Online Dating Insider

I came across a post about dating industry valuations at TJ's Weblog. TJ does an excellent and thorough job of detailing the valuations of most of the major players in the industry. The conclusion I get is that there is a valuation bubble in this sector, although TJ makes a case for why these companies could be worth a lot more in the future.

I suspect that there is not going to be as much money to be made in online dating as people think, and I will be posting these thoughts in a future post, so keep reading this blog.

In today's New York Times there's an op-ed article by David Brooks entitled Love, Internet Style.

In case you haven't heard of David Brooks, he's the author of "Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There", a book I've been meaning to read; one day I will have to purchase it from Amazon.

He says:

If you're dating in the Age of the Hook-Up, sex is this looming possibility from the first moment you meet a prospective partner. But couples who meet through online dating services tend to exchange e-mail for weeks or months. Then they'll progress to phone conversations for a few more weeks. Only then will there be a face-to-face meeting, almost always at some public place early in the evening, and the first date will often be tentative and Dutch.

I don't think people who meet on the internet actually spend months emailing and phoning before they meet in person. I had a friend from Phoenix who, about eight years ago, told me about all the sex he was getting from women he met on Yahoo! chatrooms.

David Brooks also writes:

Most of the sites have programs that link you up with people like yourself. One of the side effects of online dating is that it is bound to accelerate social stratification, as highly educated people become more efficient at finding and marrying one another.

I have to disagree with Brooks' conlusion here. Social stratification has already reached its peak, I don't think there can be any acceleration. Look at the wedding announcements in the New York Times and you'll see that the highly educated already are quite efficient at finding each other.

The highly educated normally hang out in their own circles and only meet other highly educated people. So online dating will have the opposite effect that David Brooks suggests. Online dating allows you to meet people whom you would never meet in your normal social circles.

The purpose of this blog is to provide a centralized place where readers can obtain information about what's new in the online dating industry. I will also post my own thoughts and analysis, and provide links to what other people are saying about online dating.

The next question I should address is "am I really an insider?" I programmed my own online dating site, and then I programmed this site, eDateReview.com, where people can read and post reviews of online dating services. So this makes me enough of an insider that I can legitmately claim the title. But the news on this blog will come from publicly available sources such as company press releases. I don't possess any inside information about what the big players in the industry are actually doing. Although I certainly hope to come across some insider information in the future.

The final question I will answer is "did I create eDateReview.com and the Online Dating Insider strictly for altruistic reasons?" And the answer to that is a big resounding no! eDateReview is supposed to make money by directing readers to the sites that they read reviews about. But I do believe that eDateReview has a much higher level of integrity than any other site designed for this purpose. The reviews can be written by anyone surfing the web, so they will gather real people's opinions about the quality of online dating services. At other sites that are portals for online dating services, the webmasters don't seem to make much of an effort to hide the fact that they have no goal besides making a fast buck for themselves.

I should also add that I enjoy writing and blogging, so it's natural that I should blog about what I know. Kind of like stock guru Peter Lynch's maxim to buy what you know. If there are people on the web who read this and think "that's a pretty useful and well written blog", then that makes me happy.