Independent Perspective News

Translation by Carolina Friszman.

In the United States, Internet pages that publish personal ads with such varied intentions as getting married and experimenting group sex have a potential market of 85 millon users.

Gary Gervitz was looking for a grilfriend who matched a strict description: candidates should be smart but obedient, conservative but pagan, have a postgraduate degree, and above all, be redheads... At the age of 30, this businessman so familiar with the equation cost/benefit knew it would take a lifetime to search in pubs and universities for Miss Right. So he decided to resort to the data bank of a couple-search Internet site. Within a few days, Gervitz, who lives in Dallas, US, started exchanging correspondence with Susan Crowell, a 30 year-old businesswoman who lived nearby. Soon after they got married. “The explanation is simple: I found the girl I was looking for. Susan is smart, quiet, conservative, non-religious, has a postgraduate degree and is a redhead... That's why I married her,” says Gervitz.

For many companies, regardless their trade, moving their operations to the Internet was nothing but a failure. Nevertheless, this was not the fate of the agencies that link people in search of a couple. On the contraty: the Internet has revolutionized the mètier. And, by allowing companies that relate people to cross larger and larger data bases, the business has been given an unheard-of impulse, comparable to the one experimented after the introduction of the telephone. For a 10 to 50 dollar monthly fee, agencies look for company for those lonely needed hearts.

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With a potential market of 85 millon single people only in the US, the number of firms that struggle for the leadership in the trade grows too. And this is only the beginning: the Internet Department of the consulting agency Jupiter Media Research estimates that the amount of Americans who consume personal ads on the web will increase exponentially in the next few years.

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“The growth largely surpasses the observable progress of any other medium”, affirms Stacey Herron, an analyst from Jupiter.

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The global reach of personal ads on the Internet, which have a better reputation than those on the newspapers, and the guaranteed privacy are the two main factors that give impulse to the business. “It would take a month to meet 100 single women in a conventional way. On the net, I can meet them in an hour...”, summarizes journalist Al Cooper, author of the book “Sex and the Internet”.

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Neither Yahoo! nor Lavalife publicize their earnings. But Peter Housley, from Lavalife, says that the firm, placed in Toronto, Canada, makes “several millions per year”. Sullivan, from Match, estimates that the page he works for has over 500 thousand regular users who could be paying 120 million dollars yearly. The majority of user are men, although, as usual, women are better clients: they stay longer in the 'available' list.