Facing slumping growth and heavy competition, online-dating sites are adopting a new strategy in their quest for the lovelorn: They're becoming user-friendly.
Want to banish forever the face of that guy who's totally wrong for you? For the first time, Match.com is letting members permanently block other people's ads. Seeking someone who's a "giver," a "rebel" or an "observer"? Yahoo Personals now lets you search for them. Dying to know if Ms. Right is a philanderer or a felon? True will run a background check.
As some sites go tech-happy, others are wooing specialized audiences -- including the fat, the devout and the right-here-right-now crowd -- in an effort to swipe a chunk of the market from the big boys.
There's plenty at stake in the matchmaker world. Online-dating sites raked in $473 million from American customers in 2004, according to JupiterResearch, which expects revenue to reach $516 million this year.
That would be enough to make many companies happy, but not in the internet personals business, where double- or triple-digit growth has been the norm. To make matters worse, Hitwise reported last week that online-dating sites accounted for fewer than 1 in 100 internet visits, a drop of 15 percent since this time last year.
At the same time, it's becoming more expensive for dating sites to advertise online and woo enough new customers to create a viable site, said Mark Brooks, an industry consultant who blogs about the business. "We're going through the big squeeze," he said, one in which consolidation looms and innovation is key to survival.
Indeed, the old approach to online personal ads -- slap a bunch of photos online, throw in a crude search engine -- is rapidly becoming as retro as SWMs seeking love in the newspaper classifieds.
Many sites offer "compatibility matching," promising that complicated algorithms will find someone whose personality complements yours. Curious about who's intrigued by you? Match.com, which Hitwise says is the second-most-popular dating site after Yahoo Personals, has a kind of lurker uncloaker: It allows you to see who checks out your ad.
On the communications front, sites like Yahoo Personals now allow users to send canned responses to wannabe Romeos, including polite ways of saying "get lost," like, "Thanks, but I'm taking a break from dating for a while." Personal-ad mailboxes have become sophisticated, too: Modern versions of the age-old little black book, they allow serial daters to better keep track of who's who.
And there are more tools than ever for users with a common online-dating complaint: They're tired of seeing or hearing from the same old losers. True, for one, allows so-called "bidirectional blocking": Users can block other members forever and decide who can peruse their own ads. "Basically," said True chief psychologist Jim Houran, "you're really empowering clients."
Big deal, sniffs Nate Elliott, an analyst with JupiterResearch. The bells and whistles "don't really matter to customers," he said. "If you give them a large number of photos and profiles, they're happy. Beyond that, it's all incremental."
Not every also-ran dating site has the money to offer fancy technology gimmicks. But they still need to make themselves stand out. "A few years ago, there were five to six meaningful players," Elliott said. "Now there's two to three, and a lot of little guys trying to make noise."
That's where niche marketing comes in, giving birth to sites like BlackPeopleMeet.com, Christian Mingle and BBWHarmony (BBW stands for "big beautiful women"), along with "adult" sites for the instant-gratification crowd. The quickie-oriented sites are growing rapidly, but "they've flown under the radar," said Brooks.
Other, smaller sites are trying to find the perfect gimmick through technology (such as cell phones) or non-tech strategies (like holding singles parties). Video has been slow to catch on, perhaps because it's harder to manipulate a video clip -- adding a more attractive hairline, perhaps -- than a Photoshop-vulnerable head shot.
Some observers like JupiterResearch's Elliott are skeptical that video will ever go anywhere. But Mark Thompson, CEO of weAttract.com, a search-engine developer, thinks short video clips are the future. After all, he said, researchers and authors like Malcolm Gladwell are discovering the power of instant first impressions.
"Jump ahead 10 years, and it will all be video-based," he said. "The technology is certainly there that can make it happen."
Thompson is also calling for more honesty in the online-dating business. According to his company's research, the chances that you'll marry a person suggested by one site -- eHarmony.com -- are one in 500, and it only makes an average of 1.5 recommendations a month. And there's perhaps a 10 percent chance that you'll find a relationship on Match.com in a year.
Dating sites, of course, set up higher expectations. "There's a lot of claims that are made and have absolutely no foundation in reality," Thompson said.
Which sounds a lot like personal ads themselves.
