United States residents spent $469.5 million on online personals dating sites in 2004, and over $500 million in 2005, the largest segment of “paid content” on the web other than “adult content”, according to a study conducted by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and comScore Networks.
At the end of November 2004, there were 844 lifestyle and personals dating sites, a 38 percent increase since the start of the year, according to Hitwise Inc. However, market share was increasingly being dominated by several large commercial services, including Yahoo! Personals, Match.com, and eHarmony. By 2007, many prominent studies show that Baby Boomer interest in online dating had soared.
In 2002, a Wired magazine article forecast that, "Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love without looking for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because 'the right books are found only by accident.' Serendipity is the hallmark of inefficient markets, and the marketplace of love, like it or not, is becoming more efficient".
Most recently, it has become common for online dating websites to provide webcam chats between members. In addition, as the online personals population becomes larger, dating sites like LuckyLovers.net with specific demographics like Russian personals are becoming more popular as a way to narrow the pool of potential matches.
The most successful niche sites pair people by race, sexual orientation or religion. The 20 most popular dating sites this year as ranked by Hitwise include JDate (for Jewish singles), Christian Mingle and Christian Cafe, Manhunt (for gay men), Love From India, Black Christian People Meet, Amigos (for Latino singles), Asian People Meet, Shaadi (for Indian singles), LuckyLovers (for Russian Singles) In March 2008, the top overall sites held 7% less market share than they did one year ago while the top sites from the top five major niche dating categories made considerable gains
One of the "hottest trends in online dating" is the babyboomers on the top dating sites. Around 30% of America's 80 million babyboomers are single.
Since 2003, several free personals sites, operating on ad based-revenue rather than monthly subscriptions, have appeared and become increasingly popular.
Especially popular in Eastern Europe, some sites offer full access to messaging and profiles, but provide additional services for pay, such as bumping profiles up to the top of the list, removing advertisements, making paying users' profiles appear several times in different places in the search results, and giving paying users a more advanced search engine to work with (in one real example, free users may only search for persons of specified age, gender, orientation, and city, while subscribers may search for any and all parameters listed in profiles, such as height, weight, interests, etc.). Also, this model generally allows users to switch between free and paying status at will and without having to do anything, simply providing advanced features for a set period of time whenever the according payment is received. Ease of payment is also generally higher, with such sites accepting a variety of online currencies, letting users charge the payment to their cellular phones, etc. Such sites earn revenue from a mix of advertising and sale of additional options.
