Around February, we get suddenly bombarded by the Valentine’s day promotional activities. Conversation topics move to relationships, Valentine’s cards, and potential secret admirers. You might make the prediction, that all this in-your-face love might make the average single person more likely to step up their efforts to find that special someone, perhaps even as a kind of priming effect. Out of curiosity, I did a very unscientific test by looking up traffic stats for online dating sites, to see if there had been a boost over the last week or so.
Online Dating around Valentines Day
I went to Alexa to look up the stats, and stuck to UK sites so as to minimise traffic from countries that don’t celebrate St Valentines or celebrate it at a different time of the year.
Here are a few graphs:
eHarmony.co.uk
eHarmony did experience a little boost around Valentine’s, but as you can see, it’s part of a typical pattern and there isn’t anything about the last week that sets the traffic boost apart from the rest.
Flirtbox.co.uk
We have a flatliner! No results here, a slight decrease if anything.
Datetheuk
Datetheuk did indeed have a little traffic surge, and they seemed to be on a downward trend at the time, so maybe this was a Valentine’s day effect?
Results
It doesn’t seem from this quick test that Valentine’s had an effect on online dating website traffic. Of course, this is nothing like a real study, and there are loads of confounding variables. Even if there was a nice spike for each website, it might have been due to increased promotion and marketing by the companies.
What are your experiences with this? Have you made an extra effort to meet someone recently? Do you found people more receptive to your advances at this time of year? Or then again, does all the love in the air simply remind you of what you don’t have, and lead you to the couch with a box of chocolates and a Jennifer Aniston movie?
