Dating sites see a bright future amid competition - International Herald Tribune

PARIS: Love, Internet-style, is blooming, and that means online dating sites are trying harder than ever to win your heart. But have they met their match in social-networking sites?

Worldwide, 97 million people visited Web sites devoted to matchmaking in December, according to figures from ComScore. That number is a 10 percent drop from a year earlier, perhaps a sign that free sites like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and others - where socializing, rather than romance, is the stated priority - are having an impact.

The global leader in Internet dating sites, Match.com, is renewing its vows to stay competitive in places where it is already the front-runner, like Japan and the United States, and in individual markets where it lags, like France and Germany.

Match.com operates in 18 languages in 37 markets and says that each year it links up 500,000 people who are looking for lasting relationships. "It's a big, fast-growing, profitable business," Thomas Enraght-Moony, chief executive of Match.com, said on a recent visit to Paris.

And he thinks it has a vibrant future around the world, despite the competition. "It's a highly underpenetrated market," Enraght-Moony said. "The U.S. has 92 million single people, and only 3 million now pay for an online dating service - and the U.S. is the most advanced market. In Japan, it's one-tenth of that penetration." So there is room to grow.

The top four personal-ad rivals globally are relatively neck and neck, with MSN Dating & Personals just behind Match.com and just ahead of Yahoo Personals and the Paris-based dating site Meetic in terms of the number of unique visitors, according to ComScore.

But when it comes to the average time spent on the site and number of Web pages viewed, Meetic outperforms all of the top five.

That's one reason Match.com has a unique offer in France: It is free for women, a brave step for a company that gets 95 percent of its revenue from subscriptions.

"We've tried it in other markets, and for some reason it has been uniquely effective in France," Enraght-Moony said.

As a result of the offer, 55 percent of the 140,000 new users who sign up at Match.com in France each month are women, compared with 40 percent in most other markets, said Arnaud Jonglez, Match.com's director in Paris.

"Typically," Enraght-Moony said, "the day you open, it's 90 percent men, so you have to build a site that attracts women."

Whether social-networking sites hurt business for dating services in the long run is yet to be known. But Enraght-Moony says he believes that they are no threat for now.

"When we go back and talk to our customers, they say the social network is a great extension of people they already know," he said. "They tell us, 'What I want to do is meet people that I don't know.' "

In fact, Match.com ads on MySpace drive traffic to the matchmaker and "is our fastest-growing source of new customers," he said. In Britain and the United States, Match.com is also testing an online dating application that can be used on Facebook, called Little Black Book.

In France, Match.com will try a new approach to romance, introducing in the next couple of weeks a feature called Alchimie, a supplementary chemistry-inspired matchmaking questionnaire.

Designed with a biological anthropologist who has studied the brain chemistry of love, the feature operates now in the United States under a separate brand owned by IAC/InterActive, the same company that owns Match.com, Ask.com and Ticketmaster, among many other Internet brands.

True confession time: In researching this topic in its very early days - like 1994, when Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL were the equivalents of Match.com and Meetic - I answered an online personal ad just for kicks. We began an e-mail correspondence, eventually met In Real Life, and dated for the next four years.

As Enraght-Moony put it, making successful matches is not necessarily losing customers "but gaining brand advocates."