Andrew Draper has undertaken an interesting piece of work, analyzing the network of the most popular dating sites. Some of the numbers are off, notably Matchmaker supposed 12 million members, however I applaud his attempt at this type of analysis.
Andrew says:
…knowing the amount of members each site had accumulated was a good way to base the popularity of the sites on, however this did not necessarily mean that the number of links these nodes were attached to would be directly associated with its popularity.
I started with MatchMaker.com and to my surprise, a site with over 12 million members only acquired 1,060 IN links. How does this make sense? So I continued on to the next site which was Match.com and a whopping 70,500 IN links showed up. This was more like it I thought, maybe there was an error with Google when doing the MatchMaker search. Neither Yahoo Personals or OneAndOnly.com came up with any IN links whatsoever, so I Moved on to Lavalife and DreamMates which both posted around the 1000 IN links mark. The rest of the results were skewed, raising and falling with very little relation to the number of members each had. Although the last site ePersonals.com with the fewest members did post the least amount of IN links, a connection that makes sense.
Next was finding out the number of OUT links, which I was hoping for some better results. MatchMaker.com again proved to be a disappointment with only 270 OUT links. Why? It is leaning towards the IN side for sure, in the directed network model which is appropriate for a website which is under a highly controlled environment with little information getting out. But nevertheless confuses me. Next was Match.com which came up with 6,800 OUT links, indicating that Match.com is also leaning towards the IN continent. Again this is most likely due to its strict upbringings. Lavalife, American Singles, PerfectMatch, and ePersonals were on the other hand favoring the OUT continent by having far more outgoing links compared to incoming ones, indicating that they are more extraverted than their competitors (again due to the structure and technicalities of the sites themselves).
