Online Dating Insider

This article at CBS MarketWatch is interesting because it talks about the male/female ratio at several online dating sites. Online dating in general is said to attract more males than females. Match.com is said to have only 40% female members, but eHarmony has the opposite ratio with 60% female members. The emphasis on personality and the long questionaire at eHarmony seems to be more attractive to women than to men.

American IDC Corporation (Pink Sheets: ACNI) announces an agreement with Firefly Entertainment Media in which IDC will create matchmaking websites to coincide with five upcoming syndicated TV shows that revolve around dating.

Note that IDC trades on the Pink Sheets, which places it amongst the most bogus of publicly traded companies.

link to press release

No article on online dating seems complete unless it talks about the "stigma" associated with it, and the New York Times Magazine piece is no exception:

Still, a fair number of people continue to feel a stigma about dating online, ranging from the waning belief that it's a dangerous refuge for the desperate and unsavory to the milder but still unappealing notion that it's a public bazaar for the sort of people who thrive on selling themselves. The shopping metaphor is apt; online dating involves browsing and choosing among a seemingly infinite array of possible mates. But those who see a transactional approach to coupling as something new and unseemly would do well to pick up a novel by Jane Austen, where characters are introduced alongside their incomes. There is nothing new about the idea of marriage as a business transaction.

Does online dating have a stigma? Because a stigma exists only as social perception, as long as people are talking about it then it exists, at least to a certain extent. The article seems to be saying that such a stigma shouldn't exist, because shopping metaphor is an apt comparison to traditions from earlier times and from other cultures, where marriage is more of an economic market and less of a random "dating game" where people walk into a bar and hope that they get lucky.

The most detailed article about online dating that I've ever seen appears in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine (see Love in the Time of No Time.)

Leslie Hill, 34, who works in human resources in Silicon Valley, estimates that she went on 100 online dates before meeting her second husband on Match.com.

I don't know why that particular sentence stood out, but for me it did.

The article tries to be philosophical about how online dating is changing society. Read the article quickly, New York Times articles only stay online for about two weeks.