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.
