Tonight on CNBC at 9PM EST. Love at First Byte. NBC News and Today Show Correspondent Amy Robach reveals how online daters are using cutting-edge technology in search of love and how digital entrepreneurs are getting rich helping them do it.

You’ll meet scientists, mathematicians and psychologists who claim they can draw revealing conclusions about you from what you do – and don’t do – on their websites. Can online dating  really deliver what it promises? CNBC takes you inside a business trying to unlock the secrets of the human heart with science.

Maybe you’ll even get a glimpse of yours truly.

Grading the online dating industry:  Eli Finkel, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Northwestern University, says that dating site matching systems are Doing It Wrong. Eli just called me and we’re going to have an in-depth talk next week, the highlights of which I’ll share here.

“To date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works,” Finkel observes. “If dating sites want to claim that their matching algorithm is scientifically valid, they need to adhere to the standards of science, which is something they have uniformly failed to do. In fact, our report concludes that it is unlikely that their algorithms can work, even in principle, given the limitations of the sorts of matching procedures that these sites use.”

“The authors suggest that the existing matching algorithms neglect the most important insights from the flourishing discipline of relationship science. The algorithms seek to predict long-term romantic compatibility from characteristics of the two partners before they meet. Yet the strongest predictors of relationship well-being, such as a couple’s interaction style and ability to navigate stressful circumstances, cannot be assessed with such data.”

According to Finkel, “developers of matching algorithms have tended to focus on the information that is easy for them to assess, like similarity in personality and attitudes, rather than the information that relationship science has found to be crucial for predicting long-term relationship well-being. As a result, these algorithms are unlikely to be effective.”

“Thus far, the industry certainly does not get an A for effort,” noted Finkel. “For years, the online dating industry has ignored actual relationship science in favor of unsubstantiated claims and buzzwords, like ‘matching algorithms,’ that merely sound scientific.”

Thanks to @dizzycatdesign for the tip.

The latest Online Dating Industry Insider is out on Scoop.it. Feel free to suggest stories and links.

Mobile Update

While niche apps like Grindr and other discovery apps may get all the press, Plentyoffish surpassed 300 million monthly visits to their free iPhone and Android apps in January 2012. Markus Frind, Founder of POF told me this week at 40 percent of sign-ups in the U.S. are now via mobile device. Can any other dating app come even remotely close to this?

Update: Markus just sent me this link. Is dating on the web dead, is it really moving to mobile like he says?

I have 15 dating apps on my phone, from POF to Badoo, Match and a bunch of little ones that look so sad sitting on my home screen, barely used. Even OKCupid’s mobile app, which I like, has never let me make a meaningful connection with a woman in my area. Believe me I’ve tried. Never once has a woman said, “Thanks for saying hi, yes I’m in your area, lets go get a cup of coffee.”

Maybe I’ll reinstall the POF mobile app and give that a try. Its getting near impossible to keep track of all the mobile apps and I know I’m missing some great ones.

As for Zoosk and Badoo and AYI and whatnot, the churn rate on these apps is so high, anyone worth meeting is only there for a few weeks and then poof they disappear. That is emotionally draining, at least to me.

I’ve spent a month on Badoo and MyYearbook. Logging in via mobile and web every single day. I’ll have more on that in a future post.

Mobile, its hard to attract users, even harder to monetize them and the location-based services rarely turn up anyone worth talking to. Someone please show me a new site that has awesome members who are engaged, intelligent and want to meet for a coffee.

AstrologyDating.com Officially Launches with the Introduction of Pay-Per-Match Online Dating.

Tastebuds, the dating site that matches singles using music, now has over 35,000 music fans. Love their blog,  Coldplay fans least likely to have sex on first date, ha.

More Christians Seeking Love Connection Online (video).

Niche site of the week: uTest Launches “QAdate.com” – World’s First Dating Site For Software Testers. Talk about the perfect way to design a dating site, lol!

Top 25 dating blogs.

