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December 12, 2004
E-Dating Bubble Springs a LeakBy ALEX WILLIAMS
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 NLINE
dating once seemed the perfect option for
Allison Gold, a stock trader in Manhattan. It
was a vast, exhilarating marketplace, humming
along with the efficiency and unlimited
opportunity of the financial markets of Wall
Street, where she makes her living.
Ms. Gold lithe, outgoing, athletic, blond
seemed to have plenty to sell. And judging by
the profiles of men on Match.com, the buy side
had no shortages either. If she wanted a guy
with green eyes and she sort of did she
could type that requirement right into the
search field alongside the desired height,
income and ZIP code.
"At first, you're like a kid in a candy store,"
said Ms. Gold, who is 46. Hundreds of men
answered her ad, and they all seemed great.
"They're perfect," she said, referring to the
way men portrayed themselves in their profiles.
"They're all like the guys from `Ocean's
Eleven.' "
Then she got a closer look. On dates, more than
a few of the handsome, rugged, athletic types
she thought she had been corresponding with
looked more like George Costanza than George
Clooney. Some of those "single" guys turned out
to have wives.
Feeling weary and, she said, "jerked around,"
Ms. Gold let her paid subscription to Match.com
expire, and she has turned to real-life singles
mixers for professionals. "I think I just burned
out," she said. "It's kind of like communism. On
paper, it's a perfect system."
Apparently, many others have also found that the
god of online dating has failed.
"It's clear that it's plateauing," said Peter M.
Zollman, the founder of Classified Intelligence,
a consulting company that focuses on online
advertising. "A lot of people feel like, `I've
been there, done that. I've met everybody there
is to meet. I'll take a break.' "
Evidence is appearing that after years of
rocketing growth, the online dating industry is
drifting to earth. In 2002 the industry's
revenues rose 73 percent over the previous
year's, according to industry reports, and in
2003 they grew again by 77 percent. This year
the growth has cooled, relatively speaking, to
19 percent, and tepid increases are forecast for
coming years.
"The slowing has begun," said Nate Elliott, an
analyst at Jupiter Research in New York.
Many early adopters those quick to explore
innovations are moving on to the next big
thing, which looks a lot like the last things on
the dating front: bars, real-life matchmaking
services, setups arranged by friends.
Consumer spending on online personals dipped
during the first two quarters of this year, to
less than $114 million a quarter from about $117
million in the final quarter of 2003, as
measured by comScore Networks, a research
company in Reston, Va. "Virtually any new
industry goes through a period of rapid growth
and expansion, followed by some adjustment,"
explained Daniel E. Hess, a vice president of
the firm.
This industry, apparently, is adjusting busily.
In September Match.com laid off 10 percent of
its work force and replaced its chief executive.
Its third-quarter sales inched up 3 percent over
the same period the previous year, and profits
dropped 37 percent, a decrease that one
executive at the company attributed to a rise in
marketing costs.
An online service called True, which started up
in Irving, Tex., in January, has already slashed
60 percent of its 162 original employees, though
it says it is now rehiring. Spring Street
Networks, which operates the dating networks for
Nerve and The Village Voice, has recently made
significant staff cuts. In August MatchNet, a
company in Beverly Hills that operates JDate.com
and AmericanSingles.com, backed off from plans
to go public.
All of this is not to say that Internet dating
as a business is on the ropes. Niche sites
catering to elderly singles, lesbian singles,
obese singles continue to spring up. More than
800 online dating sites now exist, according to
Hitwise, a company that tracks Web industries.
But as a heady pop-cultural revolution
otherwise known as a fad the Net no longer
seems to have the capacity to reinvent the
world's mating rituals. A moment has passed.
"There's a burnout factor that's almost
inevitable in the online dating world," said Mr.
Zollman of Classified Intelligence. In other
words, either you find lasting love or you grow
sick of surfing for it. At Match.com, which says
it has 50 million profiles in its database,
subscribers stay for only about five months on
average, said Joe Cohen, the chief operating
officer. (Subscriptions start at $24.95 a
month.) He emphasized that about 40 percent of
those who leave eventually return.
"We've tried a number of things to keep them
around longer," he said. "But you know what? We
don't really want them to stick around longer.
We want them to find partners."
The clearest measure of a nascent weariness with
online dating may be the expansion of defiantly
offline dating services, some of them set up to
cater to frustrated refugees from the Web.
"People think online dating has hurt our
business when in fact it's made it grow," said
Sherri Murphy, who operates a matchmaking
service called Elite Connections in the Los
Angeles area. She charges singles $795 to $5,000
to help them find mates among clients she says
are carefully screened. "Online dating is a job
in itself," Ms. Murphy said. "People come to us
to relieve the burden."
As Renιe Piane sees it, "Online, there's no
connectedness." Ms. Piane is the president of
Rapid Dating in Santa Monica, Calif., one of
several companies around the country that now
manage "speed dating" parties where singles
cycle through a rapid-fire series of five-minute
minidates (a bit like musical chairs for
grown-ups), so they can get a sense of whom they
might want to date. "You can't tell if there's
any chemistry" online, Ms. Piane said. "With
speed dating, you know in the first five
minutes."
