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Nielsen has come up with incredible stats on the advertising spend of the dating industry. This is why cheap hosted sites with little marketing budget will never make it past the mom-n-pop stage. It’s amazing how much more the top sites need to spend to stay there. Eharmony and Match both grew their ad spend by 39%, what are the odds of that happening? Match makes more than Eharmony yet it’s ad spend is half of Eharmony’s $110 million. Teligence spent $42 million, mostly on chat lines. There are a lot of very interesting things to learn from this information, go check it out.

In 2004 (January-November) total U.S. media spending was $149 million; 2005 (January-November) total spending was $310 million; for January – November 2006 total spending was $430 million. In 2006, most dating services companies spent their advertising dollars on Cable TV with $130.6 million in reported ad spending, the Internet ranks second at $127.3 million and Spot TV
follows with $75.1 million.

Online ad spending:

Total estimated spending on image-based online advertising for dating services was $127.3 million for Jan-November 2006. True ($52.2 million), Mate1.com ($20.4 million) and InterActiveCorp (match.com) ($16.1 million) led the top online personals advertisers in 2006.

It will be interesting to lay revenue on top of these numbers and see who is the most effective with their advertising dollars.

Who the heck is Flingweb and how did Chemistry.com spend $2 million when they supposedly haven’t even started advertising yet?