The NY Times has a piece (reg. req’d) on the plateauing of the online dating industry.
Lot’s of glum anecdotes about people getting burned out, disappointed in the experience, and going back to offline dating activities like speed dating, group dates, etc. Several offline dating services are mentioned, although no mention off the Cupid-PreDating deal.
Niche site are growing in number. After getting tired of date warehouses like Match and Yahoo!, people are eager to try their luck at target sites catering to their specific needs. Hitwise says 800 dating sites exist, I’d say more like 1,800 but it’s the top 25 that matter most.
Match says they have 50 million profiles. That’s a misleading number, Match has been inconsistent when it comes to how they identify active members as opposed to stale profiles. I heard 22 million a few months ago.
Stowe Boyd was recently talking about the difficulty people have removing their profiles from social networking sites. In the Times article, writer Alex Williams mentions the trouble speed-dating company owner Renée Piane had removing her profile from Match after she fell in love with a high-school acquaintance. She complained that her profile is still available on Match.com, giving false hope to hundreds of men, and said she has deleted more than 200 e-mail messages from eager bachelors in the last few weeks alone.
Big changes are happening behind closed doors at the major dating sites, the re-orgs are only the beginning. Expect big changes in Q1 05.