Match has an infographic out about singles and politics. Infographics are all the rage now. The problem is that most are boring, don’t tell an interesting story, or as with Match’s, basically say one thing and the graphic says something else completely. Infographics are all about getting more links to your site. Throw up some questionable data, make it look pretty and hope for the best.

Speaking of Match, check out Meetics’s numbers. Dating industry growth hype, let yee be smited (or at least put into perspective) by the mighty 10-Q. I wonder who put that Singlesnet deal together at Match? That was a rare misstep that they are going to be paying for for a while.

Still, Match continues to crush it in terms of overall revenue and subscribers. Pretty soon they will be making $200 million a quarter!

Sure there are 50 new tiny sites making waves with press releases, but Match = Amazon and even if they have a bad quarter they are just going to buy up competition and keep growing.

Match will own Plentyofish within a few years, right?

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Industry News 8-1-11
2. Online Dating Industry News January 6, 2012
3. Online Dating Industry News 6-13-11

After a bummer of a sale to FriendFinder Networks, which has proven adept at killing off perfectly good acquisitions, Nerve.com has launched a new dating site.

Many people, myself included, consider Nerve/SpringStreet to have been the best “first wave” dating site. Anyone who knows me personally knows how much I like OkCupid and Match, which I tend to write about more than any other sites, but thats because they are doing more than any other sites! Lots of contenders to round out the top five of course, thats for another post.

Speaking of Nerve Personals/FastCupid, back in 2006 I learned that if you spend 100 points a day you become a featured member on search page or that if you spend 2000 points you get your profile highlighted for one month. Sounds like Badoo, right?

Look at eHarmony trying to be all hip and cool. This is what a brand expert would call brand dissonance.

According to Urban Dictionary, The Wingman will always be there to “occupy” least attractive girl of the pair so that you may engage in the “hotty”. If it didn’t say eHarmony, I would have guessed the ad was for HowAboutWe. No word if eHarmony also acts as a “pre-wing“.

Look at this Christian Mingle ad. Cute “Church Girls” that look like they just got out of Bible study class and decided to sit in each other’s laps for a while, how nice. Proves that Christian sites are no different from any other dating sites and will do whatever it takes for more clicks.

Students in The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology completed a study that takes a closer look at the success stories of online daters. Reminds me of the Online Booty Call claim from years ago, “Reaching the one million member mark with only a single reported marriage is a tremendous accomplishment.”

A summary of what they found:

1.       eHarmony – Success = marriage (in 84 percent of success stories reported on the site)

2.       Match.com – Success = dating (49.2 percent of success stories are about getting a date)

3.       OkCupid –  Success = something other than marriage (only 23 percent of success stories on this site are about marriage)

Moonit’s new Social iPhone App is free and offers valuable insights into your romantic relationships. Users can view their percentage compatibility and a short, entertaining paragraph of tangible advice on what to appreciate, what to look out for, and what to work on for that particular pairing.

After receiving their relationship compatibility results, users can continue the dialogue by chatting with each other using the messaging functionality right inside the app and make plans to meet up in person.

RedLightCenter.com, the world’s premier adult virtual world, and UtherConvention.com, the world’s only convention planning and execution company that holds fully interactive virtual conventions, announced they will join together to host the first-ever Adult Entertainment Virtual Convention on Feb. 25 and 26, 2012. Event organizers confirmed this week that Seka (talk about old-school!), the mega-porn star of the 1970s and 80s, will be speaking at the Expo.

Work at OkCupid: They have been growing rapidly, and their team needs the best and brightest to help solve some of the most challenging problems in the field. Want to join ’em?

Related posts:

1. Dating Industry News November 12, 2012
2. Online Dating Industry News 2-9-12
3. Online Dating Industry News 6-24-11

The High Court rejected claims made by US online dating company Plentyoffish Media that it was entitled to assert rights over UK-registered trademarks because it had high UK visitor numbers to its website.

The domain UDate.org is for sale. Email Lee @ lbraxton03@gmail.com for details.

eHarmony Australia has recently released their new iPad app, eHarmony HD, available for free from the iTunes App Store. Also, eHarmony subsidiary Jazzed launches photo-sharing app and is featured in a dating television show. Does anyone think that Jazzed is making an impact? I’m seeing around 100k/month visitors.

