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Finding your niche: the evolution of cyberdating

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Finding your niche: the evolution of cyberdating

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Content FINDING YOUR NICHE: THE EVOLUTION OF CYBERDATING by Melanie Gayle Herschorn A Professional Project Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (JOURNALISM) May 2008 Copyright 2008 Melanie Gayle Herschorn ii DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my husband Evan. A niche dating site brought us together, and his constant love and support enrich my life each day. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication……………………………………………………………ii Abstract……………………………………………………………....iv Article………………………………………………………………...1 Bibliography………………………………………………………...21 iv ABSTRACT More than 16 million Americans of all colors, ethnicities, sexual persuasions and ages – 11 percent of internet-using adults – have tried online dating. Since 2004, the number of niche dating websites has increased from hundreds to thousands, as more online daters are looking for love on these specialty sites. Internet users can virtually find a dating site based on any hobbies, professions, obsessions and even chronic diseases. There are several factors contributing to the proliferation of niche sites, including pre-determined common interests and a built-in filtering process. Some of the most popular website topics are body art, “big beautiful” men and women, and religious affiliations. Thousands of Americans have successfully used specialty dating sites to meet and marry their soul mates. 1 When the pain from her broken engagement subsided and she was ready to get back in the dating game, Michelle Walker hopped online to find a love connection. But the site that met the needs of the sales representative from Tulsa, Okla., wasn’t one of the large cyber dating companies advertised on television. She chose a website strictly for members of her religion. “I’m looking for a serious Christian guy,” says Walker, a 43-year-old non- denominational Christian, who has never been married. “On a bigger site, I personally would find myself just wading through a lot of guys that I just would have absolutely no interest in. I don’t want to be sitting there scrolling through a bunch of trash.” ChristianMingle.com is specifically targeted to singles in every sect of Christianity – no matter how obscure – allowing congregants to easily meet each other. “I knew that if I got in a Christian environment, there was a reasonable chance of finding a boyfriend or a relationship,” she explains. “At my age, I really want to be married and I just don’t want to waste my time.” Walker is one of the more than 16 million Americans of all colors, ethnicities, sexual persuasions and ages – 11 percent of internet-using adults – who have tried online dating. Although the average age of a cyber dater is 42, nearly half fall within the 18- to 29-year-old range. Even older Americans are 2 finding love on the web: about 24 percent of those who find dates online are 50 or older, according to a 2006 survey by research firm Pew Internet and American Life Project. And online daters’ interests seem infinite. Sugardaddie.com matches millionaires with someone to spoil. Wine connoisseurs can find each other on Grapedates.com. TripLife.com uses major airlines to match singles flying to the same destination. Tattoolovers.com brings body art and piercing enthusiasts together. Lovebyrd.com is a dating site for disabled individuals. Internet users can virtually find a dating site based on any hobbies, professions, obsessions and even chronic diseases. The number of niche dating sites has increased from hundreds to thousands since 2004 and is still growing. Although the more than $500 million cyber dating industry continues expanding, these online companies tend to be small operations, with two or three people running the day-to-day functions. Some sites are free to join because they are ad-based, but the majority cost between $10 and $50 per month. Five years ago, New York City software entrepreneur Michael Carter created AGreaterDate.com, an online niche site directory, to organize the emerging websites by topic and make it easier for cyber daters to locate their site of choice. 