Dear readers, it falls to me on St. Valentines Day, to take you on a brief tour through the multi-billion dollar industry of online dating. Worth two billion dollars in 2012 alone, It’s an odd business.
Some sites are free, and rely on advertising; some sites require a monthly subscription; some are “fremium”, and allow basic access for nothing, with users paying for extra features. One universal feature, regardless of business model to make money, is that the websites require you to keep visiting the site – so to make money, they need you to fail to find love right away. Equally, too much failure, and you’ll leave the site. A dating website needs to strike a balance between sending you on good dates – but not the best dates. There’s a massive tension between what works for the users, and what works for the shareholders.
Of course, there are other ways to make money. Some sites have taken to selling user profiles – American women are the most valuable, with 1,000 selling for $35; Australian men are among the least valuable, with 70,000 going for a mere $95. The profiles are the valuable thing. The way the sites work is that you create a profile, and then browse the profiles for other users, as selected by an algorithm. Of course, this leads to a key question – would you have picked any of the people you’ve fallen in love with from a dating profile? Would a computer match the two of you, even though you’re in love now? It will be interesting to look back in 20 years and see the divorce rates for those matched by computers, as compared to those who met the old-fashioned way. There’s no real data thus far to suggest a computer is better at knowing what you like than you are, but for a generation of singles under 30, coming out of long term relationships that haven’t worked, it’s easy to decide to give it a shot, at least.
It’s a wide-open market. Barriers to entry are low for industry operators; all you need to become a dating site entrepreneur is a domain name, web hosting and a computer. Once you’ve set up the website, you can sit back and let the algorithms that match people do the work. Most firms run a plethora of sites – just have a look down the menu of different kinds of dating available through this firm. Competition is fierce, though, and underhand tactics are common. By their nature, all the technology has to be open and accessible online; sites are often copied wholesale by competitors. Site owners have to get more and more devious to stay ahead.
For example, one British dating site was caught out paying staff to pose as daters. This team of so-called “pseudos” were paid to string along customers for as long as possible. Each pseudo would be running as many as 15 different personalities: old and young, male and female. They would use these fake profiles to send flirty messages to innocent users – as many as 400 messages an hour were sent by the team. Professional flirting doesn’t sound like bad work if you can get it, but presumably it was a horrible betrayal for most of the daters who were inveigled by these means.
Of course, being devious isn’t just limited to the site owners: plenty of daters are deceptive in their own right. As well as the normal internet plague of people running money-making scams, and, of course, men claiming they are six foot tall, there is a deception unique to online dating – a process known as “Catfishing”. Taking its name from a fishing practice, whereby cod being shipped across the Pacific would be kept fresh by the addition of catfish to the hold, online dating catfishing is a where an individual will run a fake profiles for their own amusement, using pictures culled from social media sites to pose as beautiful women or handsome men. Originally the subject of a 2010 documentary, the practice is common – here’s a fantastically written up example from the UK, where five women tell of their experiences of being “catfished” by the same scammer. Indeed, the process has become so common that detective agencies have begun to offer services verifying the identity of online dates.
Even if the person you’re speaking to is real, they often aren’t particularly pleasant – here’s a wonderful example of the sorts of odd people online, in which the man starts with charming messages, and then slowly expands into an ever maddening spiral of lies and threats. Of course, this isn’t a one off, and countless blogs exist detailing the odd behavior of people on online dating – from women who bite on the first date, to the sorts of messages Asian girls receive from men who’s entire understanding of Asian culture comes from watching Full Metal Jacket.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom; indeed, there are a huge number of success stories, both on the business side and the personal side. Billions of dollars have been made, and tens of thousands of weddings have occurred. Giants like Match, E-Harmony and My Single Friend dominate the market, but according to analysts there are as many as 4,000 dating sites active all over the world. All life is there – everything from farmer dating website Muddy Matches, Infidelity dating site Ashley Madison – even extraordinary niches like Sea Captain dating & Ayn Rand Objectivist dating. As a veteran of quite a few online dates, I can confirm that at its best, it is great fun.
So, online dating is a huge industry, a huge social change and it’s absolutely here to stay. So, if you’re home alone on Valentines Day this evening, log on to a dating site, and try to find your special someone. As ever, just be careful out there.