NFC will help people find romance.

A recent survey by the University of Leicester suggests that as many as 200,000 people in the UK have fallen victim to online dating scams.

My Love Life is new dating and intimacy app to keep track of and log all aspects of your dates, flirts, sex life and personal activities. Available in itunes for $2.99.

I’ve seen a number of references to the IBISWorld U.S. Dating Industry Report. If you’ve read read it, was it worth the price?

Technology Cancels Out Dating’s Three Day Rule.

Bad Online Dates announces the launch of a new Rescue Bad Dates with Astrology Toolkit.

Jiayuan IPO Research (historical).

New mobile dating and discovery app: WhosHere. Send free texts, images, even VOIP calls, without giving out so much as an email address or phone number.

Online match-maker, eHarmony.com.au, is set to launch a new multi-million dollar integrated marketing campaign to redirect and refresh the brand.

OkCupid has released TameJs, developer tools that make managing certain aspects of dating site code easier to write and manage. What other dating sites are sharing code?

Dan Winchester from FreeDating.co.uk has done some research to find out the likely outcome of a first date, based on information available in a typical online dating profile.

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Following along with the liveblog for the Apple iPhone event. Seeing this, I wonder how long before Cupidtino and other dating sites will take advantage of the “Find My Friends” iOS feature. Create a temporary event, invite friends, but location sharing ends at a specific time. Eight hours of 3G talk time is a lot of audio/video flirting.

Supposedly the Siri demo is blowing everyone’s minds. I bet it is. “Phone, display all women between 30-40 within 10 miles, show their profiles and let them all know I’m free for a drink.”

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Heading to the Harpoon Octoberfest party on the waterfront tonight along with a few thousand other dejected Red Sox fans. This has been a trying month, not only in baseball, but getting blog posts out. Don’t you worry, lots of good stuff coming down the pipe.

HowAboutWe Powers Someecards: One of my favorite weekly emails is from someecards. Once look at today’s email and it becomes apparent that HowAboutWe is now powering their dating feature.

OkCupid has launched a secret skunkworks Ok Labs in San Francisco. Ex-Zoosk’er Nicholas Abramovic is there. Nick used to run acquisition at Zoosk and later consulted for SpeedDate.

Nick’s previous gig was founder of DateUp, a stealth online dating service acquired by Match.com. His LinkedIn profile says he is currently leading the San Francisco office working on top secret projects for the coolest company in online dating.

Am I the only one who’s excited to see what they come up with in the labs?

Future of the Dolphin dating platform and niche social networks: More at Boonex.

Reposting this from last month because I’m surprised that HowAboutWe hasn’t done this yet: ChirpMe Launches A Dating Site For Activities–And Groupons: Most new dating sites have at least considered date ideas similar to HowAboutWe. ChirpMe decided to do both. ChirpMe is a start-up that is participating in and funded by the 500Startups accelerator program.

I’m talking to a dating site later today funded by another popular accelerator fund. These kids really get it and its great to see investors warming up to the idea of cramming them with knowledge, domain experts, caffeine and cash.

As to whether singles give a damn about group buys and date recommendations in a large-scale meaningful way, the jury is still out. More at Forbes.

Finding an Instant Date Nearby, With an App: NY Times talking about Blendr, which used location to show you other suitable singles nearby. These apps dumb down the matching process a bit too much for my liking, but they sure can be addictive if you are in a major metro area.

Moonit surpasses a major milestone: 1,000,000 registered users. Dating site startups, they probably didn’t buy profiles to start up their database, and in most cases, neither should you.

CuddleComfort.com went live recently. Time to get all snuggly with strangers. The site says that “Maine proved to be the state least in need of a cuddle, at 94% below America’s average. With over 15,000 people searching for a cuddle buddy each month on Google and almost 5,000 on Twitter, we are catering to a very clear demand.” More info.

FreezeCrowd finally launched. EDU email addresses only. College dating remains a hot market, tons of startups that tend to get a lot of launch press, then fade from memory. Then again I’m in my 40′s.

