Even at sex sites you can't skip the dating

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece today about the slower growth rates of online dating sites and the rising growth rates of online sex-dating sites.

"Adult" dating sites flourish as people seek sex over love

Amid sluggish growth for dating Web sites, a different kind of matchmaking service is thriving online: so-called adult dating sites that dispense with courtship and urge members to head straight for the bedroom.

With names like AdultFriendFinder.com, SexSearch.com and IWantU.com, adult dating sites purport to help users find one-night stands, swinger parties and other sexual escapades. AdultFriendFinder, the most popular of the sites, draws 10.1 million unique visitors a month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That's twice the traffic of Match.com and Yahoo Personals, Nielsen says.

Anyone with a grain of sense knows that online dating sites would have to slow way down in terms of growth. People either find mates and stop dating, don't find mates and stop dating, or get tired of one site and move on to another. Maybe in the next couple of years we'll see a gigantic boom in online parenting sites.

As for the sex sites, read the article closely and find that the men who actually find sex through these services are the men willing to develop relationships with women. That doesn't necessarily mean marriage-track monogamy, but being willing to chat a little, flirt, seduce, and so on.

The article quotes one woman describing how young men ruin their chances before anything even begins:

(They) come in and act like it's a sexual fast-food service … They think they can just walk in, and order up the women of their choice at two or three a.m., and say, 'Can you pick up a pizza and six-pack of beer on the way, too?'

It was exactly the same in IRC, and it's the same in every online adult community I've ever participated in.

When will people get a clue?