Love in cyberspace

After getting the hang of shopping and job-hunting online, people are now starting to seek out romance and love over the Internet. Online dating in the United States, in fact, has reached the point of becoming a form of lifestyle that could spawn a $1.14-billion dating-service industry by 2004.

According to the Online Publishers Association, dating sites joined the ranks of entertainment and business sites as the top categories for content spending in 2002. Market researcher Marketdata Enterprises Inc. in Tampa, Florida, pegs the dating-service industry’s revenues last year at $917 million, with personal sites getting the biggest share at $304 million.

The rising popularity of point-and-click romance is driven by some 16.3 million people all over the world – mostly men, at 10.2 million – who were found to have visited personals and dating sites last year based on a study done by Jupiter Media Research. So what used to be regarded as something for losers is now becoming an acceptable way of meeting people or filtering for potential mates. Online dating sites usually target the trendy, starting at age 19 and preferably women based on the premise that if you get the women, the men will come.

This month, the purveyors of online love should see this growth continuing as love spills over to cyberspace on Valentine’s Day. Among the most popular dating or personal sites are Yahoo Personals, Udate.com, Match.com, Matchmaker.com and Lavalife.com.

In the Philippines, there is Match.ph (www.match.ph), which claims to be the first singles and dating site in the country created two years ago. Other than this, there doesn’t seem to be too many local dating sites around, which could be an indication of a still small market for online dating here. Perhaps, it will take off a bit faster when local users increase their level of confidence over its safety and are no longer intimidated by the notion that it is only for the desperate.

But in First World countries like the US, 23 percent of Internet users, or about 36 million, are expected to click on personal sites this year, said John La Rosa, author of the Marketdata study. Subscribers to Lavalife (5.5 million), Yahoo Personals (650,000) or Match.com (653,000), of course, cover a vast geographic and demographic scope so it’s likely that a good number of Filipinos are among them.

Meanwhile, improved technology is also driving the growth of dating products on the Net to make them more fun and interactive. For example, some are incorporating voice and moving pictures into user profiles. Yahoo Personals recently rolled out a technology that allows subscribers paying $25 a month, to record a 30-second voice and video message on their profiles. Adding more technology function improves the usability and entertainment value of the dating site, and helps subscribers decide whether they want to proceed to the next step: face-to-face encounter or "F2F" in chatroom lingo.

But online dating is not for everyone, especially those who still prefer old-fashioned love letters to e-mail. But to send an e-mail is so easy and immediate that it is definitely the medium of choice now, romantic or not. After all, for some a little spontaneity is good. Meanwhile, e-mail traffic is also expected to surge in the two weeks surrounding Valentine’s Day as love spreads not only in the air but also all over cyberspace.