3 “I thought within the first six months of getting this together that I had every dating site in every category that you could think of,” says Carter. “But what began to happen is, it just kept picking up steam. And then in the next six months, it more than doubled.” His directory currently has nearly 200 categories, each of which contains several sites. After seeing the exponential growth of other people’s dating websites, Carter decided to create his own niche site company in 2004. Passions Network currently has about 500,000 members and more than 100 different sites. Each site caters to a different interest group, with Large Passions, Shy Passions and Gaming Passions the most popular ones. “The concept behind Passions Network is: it should be easier to break the ice if you share something in common,” he says. And the big sites are following suit. As a result of the proliferation of specified cyber dating, the most dominant websites – Match.com, Eharmony.com and Yahoo Personals – now offer more narrowly defined search options for users. But niche site owners say these “tags” don’t compare to the real thing. Their sites offer something the major competition can’t: a feeling of community. “Because the big sites are getting bigger, it’s getting harder for people to get special services,” says Robert Yau, owner of Datemypet.com. “The analogy I 4 make is: it’s the difference between going somewhere like Costco, a superstore where you buy bulk, and going to a boutique shop to get something more specialized.” The draw for smaller, interest-targeted sites is that online daters don’t have to sift through thousands of profiles, looking for someone who matches their criteria. “On niche sites like Datemypet, what we’ve done is a pre-filtering for the members,” Yau explains. “The fact that you’re on the site, you know people are pet lovers.” San Francisco-based Yau started Datemypet.com after taking his Samoyed, Hershey, to the dog park. At that time, Yau noticed that dog owners unabashedly approached each other at the park and engaged in conversation. He also knew that continued press coverage was helping to lessen the stigma of online dating. Putting the two facts together, he devised the concept for his site. Four years later, Datemypet.com has about 50,000 visitors a month. When singles join specialty sites, however, there is no guarantee they will find their one and only. In fact, thousands of Americans have been duped by “sweetheart scams,” in which internet con artists profess their love, then claim to be in dire straits and ask for money from their new significant other. When they receive the cash or gifts, swindlers disappear with their newfound assets. Forty-six-year-old Patti Anderson experienced another risk of dating a stranger. She was victimized by a man she met through a niche site more than a 5 year ago. The divorced Madison, Wis., native joined BBWpersonalsplus.com, a site for “Big Beautiful Women” because she wanted to meet people who appreciated her size. A retired secretary, Anderson was spending her days recovering from back surgery and trading messages with other singles when she met John. (His surname has been withheld for Anderson’s protection and safety.) “He was in the chat site quite often,” she says. “We started exchanging banter in the chat room and it evolved.” Anderson and John began seeing each other regularly, but after about four months, she pulled away. “I felt that he was trying to control certain areas of my life,” she recalls. “I started wanting to spend less time with him.” But John refused to let her go. “He was becoming obsessed with me,” she explains. “I mean, this guy was calling me 15 times a day, emailing me 15 times a day. It was just relentless.” When John showed up unannounced at her home, she feared for her safety. Since he still had some of her property, Anderson called the police to escort her to his home. “I was afraid that if I went to pick up my personal belongings, I would find myself locked in a closet somewhere,” she says. “I was afraid he would hurt me.” Anderson says she won’t look for another boyfriend on a website. “You could be anybody you want to be online,” she warns. “I skated too close and I never want to put myself in that position again.” 6 Due to nationwide concerns over internet predators, several states including Michigan, California and Florida have considered legislation requiring cyber dating sites to perform criminal background checks on members. If sites don’t comply, they would need to announce the absence of this filter on their homepage. New Jersey’s governor signed the state’s “Internet Dating Safety Act” into law in January of this year. Even with the risks associated in meeting someone on the internet, the continued growth of niche dating sites is indicative of the increasing number of couples who find each other online. These websites unite singles who may never have met otherwise. Finding a vegetarian in Kentucky is as difficult as uncovering a needle in a haystack. But with the help of Veggiedate.org, a site dedicated to matching vegetarians and vegans, Heather Gale and Joshu Goebeler fell in love. Twenty-six-year-old Gale has been a vegetarian for most of her life. “I’m disgusted by meat and I don’t want meat in my house,” she says. “I don’t date omnivores but there aren’t male vegetarians in Kentucky, so to meet one is hard here.” So Gale, an environmental technologist in Lexington, Ky., joined Veggiedate.org when she started college in Indiana to meet others, like her, in a welcoming environment. “It never really occurred to me to go on a bigger site,” 7 she explains. “I thought that the type of person who would search out a vegetarian dating site wasn’t going to be a date rapist. You know, they were going to