Top 10 Cities for Online Dating
Sept. 2, 2010— -- For singles across the country, summer in the city meant a summer spent looking for love.
According to Match.com, thanks to mobile traffic and a merger with another dating site, more singles than ever used the popular online dating site this summer.
"The numbers were really unbelievable," said Whitney Casey, Match.com's relationship insider. "[They were] up 33.5 percent – it was the most active summer."
She said the site constantly monitors its activity, from messages sent between members, to the flirtatious "wink," to photo or information changes on a member's profile.
For the first time, Match.com this week released a list of the top 10 cities for online dating because activity on the site was so high.
The friskiest city of all? Miami.
Casey attributes the rise in dating activity to the smartphone and an increase in the number of people using Match.com's applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android phones.
Match declined to provide specific numbers regarding mobile members but said more and more users are accessing the service's mobile applications. The company also said that people who access the service via smart phone are two times as active as those who only use Match.com from a computer.
It also said that Match.com's recent merger with Yahoo Personals and general growth in the online dating category helped boost dating activity on the site this summer.
"Your phone is your mobile computer. If you're finding the movie you're going to see on your phone, if you're finding out where you're going to eat on your phone, you're going to find your next relationship on your phone too," Casey said.
She speculated that Miami topped Match.com's list because it's among the most mobile-friendly cities.
"Miami has a lot of international people and I think that a lot of times… if mobile apps are really big, a lot of international people typically have the new phones," she said. "They're much more savvy with using mobile phones."
As more daters use their smart phones to look for love by finding people and sending messages on the go, the dynamics of Internet dating could shift too, Casey said.
"The era of you sitting by your computer and sending these long missives to someone you don't know and never met is over and that's a good thing. The technology is affording us more opportunities to make the numbers game work for us," she said. "It makes it more real… You're almost meeting the person because it's so right now instead of creating this image of somebody that may not be realistic."
Want to see Match.com's full list of the top 10 cities for online dating? Click on to the next page.
