Online-dating sites have made it easier for people to click with one another. But they still leave something to be desired

FOR the lovelorn, the new year can be an unhappy time, as they cast envious glances in the direction of lovey-dovey couples at the season's parties. For online-dating agencies, it is a golden opportunity, as people who have spent the holidays ruminating over unsatisfactory or non-existent love lives log on in their thousands, hoping to find romance—ideally before February 14th. “The period between New Year's Day and Valentine's Day is our busiest six weeks of the year,” explains Sam Yagan, the boss of OkCupid, a big American dating site.

Once seen as the last resort for a bunch of lonely geeks, online-dating services have gradually shed much of the stigma formerly associated with them. Although they are still popular with tech types—Julian Assange, the mercurial co-founder of WikiLeaks, reportedly once maintained profiles on dating sites under the name “Harry Harrison”—they now attract millions of people from many walks of life. ComScore, a research firm, says Match and Zoosk, two large dating services based in the United States, saw 4.6m and 4.8m unique visitors respectively come to their American sites in November 2010. Meetic, Europe's biggest dating service, also boasts millions of users.

Blowing cyberkisses has become a popular pastime in emerging markets too. In countries and cultures in which arranged marriages are common, sites such as India's Shaadi and BharatMatrimony, which boast many millions of clients, are a big hit with young people who want to influence how their marriage partners are chosen. And a number of sizeable digital matchmakers, including Jiayuan and Zhenai, have risen to prominence in China. Deepak Kamra of Canaan Partners, an American venture-capital firm that has backed several dating services, including Zoosk and BharatMatrimony, estimates that the industry's revenues from membership fees and advertising now amount to $3 billion-4 billion a year.

Searching for that special someone

In addition to broad-based matchmaking sites such as Match and Zoosk, the online-dating world has also spawned thousands of niche ones. Some, such as JDate, which is designed for Jewish lonely hearts, and Ave Maria Singles, which focuses on Catholics, serve specific religious or ethnic niches. Others appeal to rather less conventional interests. Vampire lovers can sink their teeth into the profiles on offer at Vampire Passions, while those obsessed with iPads and iPhones can hunt for their iBeloveds at Cupidtino, a dating site for fans of Apple's products.

The rise of these and other dating sites has been driven by several trends in society. One of these is that people now move around more often for work, distancing themselves from friends and family members who could play matchmakers. Another is that they are living longer, and hence more likely to look for new love later in life. The spread of fast broadband connectivity in many countries has also encouraged people to dabble in online dating.

Academics who have studied the industry believe that it and other forms of electronic communication such as e-mail and social networks are starting to have a significant effect on the ways in which people find love. In a study presented at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in August, Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford University and Reuben Thomas of the City College of New York reviewed data from a survey of more than 3,000 Americans with romantic partners. They concluded that among heterosexual couples who met in 2009, the internet had become the third most common way of making initial contact—behind introductions from friends, but almost on a par with encounters in bars and restaurants.

Yet while looking for love online is no longer seen as an act of desperation, the digital-dating industry still generates plenty of controversy. Its critics charge that sites' claims of matchmaking prowess are often greatly overblown. Mark Thompson, a former executive in the online-dating trade, now an author, believes that television ads showing starry-eyed couples boasting about how they found their perfect match online should carry warnings that such outcomes are hardly typical.

Dating sites have also been accused of failing to take robust enough action to protect vulnerable users from fraudsters and sexual predators. Last year several elderly British women sent money to American soldiers whose profiles they had come across on dating sites, only to discover subsequently that the profiles were bogus. And there have been instances of rapists using dating sites to prey on women.

A megabit on the side

Then there is the fuss over sites such as Illicit Encounters and Ashley Madison, which have sparked an outcry by matching people seeking partners for extramarital affairs. Outraged critics claim such services deliberately promote infidelity to further their commercial ambitions. In America Ashley Madison, which claims to have 8.3m registered members in nine countries, has been decried as “a business built on the back of broken hearts, ruined marriages and damaged families”. In Britain the Sun, a tabloid daily, labelled it a “vile website” when it set up shop in the country last year. Several critics have also accused it of exaggerating its ability to match cheats with one another, chronicling its alleged failings on websites such as ashleymadisonsucks.com.

