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wired flesh
This page considers internet dating or match-making services.
It covers -
 introduction
Online matchmaking services predate the web, with bulletin
boards on networks such as Compuserve and AOL featuring
lonely hearts advertisements modelled on those found in
newspapers from at least the 1760s and some entrepreneurs
promoting electronic profiling services in the epoch before
the browser. Internet dating services took off from 1993,
with around 2,500 web-based services in existence by mid
1999.
Typically, services are run on a commercial basis (with
revenue from subscription fees and advertising). Participants
are able to publish a profile and view the profiles of
other participants. A profile generally features a profile
name - offering the participant with some anonymity -
along with information about defining characteristics
(age, height, weight, sexual preference, musical taste,
location and so forth) and a service-specific email address.
Searching of profiles (particularly searching that embraces
several characteristics) and contact with the owner of
another profile is generally dependent on online payment
of a subscription fee.
Most services feature collective chat
rooms and often have facilities for more intimate one
to one chat. Many also allow participants to post photographs.
Publishing and/or accessing multiple images or those of
an adult nature often involves payment of the subscription
fee or a charge for 'premium' services. Some allow audio
and video content, although that is largely of interest
to participants with a broadband
connection.
Some services are essentially passive: participants publish
their advertisements and are found through mechanical
searching by other participants on the basis of location
(eg all profiles in Canberra or Los Angeles) or newness.
Others offer active searching, with the subscriber for
example able to search for all gay divorced Caucasians
with blue eyes, blond hair, aged between 30 and 40, and
with a taste for Maria Callas, leather and pasta.
Some have sought differentiation from competitors by emphasising
automated matching that is based on psychological modelling
of varying degrees of sophistication (from Myers-Briggs
upwards), leveraging profiles that are input by participants
over a period of 45 to 60 minutes rather than five minutes.
Others might be regarded by jaundiced observers as emphasising
packaging. DoubleSign.com specialises in "astrological
matchmaking, including both Western and Chinese astrology".
US service Panspective announced
the
launch of Your Zona, a personality matching system.
The Zona test is one of the few personality tests based
on a three-dimensional integral model. This three dimensional
model assesses static personality traits as well as
personal traits that are more fluid, such as evolution
of consciousness. Two dimensional models, such as Jung,
Myers-Briggs, Freud, Enneagrams and Astrology measure
only static traits.
The Your Zona system separates personalities into nine
zonas, relating to objects found in nature. The nine
zonas are: Coral, Moon, Pearl, Quartz, Silver, Sun,
Topaz, Water and Wind. Each zona consists of five z-factors,
defined from 1 to 5. Once someone learns their zona
the system recommends the most compatible zonas in the
areas of romance, personal growth and professional partnerships.
The Zona test is comprised of 26 questions and should
take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. The test
is free and available online at www.yourzona.com. Once
users take the test and obtain their zonas and compatibility
criteria, the website also offers additional tools to
help locate other compatible zonas in their local area.
The Your Zona system intends to become the de facto
personality classification and matching system worldwide.
"What's your zona?" may soon be the most commonly
overheard question at dinner parties, health clubs and
singles bars.
We
haven't encountered the Topaz or Water zonas; obviously
we don't move in the right circles, astrological or otherwise.
meatmarket.com?
Online services initially shared the stigma attached to
newspaper lonely hearts or 'personals' advertisements
and offline introduction services, traditionally beset
by criticisms regarding dubious billing practices and
underwhelming performance.
That stigma appears to have diminished with normalisation
of the web in North America, Australia and New Zealand
from 1997 onwards. Digital dating was seen as hip and
- perhaps a reflection of what David Rieff characterised
as The Lonely Crowd - was seen as legitimate
a way of identifying and screening a potential partner
as using a grandmother, relying on friends, visiting a
bar, a coffee shop or a sauna. The 2001 Love Online:
A Report on Digital Dating in Canada (PDF)
by Robert Brym & Rhonda Lenton suggested that participants
used services because they
- created
opportunities for meeting people
- offered
"privacy and confidentiality"
- were
more convenient, especially to the 'time-poor'.
A 2002 IPSOS-Reid survey in North America claimed
that 44% of respondents considered that people had a better
chance of finding a partner online than in a singles bar
(with 8% rating online services as equal to bars); 32%
thought that an online relationship was likely to be more
successful than one initiated in a singles bar. Tellingly,
only 27% would however recommend online dating to their
friends.
By mid 2003 up to 37 million people in North America were
supposedly using online dating services each month, whether
in search of true love and devotion or merely for gawking
and flirting. That figure is probably subject to significant
double-counting (and Brym & Lenton more modestly suggest
that a mere 1.2 million Canadians have visited an online
dating site) but suggests an interest that is more than
ephemeral, even when one discounts hype that
The
Internet online dating industry has doubled each twelve
months for the past 3 years [ie to mid-2003] and is
expected to remain at this growth level for the foreseeable
future.
Match.com
and Friendfinder.com for example boast around two million
and six million subscribers respectively; other services
claim over a million subscribers. Love.com claims 550,000
personal ads, with 850,000 members on AmericanSingles.com.
