THE NEXT WEB - Feb 11 - New data suggests that there has been a 57% increase in online dating revenues in the past year. Digital marketing and billing manager Vindicia has been tracking the global activity for its online dating clients. Social networking, and in particular Facebook, is contributing to the growth. Vindicia’s online dating clients attracted £3.4 million (US$5.4 million) in revenues in January alone this year, compared to the £2.2M (US$3.5M) spent in January 2011. Sales have increased steadily over the weekends leading up to Valentine’s Day too – with dating companies seeing individual spikes of up to 40%, and a combined global spike of 23% last weekend (February 3rd) against the previous weekend’s spend (January 27th). These figures are global, and are taken from across all of Vindicia’s online dating clients, which include SNAPInteractive, SpeedDate.com, Online Buddies and AvidLife. Online dating spend grows by 60% on last year, and the industry can only get bigger