Few other dating sites have provoked such a public backlash. But some sociologists, such as Millsom Henry-Waring of the University of Melbourne, have given warning that electronic forms of communication in general—and digital-dating services in particular—are gradually changing society's conception of relationships and marriage for the worse by encouraging people to view partners as commodities that can simply be traded in for better versions at the click of a computer mouse.

Dating executives retort that although the industry is not perfect, many of the criticisms levelled at it are unfair. They acknowledge that some clients, who typically spend anything from a few months to a year before finding a soulmate or throwing in the towel, have frustrating experiences on their sites. But they point out that the web still offers important advantages over more traditional routes of finding a mate.

One is its ability to create large pools of potential partners that would be hard to replicate in the real world. This explains why online dating has proven especially popular with, for example, homosexuals. Another is the sheer convenience of being able to trawl through hundreds of profiles without having to leave the comfort of your home. Meeting someone via the web is also safer, they argue, than trying to pick up a date at random in a bar. Users of dating sites are typically encouraged to report suspicious behaviour and some sites employ sophisticated software designed to flag bogus profiles.

Online matchmakers also claim their record of producing successful unions is better than critics give them credit for. For instance, eHarmony, a prominent online-dating service, touts the results of a survey conducted on its behalf by Harris Interactive, a market-research firm, that concludes it was responsible for an average of 542 people getting married every day in America between the start of 2008 and the end of June 2009. EHarmony claims to have accounted for almost 4.8% of all American marriages in that period.

Such studies, coupled with advertising campaigns playing up the possibility of finding love online, have helped the online-dating industry to prosper. Some sites such as OkCupid and Plentyoffish are free to join and make most of their money from advertising. Others, including eHarmony, which presents users with potential partners using algorithms designed to identify compatibility, charge a subscription. The monthly fee for the American version of eHarmony is between $19.95 and $59.95, depending on the length of a subscription.

Not surprisingly, sites that charge for their services and require people to fill in detailed questionnaires argue that they are more likely to attract those who are serious about finding love. But owners of free sites say that is not necessarily so. OkCupid's Mr Yagan argues that the size of the fee that most paid sites charge is not big enough to act as an effective filter. And he claims that his own site has a very effective way of demonstrating a person's seriousness of intent, which involves promoting the profiles of those people who are most active on it.

There has been some speculation that both kinds of business model will be undermined by the rise of free social networks such as Facebook, which make it easy for people to share large amounts of personal information with one another. But Greg Blatt, the former boss of Match and the new chief executive of IAC, a holding company that owns the dating site, says studies conducted by Match show that many people prefer to keep their dating activity separate from socialising with their friends. Zoosk has even cleverly piggybacked on Facebook, enabling its users to import their details from the social network to populate their profiles on Zoosk's fast-growing service.

Dating sites have also adapted successfully to different cultures. In India agencies such as BharatMatrimony provide remarkably detailed lists of criteria, including religion, caste, income and education, that allow people to make minute refinements to the description of their ideal soulmate. The services also let parents and relatives create profiles on others' behalf. Once promising partners are identified, they are often vetted by traditional marriage-brokers.

In spite of all this, loveseekers should still approach online dating with a healthy degree of scepticism. For a start, pools of potential partners are often much smaller than the big numbers touted by mainstream sites suggest. David Evans, the editor of Online Dating Insider, an industry blog, cites the example of a hypothetical site with 15m profiles in its database. Perhaps only 4m of these will be “active” at any time, he says—meaning that the profiles' owners have logged in at least once in the previous three months. Moreover, some services only let people contact paying members, which shrinks the audience still more. And given that most online daters look for partners who live no more than 25-30 miles away, the real pool of potential mates is often tiny.

Ghost stories

To make matters worse, unscrupulous site operators sometimes stuff their databases with fake profiles maintained either by their own staff or by people they have paid. These “ghosts”, in the industry's jargon, are used to draw in new punters and to help keep existing ones hooked. Last year Jetplace, an Australian company, admitted that it had been running more than 1,300 false profiles on a matchmaking service that it owned. Dating-site bosses maintain that such instances are rare, but detecting them can be tricky.

Even genuine profiles can be misleading: OkTrends, a blog run by OkCupid, reported last year that users routinely fib about things such as their height and wealth in order to boost their chances of being contacted. Yet the prospect of a first face-to-face meeting provides a natural check on people's propensity to exaggerate. Some researchers have found that daters tend to come clean about any slight misrepresentations they have made before meeting a potential partner.

