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Nate Elliot at Jupiter Research has a new dating industry report out. Nate thinks online dating will be a $932 million dollar industry of 11 million singles by 2011.
I need to dig up his predictions from 2003 and compare them to where we are today.
What he didn’t say is that social networking is going to be a zillion dollar industry by then, far eclipsing the money the dating industry is struggling to continue wringing out of a wary audience.
11 million people will not be paying for online dating in 2011. It’s going to be advertising-based or some other payment scheme by then. Applying todays way of doing things and increasing the numbers by some certain amount doesn’t really help us as an industry.
I would reframe the questions answered in these survey’s as:
How will people meet other people in 2011?
Who gets paid to make the introduction?
How will matchmakers operate?
What will the services look like?
Will videodating be a viable first step?
What is the breakdown of users by demographic?
What do personality tests look like?
What I can guarantee is that by 2011, 90% of the dating sites running today will no longer be in existence. The biggest markets will be in Asia and there will be a new crop of BoonEx/Webscribble (of course they will be gone as well) powered dating sites out there with a feature set we can’t even imagine at this time.
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online dating sites, of which there must now be thousands available on the Internet. Only a few of the most major such sites offer any type of psychological testing and/or background
informational searches to be accomplished on the users of the sites. Compatibility testing and matching really does not help filter out those who are attempting to make use of the sites
based upon scamming, criminal, or otherwise harmful motivations. Reviews of the only couple sites that offer users some degree of criminal background history checking and unfortunately
these checks have been reviewed as being too limited in scope; generally only limited to the police records in a single State or else useless as the focused upon individual is making use of
an alias or pseudo name in his/her communications with the site.
Just very recently, a new approach has been developed that addresses this very problem. A psychologist who has an extraordinary background in psychological test development, as well
as in security related integrity or honesty testing has developed this new tool. This psychologist has developed a rather short/quick psychological test, based upon well-established and
sound psychological test construction logic, that is designed to assess almost a dozen problem areas that are highly associated with personal integrity/honesty. This 72-item, multiple-choice
test, the Personal Security Standards Psychological Questionnaire (PSSPQ), has recently gone through a rather thorough testing when used to screen or otherwise evaluate the general
integrity of persons who were attempting to contact potential ‘dates’ through the services offered by online dating sites. The PSSPQ has recently been made commercially
available to users of online dating sites. An extremely complete (and quite lengthy) description of the PSSPQ when used in the online dating arena for individual evaluation purposes is
available on: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~lastone2/psspqdatingtest.htm . On this PSSPQ website, many helpful links are provided that greatly aid a reader in understanding and
evaluating the PSSPQ, its development, and its developer, as well as the many dangers that face anyone making use of the online dating sites.