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Maybe ités the lingerie models trolling for dates.
Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love wonét look 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.é We will be charmed, but helpless to point out that the approach isnét very pragmatic. After all, how likely is it that the book of your dreams will just fall off the shelf and into your arms?
Most of us who have found our soul mates relied on the randomness of the bar scene or the party circuit or life in general. This serendipity is culturally important — we have a collective investment in the idea that love is a chance event, and often it is. But serendipity is the hallmark of inefficient markets, and the marketplace of love, like it or not, is becoming more efficient.
TODAY, ONE IN FIVE SINGLES LOOKS FOR LOVE ON THE WEB
Ités happened before: Monster and HotJobs rationalized the labor markets; eBay streamlined the collector markets. Online personals — which fundamentally sell people access to one another — are just now generating the kind of growth metrics witnessed at the height of the dotcom frenzy. Dating and mating will never be the same.
I stumbled upon the online dating phenomenon after cofounding Nerve.com — a literary magazine with a personals section that became, almost by accident, a happening singles scene. The service now doubles in size every five months; a million people have signed on in the past year and a half alone. And ités not just my company. According to Jupiter Media Metrix, between November 2001 and April 2002, the online personals market grew 29 percent to 18.6 million users — a whopping 20 percent of the singles population.
More interesting and perhaps more telling than the growth rate is whoés driving it. The people signing up at Nerve are, by and large, young, overeducated professionals. Newly minted doctors, lawyers, journalists, and media executives are flocking to these systems, and recently we saw an ad from our first Victoriaés Secret model (she actually wrote,-If you wear J.Crew, donét bother to contact meé). Whereas the short format of print lent itself to desperate, transactional relationships (DJM SEEKS BI-CURIOUS SWF), the endless space afforded online personals is perfect for the legions of smarties who cruise there. They can show off their fancy language skills and quickly cut through a broad pool with Boolean searches. After all, things are left to chance when people donét have the tools to find what they are looking for.
WOMEN PAY TO CONTACT MEN AS OFTEN AS THE REVERSE
But most fascinating are the new courtship patterns the medium is creating. Eighteen months ago, traffic in our system was strongest on weekdays, with daily peaks at lunch and between 5 and 6 pm; now it surges on Thursdays and Fridays, with hits climbing throughout the day to a first peak at around 5:30 pm, followed by a second between 11 and midnight. What we are seeing is that browsing e-personals is becoming a social activity in itself. Furthermore, women pay to contact men as often as the reverse, which is quite different from behavior in, for example, telephone-based dating systems. Ités more evidence that the virtual dating world (like the more traditional bar, nightclub, and party) is a social environment — and not just the means to an end.
In 20 years weéll look back fondly on this era as the gilded age of 21st-century dating, a computer-enabled love-letter renaissance. Alexander Graham Bell certainly meant the lovers no harm, but his invention has taken a toll on romance. By the same token, ités safe to assume that the federal government had no romantic agenda when it launched the Arpanet, the Internetés precursor. At this point in their short history, online personals are long on wit and charm, the breeding ground for a reinvigorated epistolary tradition. For now, the literate have the run of the place.
So get in there while you can, because early next year, our instant-messaging client will have video capability. Technology marches on, thank goodness. But live video is likely to make the online dynamic a little more like the offline one, with cheerleaders and jocks reascendant.
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