Dating sites' claims of matchmaking prowess also need to be treated with caution given that the data on which these are based come from research they have paid for themselves. Prominent sites have also been reluctant to submit their matching algorithms to an independent inspection that would determine their efficacy. Gian Gonzaga of eHarmony, which loves to boast about its patented “Compatibility Matching System”, says the firm won't take such a step because it would reveal the site's “secret sauce” to competitors.

Even without such evidence, Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, is convinced that the approach to matchmaking embodied by many dating sites represents a market failure. In a recent book, “The Upside of Irrationality”, he argues that the sites treat human beings as if they are goods that can be fully defined according to a set of standard attributes, in much the same way that, say, a digital camera can be described by the number of megapixels that it has and other characteristics. But this cold, drearily functional approach to assessing compatibility fails to capture the indefinable spark that triggers romance.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist working for Chemistry, a dating site owned by Match, says Mr Ariely's argument ignores the fact that although there is inevitably some magic to love, decades of scientific studies have shown that people tend to choose mates with similar socioeconomic backgrounds, shared religious beliefs and other things in common. It therefore makes sense to look at these factors, as well as exploring people's personality types, in order to narrow down potential matches. “We don't just fall in love with anything that comes along,” she notes.

Ms Fisher has a point. But so does Mr Ariely. Even industry insiders acknowledge their models cannot deal with the notion that people from very different backgrounds sometimes fall for one another. Part of the problem, says Mr Ariely, is that sites have been slow to embrace new ways for people to interact online, such as virtual chatrooms, which would help to foster more serendipitous partnerships.

The industry has also been slow to strengthen security measures to protect those seeking romance from falling into the clutches of frauds, cads and worse. A few agencies, such as True, an American dating service, regularly run background checks on their customers. But they are the exception rather than the rule. As well as weeding out crooks and sex offenders, True also uses official databases to spot married people posing as singles.

Mr Evans thinks many online-dating services are reluctant to undertake thorough background checks because these could put off potential customers. But pressure on them to take action is likely to increase. Last month a new Internet Dating Safety Act came into effect in New York state, which among other things requires dating sites to post safety tips for users on their pages. New Jersey, which passed a similar law a few years ago, requires sites charging membership fees to make clear whether or not they conduct background checks when people sign up.

Portable passion

Safety will become even more of a sensitive question as the online-dating industry embraces what those who work in it see as the next big thing: mobile, location-based dating. Many sites already offer software programmes, or apps, that let users tap into their services via smartphones and other devices. But that is just the beginning of a far bigger revolution in which people will be given technology that allows them to flirt with other members of a dating service in real time.

Already firms such as Skout and Flirtomatic let users send messages to other members in the vicinity, whose exact locations are masked for safety reasons. Looking ahead, executives foresee a day when people no longer need to fill in questionnaires on several dating sites. Instead, their personal information will be held on servers in “data clouds” that will alert them automatically when a potential love interest is nearby.

Some dating services are also exploring novel ways to overcome the concerns raised by people such as Mr Ariely. Rather than proposing matches based solely on the results of questionnaires and personality tests, sites such as ScientificMatch and GenePartner are experimenting with “scientific” matching methods. By making genetic information the cornerstone of their matching techniques, they are betting that they can find true chemistry between potential lovers.

Such experimentation will no doubt fuel the fears of those who worry that cyberdating is commoditising intimacy and undermining marriages. It is certainly plausible that the Wal-Marts of the online-dating world, with their overflowing virtual shelves of potential partners, have created the impression that a new flame can be found (and an existing one discarded or cheated on) in a mouse-click. But again some scepticism is warranted. Rising divorce rates and a growth in casual dating were apparent well before the first online matchmaking sites came into being. And advertising for love is hardly new: there were classified ads and lonely-hearts columns long before the internet appeared.

It is also true that a site such as Ashley Madison facilitates extramarital assignations. But to blame the service for infidelity is to confuse cause and effect. Noel Biderman, the site's founder, says the idea for his business came to him when he heard people griping that a sizeable percentage of folk on mainstream dating sites were married and masquerading as singles in order to find partners for affairs.

Some sites—notably in India—have been subject to a different criticism: that they entrench tradition rather than undermine it, by making it easier for people to find partners from the same background as themselves. But at the same time services such as Shaadi and BharatMatrimony have also facilitated numerous so-called “love marriages” in which people have found partners without the intervention of parents or official matchmakers. Like love itself, the world of online matchmaking is full of happy surprises.