Sunday, December 25, 2005

"Frumster's Extreme Makeover?"

Didja hear? Frumster's going beyond the frum in its name:

“Unaffiliated.” “Secular.” “Synagogue=Never.” With many JDate members describing themselves with this level of observance, daters who wanted to create a Jewish future with their bashert were for a long time simply out of online dating luck. So when Frumster barreled its way onto the scene four years ago, it aimed to fill in the observance gap for frustrated online daters and create a pool of religious singles — essentially, putting the “Jewish” back in Jewish online dating.

[...] this month, Frumster announced a milestone: In four years, 500 members had met and married; by the Dec. 15 gala event celebrating the 250 couples, the number of matched members had grown to 520. Over 55 percent of those relationships had been initiated by women (or were so remembered in the “exit interviews” that Frumster conducts when members match). Sixty percent of the matches were between people older than 31. In addition to these encouraging statistics, the milestone has spurred a media push: while continuing to serve its Orthodox population, Frumster is responding to the call of the non-frum, extending memberships to all “marriage-minded” Jewish singles, and tweaking the membership process accordingly.

The rest of my new Jewish Week singles column is available here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jealousy? A site called frumster, whose terms of service were always "must keep shabbos and kosher" now has brushed these requirements to the wayside. Plain and simple, this site is all about money - which isn't a bad thing - unless of course as is the case here, the site tries to play it off like it isn't.

Anonymous said...

I signed up. But you still can't search for people who identify themselves as "Conservative." Also, I had no idea how to describe my family - are they "religious"? "Traditional"? They're Conservative, much like I am. Whatever. And the only people who've written me so far are Orthodox guys from NYC. So I haven't given Frumster any money yet. My hopes are not terribly high.