeles-based TeamDating. "Why not online date with your friends?"  Since launching last August, Teamdating.com (free for now) has grown to just over 5,000 members on about 2,000 teams mostly in New York and Los Angeles. About 65% of members are ages 25-35, and almost 70% are women. eTwine has 5,000-members and just began group dating. So far, 30-40 groups have registered.  FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Mark Brooks: I created ace-club.com in 1998 to help small groups of people, professionals typically 30-45, 50% female, get out and play.  It's a singles club that won't admit to being a singles club and enjoys a healthy little membership in the Silicon Valley.

Blind Dating Gets Back in the Game

USA TODAY -- Dec 11 -- When it comes to misrepresentation, when an online date says he's 5-foot-10 and turns out to be more like 5-foot-6, "everything kind of goes back to the beginning. Everything that was communicated by e-mail or phone just kind of goes out the window, and you wonder, 'Oh, my gosh. Is this the person I thought it was?' "  As a result, blind dating is more popular than before.  "The technology of Internet dating, while it may seem like a great thing in terms of multiplying your opportunities to meet people, more options does not necessarily translate into a better chance of meeting The One," says Jillian Straus, author of the forthcoming Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We're Still Single. "Sometimes having so many choices makes people hesitant to commit."  Daters and dating analysts agree there are two kinds of people trawling the Internet and the speed-dating circuit: those shopping for sex and those shopping for a mate.  FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Mile-high Dating Matches up Airline Passengers

USA TODAY -- Sept 27 -- AirTroductions bills itself as "JDate meets the Mile-High Club." Passengers who already have airline tickets enter flight information and a short personal profile and notifies them if there's a match on the same flight. There were just 800 members signed up at the time of this story. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

Mark Brooks: Same old story; entrepreneur starts online dating site..."now we 'just' need to find people."  Starting an online personals site has the same draw and sex appeal (well, almost) as starting a restaurant.  It's just massively more difficult (expensive) to get to profitability.  It's not about the site, it's not about technology, online personals sites are in the business of selling people to people.  No people, no product.  These days, building a credible online personals 'restaurant' requires several million dollars in advertising and/or an extreme niche focus.