Online Personals Watch has Nielsen ratings for online dating sites:
We have updated Nielsen Online U.S.A. internet dating rankings. Yahoo! Personals, Match.com and Singlesnet maintained their 1st, 3rd and 4th position respectively. TRUE ousts MSN Dating from it’s 5th position. PlentyofFish jumped from #9 to #7. AOL Personals went down to #8 from #7. Mate1 and MSN Dating slide off the top 10.
Look at what Hitwise has to say about the USA for August:
1 Singlesnet
2 PlentyofFish
3 Yahoo! Personals
You have got to be kidding me. Nielsen has PlentyofFish at #7 and Hitwise has them at #2? AOL is #7. Have I been that out of touch all summer that I missed that AOL was even in the Top 10?
I would like to know how Hitwise is able to break out the Yahoo Personals numbers as a subdomain.
As usual, these numbers are completely off-base and mean absolutely nothing to anyone except the people in marketing and sales. I like to see numbers for unique visitors, time spent on site and total monthly visits. Compete does this, but they don’t provide free rankings. Quantcast has some great stats on dating sites, worth a look if its not in your competitive analysis toolbox.