Meexo is like Pandora for dating: Pulls in Foursquare and Facebook data. For dating purposes, you can hide your profile from friends. Virtual currency is used to pay for sending messages.

Make way for another “rate a date” site. DirtyBubble is a place people to rate, share, and review their previous relationships and hook-ups. Look at it like Yelp for people. People get to review their exes on different categories and leave their feed back about their experience.

Looks like Cheek’d has some competition.  MeSayingHi let’s people make connections in the “real” world before actually scoping them out online.

New Online Dating  Book: Robin Mesger says My  friend and  I wrote a book about true on-line dating stories.  It’s called I Don’t Want to Die Alone!:  True Stories  of Online  Dating and was just published.

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OKCupid Asking About Background Checks: By asking members questions about background checks, OkCupid can effectively poll people without seeming too much like an intrusive survey. Interestingly enough, this question appeared right after I was asked how freaky I am.

Dating Site Dominator is a subscription-site dating site aggregator that filters through top personals & dating websites like Match, PlentyOfFish, and OKCupid. Looks like $19.95 a month and its Windows-only download. Can’t imagine anyone would let them do this, we’ll see.

In honor of National Singles Week (Sept 18 to 24) Michelle Cove of Seeking Happily Every After is making the first 20 minutes of their feature-length documentary Seeking Happily Ever After (distributed by Lionsgate) available for FREE. The way to access it will be to go to the “Free on iTunes” section on iTunes only during National Singles Week. As if you needed further enticement, I’m in the documentary going on a recorded date.

Capples, Apps for Couples: Ofir from Israel has invented the first ever relationship status for iPhone which helps couples show each other how they feel in the beginning of their relationship.

The first Capple is called “Just Us”. Basically, when you show your friend at the bar how hot your girlfriend is, she gets a message saying “Your bf is thinking about you.” Check out Capple Factory to see the latest assortment of Capples.

Brandon Wade owns SeekingArrangement, SeekingMillionaire and WhatsYourPrice. Thats quite a collection of money-focused daters. Check this out, single college students registering on WhatsYourPrice as Attractive members using their dot-EDU email address will automatically receive a free upgrade and become certified as an Attractive College Co-Ed (Details). Brandon even came up with Labor Day Dating Tips for Unemployed Singles.

Chinese dating site Jiayuan is growing quickly, with second-quarter revenue more than doubling from a year earlier to $12.9 million and earnings growing at a similar pace. Jiayuan’s shares were up 21% Friday from when they listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market on May 11. More at the WSJ.

Badoo is up to 120 million members. It is the latest site, besides OkCupid (pictured) to take inspiration from HowAboutWe.

Understatement of the week: “However some users have reported copping sex-related spam through the service as the company’s 200 moderators fail to keep up with the growing hoard of users.”

Humorous Comcast “Dating On Demand” videos.

While poking around on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (crowdsourced small tasks) and came across many requests for profiles reviews. Prices ranged from .05-.20 cents per profile.

People have all sorts of clever ways to propose: StumbleUpon Helps Coordinate a Marriage Proposal.

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Employing over 95 full time staff with annualised revenues in excess of £30million, Global Personals (White Label Dating), co-founders Ross Williams and Steve Pammenter reflect on the company’s journey to becoming one of the fastest growing companies in the UK and what they have learned so far.

Cupid PLC plans to create a business with over £200 million of subscription revenues within five years.

My Single Friend is for sale, asking price is £15m. The site attracts 9,000 new singles a month from across the UK. It is on track to make underlying profits of about £1.5m this year.

Infographic: Dating in New York City by Match.com. Looks like Match is taking a page from the OkCupid playbook.

Alarm over smartphone date-locator: FindSomeone is the latest location-based flirting app to launch.

Men Value Love $73 More Than Sex According to Online Dating Study: WhatsYourPrice, the premier online dating website where users buy or sell first dates, just announced the results of a three month long study which concludes that men value love $73 more than sex. Hookup dates are  $121, serious long-term relationships are $194. Full story.

