EDITOR'S NOTE: The original version of this story, published at 10 p.m. Wednesday night, had a number of structural inconsistencies because of a publishing glitch. We apologize for the error.
There are millions of lonely hearts looking for love on the Internet, but you won't find the majority of them on Facebook or MySpace.
Relationship sites - the pioneers of online social networking - are waging a pitched battle for members, employing new technologies from video conferencing to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) to bring Google-like results to their niches.
Their new secret? Scientific algorithms based on detailed surveys that connect users after matching and weighting dozens of specific criteria ranging from a love of Chinese food and a penchant for long walks in the rain to spirituality and communication style.
For Vancouver-based plentyoffish.com , the emergence of love 3.0 has generated what its creator Markus Frind admits is a global cash machine. More than 600,000 people log on to his site every day to send messages to potential mates with the possibility of romance hanging in the balance. In less than five years, after signing a deal with Google Inc.'s adWords service, Plenty of Fish is generating $10-million a year in revenue.
"I just captured a market here in Canada and it spread to the rest of the world," said Mr. Frind, the brains behind plentyoffish.com, one of the most heavily trafficked relationship sites on the Internet.
Unlike Facebook and MySpace, whose values are based largely on their potential to generate future revenues, online dating sites are making millions from user fees and advertisers now.
For Mr. Frind, it was a lucky break for something that started on a bit of a lark.
"I was working for all these different companies and every six months they would go bankrupt," he said. "I wasn't learning anything new and it turned out that making a dating site was the quickest and easiest way to learn a new programming language."
Just this week, Plenty of Fish launched a VoIP service which allows users to send voice messages to other members they are interested in connecting with. If the person they contact adds the user to a preferred list, the next call goes straight to the contact's phone, taking the service offline.
Sites such as eHarmony.com - which was founded by a clinical psychologist - are dedicated to applying scientific algorithms that would make Google blush in an effort to find match users up with the perfect mate. In fact, matchmaking algorithms are the backbone of the industry; Mr. Frind estimates he spends 95 per cent of the time he dedicates to the business tweaking the back end of the website to both improve user searches and keep out potential scammers and solicitors.
Facilitating online hookups has become a billion-dollar industry; companies that own a portfolio of sites, such as Spark Networks, are ringing up revenues of between $15-million (U.S.) and $18-million every quarter.
Various Inc., a U.S. operator of about 25 online properties including the sex and swingers personal site adultfriendfinder.com , was bought by Penthouse Media for about $500-million in December.
But unlike the social networks space, which is dominated by a small number of big players, romance-seekers have hundreds of options to choose from in online dating, and the pie is big enough that just about all potential players can have a slice.
Catch-all sites such as Match.com and mate1.com attract diverse audiences looking to scope out a broad swath of users, while demographic-specific sites such as Spark's' JDate.com - an online community for Jewish singles with about 500,000 users - cater to those trolling for someone, or something, more specific.
