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MarketingVOX: With the proliferation of free "friendship" sites like MySpace and Facebook, paid dating sites are dipping into the social networking playbook to freshen up the look of dating 2.0, according to The Guardian.
British dating site Dating Direct, whose tagline reads, "Same game, new rules," offers the serial daters of the online world a suite of staples: instant messaging, compatibility quizzes, video chat and even the photo albums of potential love interests' pets. Recently, they launched a mobile phone component in tangent with Vodafone.
Dating Direct is just one site run by Meetic, a French company and Europe's most visited dating destination. Its global network supports a range of users from Brazil to China, operating in 10 languages and boasting a doubling in net profit to �10.1m in 2006.
"In the beginning people felt ashamed, no one would admit to being on Meetic. Now it's trendy," said CEO and founder Marc Simoncini of Meetic to The Guardian. "When we started we had 25% women and 75% men. Now we are close to 50-50 in France and Spain."
The Guardian also notes that in Britain, the online dating stigma is also collapsing. comScore World Metrix reports dating sites in the Mother Country, which number about 141 total, received 6.4 million unique visitors in May. And according to Nielsen, the average proportion of UK Internet users visiting personals sites has leaped 13.4 percent from 8.2 percent three years ago.
The average dating service age is 45-55. Britain's dating site Dating Direct is no exception, logging a typical user at 45.
According to Synovate, only 6 percent of British Web users aged 18-24 actually engage in online dating. 38 percent, however, admit to having met someone online and making online friends.
With the vast amount of this demographic on free sites like MySpace, it's increasingly difficult for dating sites to maintain a subscription-based service model - particularly when users are wont to change partners as quickly as AJAX alters the information on a Web 2.0-studded page.
Meetic, however, appears to be surviving swimmingly on the subscription boat. "You can date everywhere in the world, even on the tube, but if you really want to date you need to be with singles," Simoncini said.
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