Innovations in the game of love from the Washington Post.

German city introduces parking meter for prostitutes. That’s one way to raise a city’s revenue.

Gizmodo blogger  Alyssa Bereznak landed in hot water this week for writing an awful post about going on an OkCupid date. Serves her right.

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eHarmony Premier launches, looks like they are pushing for one-time payment of $503.40. eHarmony has a lot of membership options these days.

eHarmony also has a new CEO. Former Zynga general manager (Farmville) Jeremy Verba has jumped ship to helm the expanding dating site (1 million mobile app downloads, sites in 16 countries, 30 percent of eHarmony’s user registrations are currently taking place within the mobile environment.)

A good sign that eHarmony is doing well is its current 33 job openings.

Breaking the Online Dating Sound Barrier has written an open letter to Mr. Verba. I wonder what they will do with Jazzed? More at TechCrunch.

Match is asking affiliates to stop mentioning total number of profiles or signups per day.

We would like to ask for your immediate assistance in removing any marketing copy that refers to the number of free or paid members on Match.com or the estimated volume of users joining Match.com on a daily basis. Examples of such copy that we have seen includes, but is not limited to, “Over 15 million members” or “Over 20,000 singles join Match.com every day”. Due to a change in the Match.com advertising policy, these types of marketing claims are no longer allowed.

Match continues to play hot-potato with Stir. A visit to the Stir app on Facebook now shows that Match has basically embedded Match Lite into Facebook and added a Hot Or Not feature. Not a fan of photo rating as the primary feature, hurts the Match brand and not what they are about, too casual. Anything for clicks, as they say. I wonder how many people will use Match via Facebook as opposed to the website or mobile app? I use the mobile app more than anything these days.

Liquid Fare is the quintessential mobile app for bar-hopping singles. Rate local bars, lounges and clubs in terms of age, style and attractiveness of the crowd.

OKCupid launches Locals feature. Share photos and suggest venues, chat with locals, notifications of matches nearby. Big dating sites adding location-based services will almost always fare better than startups launching free mobile apps that have to pay ridiculous amounts to acquire new members.

Spark Networks announces 2Q 2011 financials. Revenue for the second quarter of 2011 was $12.0 million, an increase of 17% compared to $10.3 million for the second quarter 2010. Total cost and expenses for the second quarter of 2011 were $12.3 million, a 43% increase compared to $8.6 million for the second quarter of 2010. Net loss for the second quarter of 2011 was $81,000 compared to net income of $923,000 for the second quarter of 2010. JDate revenue up 1% to $6.73 million. Read more.

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Social location-based service WhosHere has closed a $1.25 million first round of funding. Offering  free SMS texting, free MMS image sending, and free VoIP calls and  four million registered users, co-founder and COO Stephen Smith calls it, “a mobile, location-aware Craigslist.” WhosHere was created by Myrete.  Jolie O’Dell has more on WhosHere at VentureBeat.

Great to see more mobile/social/dating companies getting it right.

Can you imagine how upset the mobile carriers are getting as more and more people use free texting apps and Skype or Facetime? Billions of dollars in revenue are at stake and carriers can’t be happy about free messaging apps.

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Longtime sponsor Boonex has announced the release of Dolphin 7.0.7. 100 improvements, fixes and new features. Along with being a generally improved package it brings some substantial additions: support for 3rd-party mobile apps and Page Access Control.

Hosting
HostForWeb is the first official BoonEx hosting partner, starting at less than $4/month.

July Special Offer
Mobile Apps license available separately for A$299 for both iPhone and Android Apps.

Mobile Apps Update and Mobile Builder
The new breed of BoonEx Mobile Apps now support integration of 3rd party Modules in the most elegant manner. Executed properly this implementation allows 3rd party modules look and feel like part of native application experience.

Page Access Control
This system has been around for some time as a commercial modules by AntonLV. We’ve purchased, integrated, updated and packed it in for you for free. Why? Put simply, because it brings control over your site to a whole new level.

Details about Dolphin 8, which is coming soon.

More details at Boonex.

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