Check out the Snapshot report from Compete.com on eHarmony.com, Match.com, Yahoo Personals, Singlesnet.com and Plentyoffish.com. This month's trend is pretty interesting considering that eHarmony just signed that deal with AOL Personals which is eating up half of Match.com's space that they have exclusively occupied for years. Match.com's business is very partnership focused with some presence in paid search and sprinkled display ads that appear on social network sites once in a while. eHarmony continues to pound the concrete with it's cable network commercials with a different twist that looks to be focused more on a mainstream demographic. eHarmony also participates in paid search and bids aggressively on top terms like "dating" and "personals". They have been a little more strategic lately with their business development efforts trying to put a dent into Match.com partnerships. This should be a pretty effective strategy considering they are becoming a household brand for dating now even though they have a 1-hour long sign-up process.
Yahoo! Personals has the power of their network behind them for free ad placements on the Yahoo home page and through out their properties. They buy paid search but aren't aggressive at all. Yahoo Personals does really well in SEO on top dating terms because Google loves big brands and keeps squeezing the small guys out of the mix.
On the free side of things PlentyofFish.com seems to still be holding ground and growing. I see him buying a lot more paid search on Google lately and he evens bids on high cost terms for traffic. He must be working a pretty decent arbitrage to be able to afford this. I wonder what his gross to net spend is on Google AdWords and AdSense. Singlesnet.com had a strong year but they seem to be losing a little steam lately. They were all over the social networks and ad networks and are still buying heavily on search but I don't see any partnerships with portals and ISPs. The ad model will eventually get too expensive and is not consistent to grow your business. In order to keep up with the growth they have seen they really need to secure some partnerships in the US. The one shady thing I have seen with them on search is that CPA networks that they have been working with are spamming the paid search listings and occupying several spots of shelf space. I have reported them several times but those networks are pretty aggressive at getting new ads back up in place of the ones removed.
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