Match.com International

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Formerly the Australian based Soulmates Technology, Match.com International is the largest international dating service in the world (by comScore Media Metrix 1/05). It currently runs in more than 13 languages. It has an alexa.com traffic ranking of about 140 (as of November 2006).

Match.com International services a number of companies sometimes under partner brands including MSN (under the name "MSN Dating and Personals"), AOL (under the name "Love@AOL"), Yahoo, and many others. In the case of Yahoo, they provide their own Yahoo Personals search which competes with Match.com in the US, however in other countries such as the UK, Match.com International powers the online dating services for that region.

1 History
2 Sites
- 2.1 Match.com Brand
- 2.2 Partner Brands
3 External links

[edit] History

Soulmates Technology was founded by Martin Haynes and Daniel Haigh in early 1998 in Sydney Australia. It's rumored that they both met at the Cold Fusion User's Group meeting in Sydney and decided to build the site.

Soulmate's platform wasn't designed at first to be used as a dating website, but as a bridging software for traditional dating and meeting companies to pool their clients. Shortly after creating the platform, the site shifted goals to becoming a purely web based platform.

In April of 2002, Soulmates Technology was purchased by IAC/InterActiveCorp (then TicketMaster) to become the international wing of their other personals business. The sale was for a little more than $23M US.

In early 2006, Match.com deiced to drop the Czech and Slovak based sites for reasons unknown, although its speculated that it was based on issues with internationalization and lack of users.

Sometime in the middle of 2006, Match.com abandoned the original ColdFusion site and moved to version of the US site ported for international use based on ASP.NET. The site carried the branding of "the New Match.com" in many markets. At the time, it was one of the most heavily accessed ColdFusion websites in the world beating out both MySpace and Macromedia's sites according to alexa.com.