Online Dating – A Multi Billion Dollar Industry and Still Growing

I was working on a project for my Video Production class a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to do a video about online dating. From my perspective, online dating was something fun – just a way for people to make new friends. What I did not know is that online dating is a billion dollar industry. Forty million people in the United States have tried online dating, and even more conservative countries are crossing cultural barriers to engage in online dating.
According to Reuters and The Washington Post, “the annual revenue from online dating industry in 2012 was $1,049 billion,” most of them collected by two leading companies – eHarmony.com and Match.com, with a result of seventeen percent of marriages last year. The statistics show that from 54 single people in the United States, 40 million have tried online dating; that means about five persons from a group of seven have tried online dating. Seventeen percent of marriages last year met on a dating site. This means that from a total of 2,096,000 marriages in the American Nation, 365,320 met online; what give us about 1,000 weddings daily in the United States as a result of online dating.
Internet is reinventing the ways people meet. Additionally to online dating there is also a new category called speed dating. Thailand has set a new record by gathering around two hundred and sixty participants in a resort, giving each participant three minutes to engage in a conversation with someone of the opposite sex. This gives him or her the opportunity to develop a romantic relationship. Even though online dating and even speed dating are weird to some people, it has become a way to join a couple that matches in several aspects of their lives. Many of this people now enjoy a happy marriage and family because they met their significant other through these venues.