Interesting Online Dating Stats and Info, March 2005
From an article in the Chicago Tribune:
Top dating sites
Number of unique visitors to top Internet dating sites in March (in millions)
Yahoo Personals: 5.93
Match.com sites: 3.96
Spark Networks: 3.37
EHarmony.com: 2.73
True.com: 2.54
IMatchup sites: 2.54
: 1.72
Tickle personals: 1.37
HotMatchup.com: 1.13
DateCam.com: 0.94
Source: ComScore Media Metrix
Last year IAC’s online dating sites generated $198 million in revenue for the company, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. That was up $12.7 million, or 7 percent, from 2003. About 8.4 million people were paid subscribers of dating sites in 2004, according to Jupiter Research. Match.com has about 1 million paid subscribers, said spokeswoman Kristin Kelly.
My comments: Yahoo! Personals (which includes Yahoo! Premier, my current favorite) clearly is outstripping Match.com. Yahoo! is the biggie. And Match.com is owning up to having about 1 million paid members. I haven’t seen the total members numbers lately, but they have been 8 -10 million. That means that only 1 in 8 are paid members.
I’ve written about this phenomenon a number of times (see my comments to this post), but the bottom line is that a very high percentage of people posting profiles on dating sites have not paid. Therefore, they cannot do at least some of what the site offers, and usually that means they cannot email you until they pay up. That is the biggest reason behind non-responses to your emails, the most frequent complaint that I hear from Internet daters.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
