Looks like Yahoo! is taking eHarmony seriously.
Yahoo Inc. late Tuesday launched Personals Premier, a premium online dating service aimed at attracting serious relationship seekers with deeper pockets. The move challenges eHarmony, a popular online dating site that picks potential “soul mates” for its subscribers based on results from a lengthy personality test. Yahoo’s new premium service costs $34.95 a month and features searching and matching technology that uses results from new relationship and personality tests. Yahoo’s existing personals service costs $19.95 per month.
The higher-priced offering comes at a time when growth in spending on online dating is slowing. Personals remain the largest paid online-content category in the U.S., excluding pornography and gambling, with U.S. consumers spending $227.9 million in the first half of 2004, according to the Online Publishers Association. Although spending in the period was up 6.4% from the first half of 2003, it has declined sequentially for three quarters in a marked reversal from two and a half years of rapid growth.
Yahoo operates the No. 1 personals site with 6.2 million users in October, according to research firm comScore Networks Inc.
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