A 2002 article in Salon, answering "why
have people begun peddling themselves so shamelessly online?",
suggested
that
the
anonymity of the medium, the prevalence of blogs, online
photo galleries and personal Web sites, and the comfort
most of us feel in corresponding entirely through e-mail
have combined to make online dating a perfectly acceptable
means of meeting new people.
Demand creates supply. When you think for a minute about
how inefficient and circuitous the traditional delivery
system for meeting potential lovers is, it's not hard
to see how we landed here. When your options are limited
to getting set up by your friends, going out to parties
or going to smoky bars in the hopes of getting drunk
enough to knock over someone with a pulse, it's clear
why shopping for a mate online has been embraced by
mainstream America.
Studies
suggest that participation isn't restricted to the under
25 year cohort, although under-35 participants appear
to be more active and are more likely to have met other
participants face to face.
As we've suggested elsewhere on this site, anonymity has
its discontents. The virtual nature of services encourages
participants to actively manage - or manipulate - their
online personas: adding/shaving years, kilos, income,
status, qualifications, existing relationships. Anecdotal
accounts suggest that there's some degree of gender bending
and role playing. The Brym & Lenton study, arguably
underreporting problems, suggests that around 25% of participants
have massaged their personas.
Journalist Mark Simpson sniffed in the Guardian,
after a UK government minister was unfortunate enough
to be spotted on gaydar.com, that
The
evil of internet cruising - and the reason why it will
become irresistibly, devastatingly mainstream - is precisely
its efficiency. IT plus a wired world means lust can
be much more productive, much more accurate, much more
all-consuming, and much more pointless. Internet cruising
allows you to pursue endlessly and ever more obsessively
your ultimate "type". Like an especially well-organised,
if unfriendly, Roman orgy, there are chat rooms for
every (legal) fetish and taste. Gaydar members can search
the database on height, age, hirsuteness, ethnicity,
hair colour, pec-size and sex role (passive, active,
or variable). There isn't a box to check for "twinkly
eyes" or "great sense of humour".
For
that, presumably, there's email or chat or even - dare
we say it - F2F.
economics
and statistics
As with the online adult
content industry, authoritative statistics about the
shape and size of the online dating industry are unavailable
and many claims should be regarded with caution.
It's common to see promotional statements that particular
services have several hundred thousand - or even million
- profiles and participants. It's less clear whether many
of those profiles are active, whether many of the participants
share a common identity (ie the one person using several
names) and whether many of the profiles are those of commercial
subscribers.
Small-scale polling conducted by Caslon Analytics in 2003
appears to substantiate suggestions, based on comparison
of profiles on some general and specialist sites, that
many individuals are present on several services - often
using the same name and details. The extent of churn from
one service to another and within services (eg establishment
of a new profile in lieu of a 'dear john' message) is
unclear.
Independent measures of 'success' are not available on
an industry-wide basis. It is unclear whether 'premium'
search facilities and in-depth profile entry produces
better results than those from 'profile-lite'. Brym &
Lenton suggest that 3% of their online daters who met
face to face married someone encountered online, 63% engaged
in sexual activity and 60% formed "at least one long-term
friendship". One Indian service claims 25,000 marriages
out of 800,000 subscriptions. An accurate global or national
figure is impossible to determine.
Figures about turnover and profitability are uncertain.
Many estimates and projections vary widely. That's perhaps
not too surprising as the operators of most services are
unlisted and thus exempt from the discipline of public
disclosure to stock exchanges and securities regulators
of information about investment, costs, revenue and profits.
Subscription fees appear to range from around US$7.95
to US$34.95 a month.
One Jupiter estimate was that the EU market was 'worth'
US$45 million in 2000, forecast to increase to US$132
million in 2007. A separate estimate put the US industry
as having US$72 million revenue in 2001, growing to US$302
million in 2002. It is unclear how much of that turnover
was attributable to subscription fees and how much to
advertising. US researcher Mindbranch suggested in 2002
that the global industry involved revenue of US$917 million,
inconsistent with estimates from the Online Publishers
Association in 2001 that the global market for all "paid
content" was a mere US$675 million.
Another report claimed that the UK online dating industry
amounted to £600m in 2003, with MarketData Enterprises
projected that the global figure for 2003 would be US$1.1
billion. Jupiter had suggested that only 2% of online
adults would pay for personals and dating services. The
New York Times suggested in November 2003 that
US spending on dating sites and online personal ads in
the first half of the year was US$214 million.
The number of services, location and participant demographics
are also uncertain. Globally the number of services may
have increased by four or five times since 1999. However,
there are indications that the industry is volatile, with
- the
closure of existing services keeping pace with establishment
of new services
- much
growth occurring outside North America
- most
traffic continuing to accrue to the major services
- major
services seeking to regionalise and sectoralise while
leveraging existing hardware and software
As
dot-coms, how much are the services worth? Only a few
indicators are available. Match.com was acquired by Ticketmaster
CitySearch for US$50 million in 1999 during the dot-com
boom. In 2002 its revenue
was around US$125.2 million (up 154% on the previous year)
with profits of US$36.1 million, up from $2.7 million.
