I’ve been going through old news and have come up with some examples of missed predictions.

According to Yankee Group research, active users of mobile interactive, entertainment and community applications, which include premium chat, flirting and dating services, are forecasted to grow from 960,000 in 2003 to 16.3 million in 2008, for a cumulative annual growth rate of 76.3 percent.

Via Sprint Offers Mobile Dating Services. They say the numbers include dating features, but still.

With fewer than 6 million users in the United States, mobile dating is small compared with the estimated 40 million users of traditional computer- based online dating services.”

Via Textually.org. Six million mobile daters in the US circa 2005? Get out.

Subscription revenue for the mobile dating services are expected to rise from $31.4 million this year to $215 million by 2009.

Via SFGate. Get cracking on those mobile apps.

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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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