• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 10, 2005

From New York City to Paris, Texas, the state of dating is increasingly grim--if online personals are any measure. Traffic to dating sites has dipped some 33 percent over the past year, according to a JupiterResearch report out Wednesday, cooling what was a piping industry less than two years ago.

The online personals industry grew 73 percent in 2002 and 77 percent in 2003, but in 2004 the market slumped to 19 percent growth.

Nate Elliott, JupiterResearch associate analyst, watched the market prune last year, and expects the worst for 2005. "For years, online dating sites saw large numbers of new users flowing into the market every year," Elliott explained in the report. "In 2005, the industry will grow by just 9 percent, to $516 million."

So, as traffic dwindles, dating sites focus on creative differentiation, converting site visitors into paying members, and attracting "serious daters." The daters with more serious intentions convert 20 percent more often--and according to Elliott, are twice as likely to purchase long-term subscriptions and pay up to twice as much per month as casual daters.

Yahoo! launched a premium dating service for serious daters in November--totaling some 90 million, according to a Census Bureau estimate at the time of the launch. Yahoo! attributed their newfound wisdom on relationships to weAttract, a tech firm specializing in psychologically based intelligent software.

Similar efforts drove industry-wide conversion rates up nearly 25 percent over the last year, JupiterResearch found.

Online dating service Match.com Tuesday took yet another tactic, announcing a word-of-mouth marketing effort, which spotlights Match.com success stories on its new Success.Match.com site. The company said it is betting on the results of a survey conducted on WeddingChannel.com, which found that 12 percent of the responding couples had met online, and nearly a third of them had met on Match.com.