have similar values to me.” Although she didn’t pay for her subscription, Veggiedate.org membership had its benefits. Several years after she joined the site, Goebeler, 33, whom Gale describes as “a vegetarian since he was in the womb,” found her in an online search. Goebeler, now a carpenter, was working in a computer lab at the University of Kentucky, while finishing his master’s degree in historic preservation. “He just wanted to chat online to kill some time,” says Gale. “He was curious about whether there were other vegetarians out there so he did a search and found Veggiedate.” When Goebeler found her profile, she hadn’t updated her information. He didn’t know the brunette who calls herself “a little bit of a hippie” was beginning her graduate studies in biology at his school. Gale tended to ignore email requests from Veggiedate.org but Goebeler’s profile intrigued her. Not only did she like his photo, but also while reading his stats, she remembered a point system she’d created with some friends in college. The grading was based on her interests such as vegetarianism, education and ambition. “I noticed that he had a whole bunch of the things that were on my point system,” she reminisces. “He definitely earned all the points for having a 8 cool job that he was real good at. He was good looking too.” Goebeler earned a 21 out of a possible 22 points – the highest score of any of her suitors. Before their first date, Goebeler invited her to clandestinely find him in the university computer lab to make her feel comfortable. “He said, ‘If you wanted to check me out ahead of time, you could come in, sit down at a computer, see who’s sitting at the desk and working and I’d never know who you were. You could leave if you didn’t think I was hot enough and we wouldn’t have to meet,’” she explains. Gale never took him up on the offer to spy. “I figured he must be good looking if he’s willing to take that risk,” she says. Her hunch was accurate. She was attracted to her rather tall, dark-haired date, who was covered in tattoos. When they began spending time together, the couple discovered their love of vegetarianism had drawn them together even before they had officially met. For several years, Goebeler worked as a cook at a now defunct vegetarian restaurant frequented by the Gale family. “It was my favorite restaurant,” says Gale. “I’m sure he waited on us. He worked long hours and it was a really small restaurant. You know, just a few people worked there, and he worked there more than anyone.” Within a few months, Goebeler initiated “the talk.” He said he had been planning to move to San Francisco with friends when they met. Because of his 9 strong feelings for her, he had decided to remain in town until she was finished school if she agreed to move with him afterward. Gale accepted his offer. But that was Goebeler’s only proposal. The couple became engaged in an untraditional manner: while at home watching Rocky Horror Picture Show. “The wedding scene comes on, and I asked him if he ever thought we would get married,” says Gale. “I really was just asking him, ‘Do you ever think that we will?’ But he thought I was saying, ‘We’re not ever going to get married.’ So he said to me, ‘Well I guess if we’re going to do it, let’s go ahead and do it.’” The next morning, the couple awoke, nervous to mention their conversation from the previous evening. They asked each other if they really wanted to get married. “We just kind of said, ‘I guess so. We might as well.’ So we did,” she explains. Gale and Goebeler wove elements of their common bond into their wedding in May 2007. The food was vegetarian and the minister was also a vegetarian. “It’s more than just a diet,” Gale says of vegetarianism. “It’s social consciousness and having concern for your world and not wanting to harm anyone or anything.” Niche sites bring believers together. Through TheAltasphere.com, a website for followers of author Ayn Rand’s philosophies, Marc Pelath, an 10 American, and Diana Kovacikova, a Slovak, found someone who shared their strong political convictions: each other. Pelath had just ended his marriage after moving to England from the United States with his former wife. At the age of 30, he was divorced, living in a foreign country and had no dating prospects. Already a member of the social networking section for objectivist thinkers on TheAtlasphere.com, Pelath opted to expand his membership on the site. “To get my mind accustomed to the fact that I was going to be single again, I thought, ‘Okay I’m going to check out the online dating part of TheAtlasphere.com just to see who’s out there,’” the software company statistical consultant, now 34, recalls. “I could do it safely from my own home.” Pelath chose to contact women on TheAtlasphere.com because the bigger dating sites, he says, only feature typical ideological divisions, none of which would match his beliefs. “Are you liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican?” he asks. “I wouldn’t even know what to say. I knew at least that anyone that had