Christmas and New Year tend to be the loneliest times of the year, with singles even more aware that they could face yet another twelve months on their own. The cheesy cards and loved up couples walking the streets through the festive season tend to spur those singletons into action by heading online to find love- and wow didn’t December 2010 and January 2011 show it.
The lead up to Christmas is always huge. Yes, it always seems a great idea to take as much time off over the festive period as possible, but all that family time can send people round the bend! Boredom kicks in and singles jump online looking for love – the final week of last December saw 25% more registrations across our platform than the previous weeks in that month.
January comes along and with it comes the New Year resolutions where those in fizzled relationships decide to break the ties and go into the New Year with a fresh start. Not only that, but singletons make it their mission to find someone after spending Christmas and New Year going green with envy at those couples around them. January is known as ‘National Break Up Month’- twice as many break-ups happen in January than any other month and the below stats show that this time of year is where we see a peak in searches for ‘dating’. January 2011 saw WLD register 26% more members across the platform vs. December, and a 15% rise on revenues collected.
UK
Looking at the UK search volumes, you can see that the last two weeks of December 2010 saw searches for ‘dating’ rise to an all-time high, and it continued to peak from 2nd-8th January 2011. Searches began to steadily decline throughout the remainder of January but were still significantly higher than any other month. Interesting to see that following the peak, searches for ‘dating’ actually remained consistently higher than the previous year for the remainder of 2011.
Australia
Australia saw a similar trend with searches escalating from mid-December through to 26th December 2010 and remained at that volume until 8th January 2011.
Now that Australia is the fastest growing network on our platform, it looks like December 2011 and January 2012 could be the biggest months of AU traffic that the platform experiences. Another thing to note- the Royal Wedding which took place on Friday 29th April 2011 resulted in a spike in searches for ‘dating’ on that date and the period leading up to that day. Bear key events in mind when marketing your International sites too!
South Africa
South Africa was a slightly different story in terms of peak searches, but still saw huge growth in searches throughout Christmas and early New Year. The whole of December 2010 saw uplift in searches for the term ‘dating’. The peak ran from 26th December 2010-1st January 2011 and by the last week of January, had levelled out to where they originally were. This highlights that December is the month to monetise on the seasonal traffic hike in South Africa.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to grow your traffic and revenues very quickly, then December and January are the months to ramp up spend. There are more people searching for ‘dating’ at this time of year than any other. This holds true for all networks and all territories so speak to your Partner Manager about other sources that can help increase your coverage.
Lauren Barnes
Partner Manager @ WhiteLabelDating.com.