Competitor MatchNet claimed 14.78 million "users"
in mid-2003, up from 7.84 million in 2002, with forecast
revenue of US$40 million and market capitalisation of
US$42 million.
guides
for the lovelorn
Wired Not Weird (New York: Synergetic 2001) by Christy
Clement & Kay McLean asks
Why
sit at home alone when you can find interesting and
available men waiting to meet you?
It
is an example of a minor genre - often published by appropriately
minor presses (some which appear to be restricted to the
works of the particular author) - concerned with tips
on meeting and retaining Mr/Ms Right online ... a rose-coloured
version of the One Minute Internet Manager and
descendant of a long line of thin tomes on how to win
the person of your dreams.
Other guides for the digitally lovelorn include The
Rules for Online Dating : Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right
in Cyberspace (New York: Pocket Books 2001) by Ellen
Fein, Cast Your Net: A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding
Your Soulmate on the Internet (Boston: Harvard Common
Press 2001) by Eric Fagan, Cyberflirt: How to Attract
Anyone, Anywhere on the World Wide Web (New York:
Plume 1999) by Susan Rabin & Barbara Lagowski, Putting
Your Heart Online (New York: Variable Symbols 2001)
by Nancy Capulet, Virtual Foreplay: Making Your Online
Relationship a Real-Life Success (New York: Hunter
House 2001) by Eve Hogan, Men
Are from Cyberspace: The Single Women's Guide to Flirting,
Dating & Finding Love On-Line (New York: St Martins
2003) by Lisa Skriloff & Jodie Gould, Online
Dating Survival Guide (New York: E Solutions 2000)
by Karen Adams & Kate Crenshaw, Internet Dating:
Tips, Tricks & Tactics (Roman Griffen 2003) by
Roman Griffen, Complete Idiot's Guide to Online Dating
and Relating (New York: Alpha 1999) by Joe Schwartz
and Meeting, Mating & Cheating: Sex, Love, and
the New World of Online Dating (New York: Reuters
2003) by Andrea Orr.
A cautionary note is struck by Michele White's 'On the
Internet, Everybody Worries that You're a Dog: The Gender
Expectations & Beauty Ideals of Online Personals and
Text-Based Chat', a paper in Readings in Gender Communication
(Belmont: Wadsworth 2003) edited by Mary Rose Williams
& Phil Backlund.
agents,
homepages and blogs
The unlovely advice
Attract Women With Your Online Personal Ad (on
a page littered with treats such as promises to "Relieve
hemorrhoid pain fast") claimed that
For
every 10 men who post a personal ad on a dating site,
only 3 get a response. In essence, only 30% of men will
get a response, while the other 70% stay home alone
snapping their radish. Why is the response rate so low?
Because most personal ads posted by men are boring,
redundant, and worse yet, plagued with grammatical errors.
Oh
dear, split infinitives and misplaced semi-colons as the
cause of achy breaky heart syndrome. In
practice printed tips about smiling, wearing clean socks
and carrying roses (or capsicum spray) don't appear sufficient
for some readers, who've instead turned to commercial
services that will lovingly craft the requisite online
profile and even handle initial email exchanges to the
inamorata.
These include solvedating.com, findtherightguyonline.com,
e-cyrano.com, cyberdatingguru.com and profiledoctor.com.
There's been surprisingly little academic attention to
the role of personal home pages and blogs
in underpinning online romance, given that web logs arguably
offer a fuller picture of the author than standard matchmaking
service profiles and short email or IM exchanges.
the
dark side
Much of the promotional information about dating services
is relentlessly upbeat. Lavalife for example burbles
Lavalife
is a new brand...a new community...a new world...a new
vision for single life. Lavalife is solely dedicated
to enhancing the lives of singles.
More specifically, Lavalife offers singles anytime,
anywhere connections that make single life a positive,
fulfilling and self-esteem building experience through
relationship opportunities, social interaction and a
like minded community of ideas and information.
Panspective
("founded on the first day of the new millennium")
is
dedicated to producing products that redefine personal
and interpersonal communications on a global scale.
It's
perhaps inevitable that some observers have noted use
of the net for a nastier form of lonely hearts interaction
- online mail order brides and trafficking in women or
minors.
An overview of some issues is provided in the sobering
US report to Congress on International Matchmaking
Organisations (PDF).
There's a less nuanced view in papers by Donna Hughes
- whose claims are noted in the Censorship
Guide on this site - on Use of New Communications
and Information Technologies for Exploitation of Women
and Children (PDF)
and Welcome to the Rape Camp": Trafficking, Prostitution
& the Internet in Cambodia (PDF).
They are complemented in Riitta Vartti's 2001 paper
German Matchmaking Websites: Online Trafficking in
Women? A perspective is provided by Dennis Altman's
Global Sex (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2001).
Attention is also turning to identity
theft, cyberstalking and other abuses. One example
is the 2003 case
of Carafano v Metrosplash.com, in which a public
figure's persona was misappropriated on Matchmaker.com.
Consistent with a body of rulings under the CDA, the US
court held that the dating service was immune from third
party liability as an "interactive service provider".
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