| 2004-04-06 |
Love at first site |
After five years on the New York dating scene, Kate Rolston, an advertising sales manager and sometime actor, had become a little jaded. "New York is the most difficult place in the world to date," she says. "Men are afraid to approach. And the ones who do are often all about money and status. The first thing they ask is 'What do you do?' I wanted someone with different priorities."
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So, like an increasing number of people in America, she turned to internet dating. Her first try, on the website Oneandonly.com, didn't yield much in the way of results. Her second try last year, on Match.com, was a resounding success.
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After dates with 10 or so different men, Rolston met Kyle, a health-food store owner, on December 10 last year. Seventeen days later he asked her to marry him.
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Rolston, 37, is part of a social phenomenon. Internet dating in the US has lost its stigma. According to figures from Jupiter Research, 21% of US internet users have surfed a personals website and 13% have posted an advertisement.
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In the early days of Yahoo personals, a service launched in 1997, online dating was useful only if you wanted to snare a Silicon Valley geek, admits Yahoo's spokeswoman Rochelle Adams: "There were a lot of engineers."
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Things have changed so much that more than 38,400 users responded to a recent promotion on the Yahoo personals site asking for real users to appear in an advertising campaign. "That says a lot about how things have shifted," she says. "A couple of years ago people might have used the site but wouldn't have mentioned it at a cocktail party. Now they are totally open about it."
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Jupiter estimates that the US market for online personals will generate $300m (£200m) in revenue this year, rising to more than $600m by 2007. On most of the services, it is free to post an advertisement and to peruse the personals, but members have to pay between $20 and $25 a month to correspond with other people.
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