• by Masha Geller , January 13, 2003

The world may be buzzing about Steve Case resigning from AOL Time Warner but there are other interesting things happening today. This morning, in yet another attempt to get more subscribers, Yahoo! announced the launch of streaming video technology for its online dating service, Yahoo! Personals.

Having determined that personal ads accompanied by a digital photo generated eight times the number of responses than ads with just text, Yahoo hopes to make some money by going a step further. They will allow users to add video and voice components to their ads free of charge, but they aim to entice more people to try and contact each other to set up a meeting, which is a $24.95 per month subscription service.

The online personals industry is certainly worthy of advertiser attention, both due to the quantity and the quality of users. Here are some quick stats: according to a December 2002 study conducted by comScore Networks and the Online Publishers Association, the Personals category surpassed the Business/Investment and Entertainment/Lifestyles categories to become the largest paid-content category in Q3 with more than $87 million in sales (up 37% versus Q3 2001).

Additionally, comScore has recently analyzed the composition of visitors in the Personals category who access the Internet using a broadband connection and as expected, broadband users are highly over-represented at Personals sites, accounting for 46% of visitors to the category compared to 33% for the total Internet.

With more than 3.8 million unique visitors, Yahoo! Personals ranks second in the Personals category next to Match.com, which leads with 6.7 million visitors. The rest of the top ten, according to comScore, are date.com, one2onematch.com, matchmaker, americansingles.com, dreammates.com, uDate.com FriendFinder.com and Lavalife.com.