Ms. Piane canceled her own subscription to
Match.com in May 2002, around the time she ran
across, in person, an old high school
acquaintance she soon fell in love with. 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.
Perhaps no one has been quite so literal in
trying to build a business around online burnout
as Ilana Eberson. Ms. Eberson, who worked at
Jcupid.com, a former online dating site for
Jewish singles, started a company called Real
Live People Party four months ago.
"The whole concept is, `Disconnect from the
Internet, reconnect with real life,' because we
all agree that the bloom is off the rose with
online dating," Ms. Eberson said.
It's not that Ms. Eberson's offline alternatives
are revolutionary. So far, her company has held
several singles mixers at New York bars, and she
is planning to put on a scavenger hunt at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as a singles
cruise. But she maintains that her timing is
just right. After a few euphoric years mouse in
hand, people are jaded about online dating, she
said.
On her company's Web site, http://www.reallivepeopleparty.com/
(yes, even offline dating services have Web
sites), she started a contest in which the best
tale of an "online date from hell" will earn
free entry to a party.
Dr. Marty Klein, a marriage and family counselor
and sex therapist in Palo Alto, Calif., said:
"What always happens with new technologies,
whether it's computers or cellphones, is that at
first there are early adopters. Then it gets out
into the commercial realm. Your grandma gets
one. It's always over-hyped in the beginning,
then turns out not to be the answer to
everything, so some people with unrealistic
expectations blame the technology. Like
everything else, there's a predictable cultural
curve to it."
Jill M. Horn, a real estate manager who lives in
Manhattan, said that after divorcing in 2001 she
joined about five paid dating sites. E-mail
begat more e-mail. There were personality tests
and phone calls.
"It's a lot of effort, and it's really no
different from the people you meet in the
offline world," she said. "I'm becoming
disenchanted. I've got people contacting me from
North Carolina and New Mexico, and that's not
going to work."
"The argument is that technology is supposed to
make your life easier, but that's not
necessarily the case," she added.
Rosie Koul is an information technology
specialist for the automobile industry who lives
in a suburb of Detroit. Now 34, she divorced
three years ago and immediately turned to online
options like Kiss.com, as many of her single
friends had done.
An expert in marketing data, Ms. Koul kept
meticulous records of her online activities.
Last year, in one nine-week period, her profile
was browsed 4,212 times, mostly during the first
four weeks after it was posted. At one point,
she said she did fall in love with a man online,
or at least his profile. In print, he was clever
and engaging. She laughed out loud as his witty
e-mail. Finally, they agreed to speak on the
phone.
Nothing.
"I don't know what happened in the exchange, but
he was boring," she said glumly. "I even went
back to the e-mails to make sure I was talking
to the right guy."
"Having been a marketer, there's a point of
diminishing returns," Ms. Koul added. "Do I want
to spend all these hours at my PC or out having
fun and meeting people?"
Lately, she has turned to a service based in
nearby Royal Oak, Mich., called Table for Eight,
which organizes intimate dinners of four women
and four men, about 70 percent of whom have had
their flings with online services, said Regina
Stocco, the company's president.
While most women interviewed complained that too
many men just "window shop" online and are
unwilling to consider any but the prettiest
faces, Zev Guttman, 28, a mortgage banker in
Monsey, N.Y., said it was men who are at a
disadvantage online: it is still typically the
man who has to make the first move, and it is
still the woman who gets to pick and choose.
As a result, he said, he either had to lie
about, say, the fact that he is divorced or
face an empty mailbox every day. "If I write
that I'm divorced, I don't have a chance of
hooking up," he said. "If I write that I'm
single, they're not interested because they
think I lied to them" once they discover the
truth.
"I'm just going to go back to matchmaking, or
friends," he said.
For every Zev Guttman who lets his screen go
dark, another lovelorn hopeful will undoubtedly
rise in his place. Bill Tancer, a researcher at
the Redwood City, Calif., office of Hitwise,
said a lot of the industry's growth will come
from groups arriving late to the online singles
scene, like the elderly.
And technology being technology, online dating
continues to morph. Stuck in line at the post
office? You can now pass the time hunting for a
life partner, or at least a quick hookup, on
your cellphone, using Match.com's mobile
service. The True online service screens for
both felons and cads through a partnership with
Rapsheets, which reviews public records to
verify that people claiming to be single in
their profiles actually are. Yahoo Personals
offers the opportunity to include a 30-second
video clip in profiles as an opening line.
Hey, it's almost like meeting someone.
In a sense, the fate of online dating is
probably a bit like that of singles bars. There
are still singles, and there are still singles
in bars. But the "singles bar" that caused such
a frisson became a relic of the "Looking for Mr.
Goodbar" 1970's. It became ordinary.
That is probably one reason that online dating
seems to have lost its buzz among its own
Generation 1.0. "In the last five years, it's
become so mainstream," said Sherrie Schneider,
an author of "The Rules for Online Dating"
(Pocket Books, 2002), who remains a great
champion of the practice. "It's your boss. It's
your co-worker. Every single woman in my
neighborhood is on Match.com. It's like brushing
your teeth."
And sometimes it's just as exciting.
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