I personally don’t pay much attention to dating and social networking site rankings. I leave that to Hitwise and Comscore. It’s Yahoo, Match, Eharmony, Spark and Friendfinder in the US. Everyone else is fighting for the free and niche eyeballs. For sure, some are fighting better than others but that’s the game right there.
When it comes to Europe, the numbers are even more difficult to compare. SparkNetworks, which is a conglomerate of over a dozen dating sites, has overtaken PerfectMatch, a single website. Huh?
Month after Comscore confuses networks of sites with single sites, dating sites and social networking. How many years until they get it right? I know the lines are blurring, but dating makes far more money than social networking. Who are these rankings for? Consumers don’t pay attention to them, which leaves industry, and the data are so broken as to be unusable in any real strategic planning.
I want to hear about Meetic. They were battling Match for #1 in EU. Now Yahoo comes in and takes the top spot? True.com is the #4 dating site in Europe?
Nielson can’t even get enough panelists to visit the sites to complete their top 15 rankings.
I bet anything over 10th spot isn’t much more than 25,000 members in reality, and even less paying members. Is anyone using this data to gain a competitive edge?
