At this point, you may not be a newbie in the online dating scene. You’ve suffered uncomfortable evenings with a few duds, and now you’ve fine-tuned your selection process.
Maybe you know you want a nice person who shares your faith, political beliefs, or penchant for pets, for example. Traditional sites that cater to a variety of people—Yahoo! Personals, Match.com, and American Singles—are still going strong, but growth in the online dating industry is slowing, and there seems to be a growing interest among daters for something more focused. Highly specialized sites centered on narrow areas like religion, ethnicity, political view, and even pet preference are popping up more than ever this year.
“People are getting more and more specific in what they’re looking for,” says Bill Tancer, VP of research for Hitwise, an Internet traffic monitoring company. “We pulled some interesting data during the election. There were sites like conservativematch.com and liberalhearts.com. There’s a site Animal Attraction—meeting people through their love of pets.”
Jupiter research is predicting 19 percent growth in the online dating market in 2004, down from 48 percent in 2003 and 100 percent in 2002, according to John LaRosa, research director at Marketdata Enterprises, a market research firm. Meanwhile, specialized sites are flourishing, according to Tancer: “At this time last year, we were looking at around 600 dating sites. Now we’re tracking 862, and almost all of the additions have been through some sort of niche.”
Tancer also says matchmaking sites are on the rise. Yahoo! Personals, one of the most popular online dating services, launched its premier version in November. The site, like eHarmony, personalizes dating by showing compatibility based on in-depth personality and relationship questionnaires. The service costs $34.95 a month, and it’s targeted at those seeking long-term relationships. Yahoo!’s standard version costs $19.95 a month.
Yahoo! Personals Premier and most other online dating services attract people ranging in age from 25 to 44, but 18- to 24-year-olds are also entering the scene, and social sites like Friendster are catering to them.
“Social networking groups have encroached on dating space,” Tancer says. “Young people may not feel like it’s socially as acceptable to try online dating, but it’s a little different with these sites, because you’re going there to network, and a date might fall out of the process. You’re not specifically going there to find a match.”
Meet Me at…Hot or Not is an actual service for this demographic, but it also came out of a social networking tool. Hot or Not, which lets you rate people based on their looks, began as a service on the America Online Instant Messenger main page. With Meet Me at…Hot or Not, you still rate others based on their looks, but a link lets you try to match yourself up with someone.
While some sites are trying to draw the largely untapped younger audience, another relatively new development in the online dating world aims at those who are wary of a potential love interests’ credentials.
“With an online dating Web site, you can post a photo from 10 years ago, you can lie about your height, you can lie about your weight,” says Marketdata’s LaRosa. “Companies have established that as much as 25 to 30 percent of the registered users are not single, but in fact married. What you have now is an emerging cottage industry of ancillary services devoted to things like background checks.”
In addition, trade groups to regulate the online dating industry are forming, according to Marketdata’s April 2004 report “The U.S. Dating Services Market.” Explains LaRosa: “The formation of trade organizations signifies that the industry is starting to mature and try to establish a code of ethics. There are some sites that need cleaning up and these groups are going to try to do that.”
This article, by Natalie Goel, is from: www.pcmag.com
