Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely ...
Thy screen shot is sublime, while thy personality profile closely matches that of my own, including liking ancient ruins and empty beaches.
What is this algorithm of love -- the secret of which perhaps holds untold riches? Both for lover and for matchmaker.
If one is good, then two is better and most people are looking for the big existential hookup. Waiting to help is a myriad of online services that use modern magic to help Cupid aim his bow and arrow.
The matchmaking business is exploding in the online medium, propelled forward by the oldest of human emotion, which is then in turn accelerated by technology. Competing for all the online romantics populating the global Internet are thousands of matchmaking services, including those hosted by such cyber-giants as Yahoo!. The end game is a competition for both your heart and your dollar.
In 2002, U.S. consumers spent $302 million on personals and dating online content, an increase of nearly threefold from the $72 million they spent in 2001.
In the first six months of 2003, consumers spent $214.3 million on Net matchmaking, a 76 percent increase from the first two quarters of the year before, according to a study by research firm comScore Media Metrix and the Online Publishers Association. Extrapolating from this, consumers will have spent nearly half a billion dollars finding love online for 2003.
Forrester Research estimates there about 40 million people visiting the various online dating services each month.
For public relations professional Kirk Sullivan, a widower, online matchmaking helped ease an awkward re-entry into romance.
"I re-entered the dating world late in life. At 39 years of age I found myself a widower. A year or two after my wife's death -- I had to face an unusual dilemma: how to start dating again? I decided to try an online dating service. I mean -- what the heck. I was a little apprehensive. I had always thought of the newspaper personal ad thing as a bit creepy and I likened online dating to personal ads," Sullivan said.
Ultimately finding more than just a date, Sullivan's experience is the kind that online matchmakers like to tout.
"What surprised me as soon as I started dating online was the incredible quality of the people I was meeting," he said. "The profile process they have for online dating really helps you target meeting the type of person you are best suited for. I know it worked for me. I met a wonderful woman through online matchmaking. We've been dating for three years and two weeks ago we be became engaged."
Joe Shapira, chairman and CEO of MatchNet, one of the behemoths of the online romance world, said, "The past year has seen online dating lose much of its initial stigmatism. Everyday we get letters from our members who have met someone on one of our Web sites. JDate (for Jewish singles) has become a part of recent pop culture. We expect by the end of 2004, online dating will become accepted as just another outlet for people to connect as more and more members tell their friends about their successes with online dating."
MatchNet owns and operates 11 online personals Web sites worldwide, including Match.com, AmericanSingles.com and JDate.
The single largest of the online matchmaking Web sites -- Yahoo! Personals -- has been recently vying for the title of taking things to new heights in the online dating world. As part of Yahoo's "Project: Real People" advertising campaign for its personals service, the company has been hosting one particularly ardent dater -- attractive LA single Julie Koehnen -- atop a wired billboard on Sunset Strip, where she has been receiving e-mail from prospective suitors.
Koehnen, an aspiring screenwriter, began her billboard stint on Jan. 7 and was wrapping it up Friday. Her billboard has featured a larger than life visage of her; publicity that no doubt many singles would die to have or die to not have.
"Each day, Julie will select a few lucky men from Yahoo! Personals to meet face-to-face at the billboard and have a date above the Sunset Strip. Eligible bachelors interested in taking love to new heights can contact her online," the company said in a statement.
Koehnen laughingly said "it's crazy" and added that she had first told Yahoo! "no" after having been selected from the 38,000 singles that applied to be the company's "poster" dater.
As a screenwriter, she said, the last several days have defied fiction.
"I'm an everyday person," said the Minnesota native while having makeup applied for her next date. She was starting day at 3 a.m. for shooting a segment to be aired on "Good Morning America."
This is all part of Yahoo! unveiling "a new approach to its dating community as it launches an online advertising campaign featuring singles who are using the service to connect and communicate with prospective dates."
The campaign, called "Project: Real People," represents the company's new focus on using only singles from its site in online advertisements and highlights the service's most valuable assets: a diverse community of singles looking to make a connection. '
"Project: Real People" is the result of market research Yahoo! conducted through focus groups and customer interactions and is a response to feedback singles had about wanting a comfortable, welcoming environment for their online dating experience. In Yahoo's "Virtues of Being Real Survey," the company found that nearly 70 percent of singles felt most advertisement models were unreal, impersonal and unattainable, further validating the importance for the service to move toward highlighting real-life, everyday singles in its online advertisements.
According to the company, the real-life everyday singles featured in the new online campaign are from professions and lifestyles as varied as Marines, firefighters, artists, actors, photographers, students, single parents, business managers, engineers and musicians. They range in age from 24 to 54 -- representing what the company called "the broad spectrum of singles that are using the Internet to make a romantic connection."
But all this online romance can also be a potential problem to office productivity.
According to Internet management software and consulting company Websense Inc., the number of dating Web sites has increased almost 35 percent in the past 12 months, now totaling approximately 24,000 Web sites. In fact, the company said, online dating is one of the fastest-growing categories on the Web today.
But Websense doesn't suggest kicking cupid out of the office completely.
"With employees working longer hours, having less free time to socialize and greater access to high-speed Internet connections, it's not surprising that dating Web sites attract millions of employees as a convenient way to find that special someone -- especially around the holidays," said Kian Saneii, a Websense Inc. official. "Because of the productivity and bandwidth drain, combined with the security risks of dating Web sites, companies would be wise to manage employees' access to online dating content without shooting Cupid by blocking access to them completely."
But then as Emily Dickinson wrote in her love poem "Wild Nights!": "Rowing in Eden, Ah the sea!"
