I received a press release from Meetic which states they are the #1 dating destination in Europe. an hour later I read this:
Independent Internet audience measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings has named Match.com and its affiliated sites as the leading online dating provider in Europe. According to Nielsen/NetRatings data, dating sites owned or provided by Match.com drew 2.3 million unique visitors in November 2004, 35% more than Meetic, its closest European competitor, which had 1.7 million unique visitors during the month. Match.com has more than nine million registered users in Europe.
When I asked Meetic about the disparity between the two releases press release, I received this:
If you read carefully the match’s PR you’ll see dating sites owned or provided by Match.com drew 2.3 million unique visitors in November 2004, 35% more than Meetic. Witch mean they have add match’s and ALL their partner’s reach (owned or provided by Match.com ) to compare with meetic’s reach WITHOUT reach of our 60 partners all over Europe. This comparison is quite unfair ;) and totally wrong (see bellow Nielsen November 2004 figures!)
If Match measures their entire network, it makes sense that Meetic does the same, Otherwise it gets confusing.
Meetic starts down the slippery slope of taking a competitor to task for aggregating the numbers across partner sites:
“All the indicators measured by Nielsen prove beyond any doubt that meetic is indeed the leader of dating websites in Europe contrary to what you may be led to believe by one of our competitors who, in a recent communication on the subject of the Nielsen findings, added together its own visitor figures and those of all its partners to compare them to the results achieved by meetic alone, excluding our 60 partners! In any case, and despite the fact that Meetic is visited by 420,000 more UV than this competitor, the notion of UV is not the sole criterion by which to evaluate the performance of a dating website. From a quality point of view the visit length is also highly significant and, on average, the duration of a visit to meetic is 13 times longer than visits to match.com” explains Marc Simoncini, CEO and founder of meetic.
I do not know if users pay per session or minute in the chat rooms. If they do, that’s a good thing for Meetic. Match chat has always been underutilized, partially because it’s blocked by pop-up blockers, so I can see Meetic users sticking around 13 times longer than Match users.
Not only is there a lack of standardized metric to measure top 10 dating sites, we still have to figure out how to keep the Friendster and myspace out of the mix and stick with pure play dating sites.
Link to JPEG of the Nielson numbers in question.
