Online, It's Valentine's Day Every Day

A New Form of Online Entertainment?

With that level of variety, it is perhaps no surprise that online personals ads have become a serious form of entertainment.

Another big-name player in the online dating game, Yahoo, has recently upped its entertainment value, allowing users to add a 30-second audio greeting and video clip to their profile, for free. Yahoo's video feature, which has competitors such as Match.com in hot pursuit to launch their own video services, adds to online personals' existing interactive capabilities, such as instant messaging.

But high-tech love is not confined to the desktop. Match.com is launching a service this week that connects singles via their cell phones. The service, dubbed Match Mobile, is being provided through a deal with AT&T Wireless and allows users to search and find partners based on location.

Who can resist the luring mix of audio, video, chat, mobility, and romance, all at their fingertips? Apparently not workers, tethered to their computers each day while secretly pining for love, and at the very least, entertainment.

According to a report released by ComScore Networks earlier this month, at-work Internet users account for 35 percent of all time spent at online personals sites.

What's more, at-work personals perusers spent an average of 51 minutes at personals sites in December of 2002, compared with the 37 minutes spent by at-home visitors, ComScore said.

While those figures may be worrying to employers, they offer all sorts of fodder for water-cooler gossips.

Dating Spam

Online dating has not just become a form of entertainment, however. In a way it has become its own sport, the experts said.

The scope, variety, and ease offered by online personals has led to some curious dating habits. Many users, for example, have said that they have received "dating spam," or a form of e-mail sent to numerous potential dates.

These date spammers are typically men, McDermott said, which leads to another curiosity about online dating. Despite the revolutionary state of the technology, users fall back on typical dating stereotypes, McDermott said, which in the case of date spam implies that men still lead the pack in initiating contact, as impersonal as it may be.

The majority of online personals users are in fact men, Jupiter reported. Of the 16.3 million singles who visited online dating sites last year, 10.2 million were men and 6.1 million women. While that may be good news for single ladies, it can lead to measures such as dating spam.

The advantage in online courting, however, is that there are options. Spring Street's Battjer argues that his company's business model is more "fair" to women.

Free to Fee

While Match.com charges users a monthly subscription fee to use its service, Spring Street's clients allow users to post profiles and respond to inquiries for free. Users have to pay to initiate contact, however, making them more selective in who they contact and thus avoiding date spam, Battjer said.

Yahoo has also taken this tack, which not only serves to make users more selective, but also allows the company to rapidly grow its user numbers by offering free online profiles. And by throwing in other free services, such as video and audio clips, the company can get users hooked. Pretty soon they find they want to initiate contact, and eventually pony up their subscription fee.

In fact, the popularity of online dating allowed service providers to reap an estimated $313 million in revenue in 2002, according to Jupiter Research, and it is expected to continue to bloom, raking in an estimated $642 million by 2007.

While growth in online personals is expected to continue, the sheer number of players crowding the space, from bigwigs like Match.com and Yahoo to smaller players like Kiss.com and UDate.com, is expected to decrease, said Jupiter analyst David Card.

"The only option for a number of players is to customize the experience and deliver a niche," he said.

While online dating enjoys booming popularity, the turnover rate from free users to subscribers remains relatively low--below 10 percent--Card said, and there is the aspect of perpetual churn. After all, the goal of most users is to eventually meet their match and leave the dating world behind.

Considering these factors, Card believes there is only room for a few major players in the market, and a handful of niche providers.

Right now, however, business is booming. And with Valentine's Day here, singles are hopping online in droves, hoping to find a date for the special day. Traffic to personals sites in February of last year spiked to 20 million visitors, according to Jupiter, and this year looks to be no different.

"January through February is our busy season," said McDermott. "A lot of people have just gone through the holidays as a single person and they don't want to do it again."

With a little bit of daring, and some cutting-edge technology, perhaps some of them won't have to.