The World’s Largest Social Dating Network Continues Its Rapid Growth and Delivers 150 Million Connections for its Users in One Year.

Zoosk, the fastest growing social dating network in the world, celebrated its first anniversary today and announced it now has 12 million users. The company also announced it has won a 2009 People’s Choice Open Web Award in the “Dating and Romance” category. During the past year, Zoosk has made 150 million connections for its users and it has expanded from one social network site to now five, including Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Friendster, and Hi5. The company has also launched www.zoosk.com as a destination site to capture users who are not on social networks. One of the drivers of this strong growth for Zoosk has been its ability to fully localize the experience in 12 languages with more coming soon.

“We’re thrilled about our success this year and are excited to receive strong validation from our users with a 2009 Open Web Award,” said Shayan Zadeh, co-CEO of Zoosk. “We allow people to seamlessly connect across multiple social networks and this is drawing young professionals across the globe to us in increasing numbers. Last year, we saw a dramatic increase in users over the holiday season with 100,000 users registering last Christmas day. We’re expecting to add over 1.5 million users to our community this holiday as people stay in more to save money, but still want to meet and connect with others.”

Founded in 2007, Zoosk is the first and largest dating application built for social network users. Zoosk allows users to easily connect across the most popular social networking sites and makes online dating casual, social, and fun by allowing people to meet through the context of these online communities. Zoosk has more than 700,000 daily unique visitors across its properties and more than 2,000,000 messages per day are exchanged through Zoosk.

“We are excited about the strong increase in users and communities Zoosk has achieved in its first year as a company,” said Deepak Kamra, General Partner at Canaan Partners. “There is great opportunity for growth in the online dating/social web dating market and we are looking forward to helping Zoosk achieve even greater success in the coming year.”