More Catholic Singles Use Dating Sites

CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO - Sep 8 - CatholicMatch.com claims to be the largest Catholic dating site with 500K members. There are numerous other Catholic dating sites, including CatholicSingles.com, which says it has signed up ~500K members, and AveMariaSingles.com. All are eager to accommodate a very large pool of single adult Catholics – as many as 22.6M in the US in 2008, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

The full article was originally published at Catholic San Francisco, but is no longer available.

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Comments

[Sam Moorcroft, ChristianCafe.com]

How do you define a "member"? This term is bandied about by dating sites all the time. Some context is in order.

a) Is a member a hit to the website?
b) Is a member a unique visitor to the website?
c) Is a member someone who has created an account, no matter how bare-bones?
d) Is a member someone who has visited, ever (even if that was in 2003)?
e) Is a member someone who has visited in the past year?
f) Is a member someone who has visited in the past 3 months?
g) Is a member someone who has visited in the past 2 weeks?

Which is it? It isn't 500,000 (if picking on CatholicMatch.com or CatholicSingles.com). It isn't 12 million. It certainly isn't 20 million.

Here's the acid test: how many unique users - with actual profiles - are on your site right at this moment? 200? 500? 1,000?

That's a more accurate measure than anything else. We have 649 online right now.

Or, I could say we have (had) more than 2 million members. No, make that 5 million. Well, that's true, too, when put in context. Otherwise, these are completely meaningless numbers.

Sam

[twitter.com/rosswilliams]

As usual Sam, absolutely spot on.

Member numbers mean nothing - I could buy 1million members for a few thousand dollars, it really is meaningless nowadays. I know of a few companies who have bought millions of profiles.

What matters is online users - that's far more meaningful, how many users are engaging with the site.

And that's what matters to our users - they don't want to wade through thousands of stale (or fake!) profiles. They want genuine, active users who engage with the site and will respond to their communication. That's how dating sites generate long-term SUSTAINABLE revenues through their users.

Ross

[Saïd]

@sam +1

sam/ross, anyone else who runs a dating site: what constitutes an "active" member for you guys? i typically use a 3 month benchmark.

[Sam Moorcroft, ChristianCafe.com]

Said,

Yeah, 3 months (of no activity) has been our benchmark for years. We go one step further: we auto-remove them nightly from the active database, to keep it fresh. Besides you and us, Said (and Ross?), what other dating sites do this? I don't know of any. They are too busy claiming 500,000 or 1 million or 15 million profiles.

As Ross said, "...users don't want to wade through thousands of stale (or fake!) profiles...."

Sam

[Saïd]

thanks sam.