bothered to put a profile on TheAtlasphere, let alone bothered to put a dating profile on there, I was already going to have certain basic things in common with them. It just seems so much more efficient.” Kovacikova, 37, was the first and only woman Pelath dated from the site. A Bratislava, Slovakia, native, she had joined in 2004 after reading the novel Atlas Shrugged. “I was just googling everything I could find about it. That is how 11 I discovered Atlasphere,” she says. “I registered just to be a part of the project, to belong to the group of people who enjoyed the book and philosophy the way I did. I really just wanted to be a member and didn’t expect anything more from it.” Around that time, Pelath was having little success meeting British women, so he expanded his search parameters. “It sounds kind of silly in retrospect,” he says. “But I was like, ‘You know, I should find some hot central European woman.’” When he came across Kovacikova’s profile, he was in disbelief. “I think I still had some trust issues at this time, because I thought somebody made up this woman and put her up there for my benefit,” Pelath says. He immediately contacted her by email. And when she hadn’t responded in a few days, he sent her a follow-up message. “I thought it was strange that she wouldn’t even respond, even with an ‘I’m not interested, go away,’” he says. “My minor persistence there had sort of a long term effect on my life in the end.” After a month of emailing, Pelath decided their relationship should progress to telephone conversations. “I was so nervous,” he explains. “There was all this weight behind it already but she sounded so lovely on the phone. It was a little awkward at first, too, because I think that it had been a while since she was speaking English regularly. It took her a while to find her words.” When they decided to meet face to face after three months of chatting, Kovacikova flew to Pelath’s turf. Upon exiting the baggage claim at Stansted 12 airport in London, she recognized Pelath and immediately approached him. “He looked very sad,” she recalls. “So I thought, ‘Great, he does not like me.’” Pelath had only seen a blurry photo of the blonde, blue-eyed Kovacikova on her profile. “I didn’t know what she looked like exactly, which of course made me more nervous, and it was already a nerve-wracking situation,” he says. “What if the picture strategically left out certain things?” His fears were all for naught. They were instantly attracted to each other. He even beat out the other man she’d met online who was vying for her attention. After several months of flying back and forth to see each other, Kovacikova moved to London in July 2005. A year later, Pelath decided to ask her to marry him. “I could’ve done it more romantically,” he says, berating himself. “We were in Chicago over the Fourth of July. I ended up proposing to her in our hotel room. I was on my knee at least, but it wasn’t like a particularly romantic location.” That was actually his second attempt. A few days prior, when the couple was walking on the beach in Michigan City, Ind., Pelath tried to present Kovacikova with a Tiffany engagement ring. “I started to propose, but as soon as I started to get the words out, I got so nervous, I just almost passed out,” he says. “I thought, ‘Okay, I can’t do this right now. Maybe I need to wait until I have all my wits about me. I’ll just give it another few days.’” 13 Despite his fears, Kovacikova happily accepted his proposal. The couple married in a small ceremony in the Bahamas six months later. They relocated to Chicago last summer and Kovacikova gave birth to their daughter Nell last October. Pelath wasn’t always so open about how he and his wife met. “When people would ask us, we would be a little vague about it unless it was a close friend or family,” he admits. “Now, I don’t care. It’s a big universe of people and you can screen them out very easily so you get to something you actually know might be worth your time. It seems a lot better than going to a bar.” Aditi Mogre was in this predicament. The 28-year-old bank project manager was having little luck meeting eligible bachelors at nightclubs and bars in San Francisco. She found the atmosphere and clientele weren’t conducive to meeting a potential companion. As a result, her mother got involved. “She had come down from Dubai, with the intention of getting me hitched through this website she’d heard about,” says Mogre, a smirk creeping up on her face. After numerous requests from her mother to try online dating, Mogre relented and joined Shaadi.com. Shaadi means matrimony, and the site caters to Indians who are looking to settle down with other Indians. But Mogre’s mother wasn’t satisfied with her daughter simply joining the site. “She would even send me links of boys she thought were suitable because she had access to everything,” Mogre says. “She just filtered through the guys and 14 she’d say, ‘What do you think of this one, should you message him?’ She tried to help me speed up the process.” In her first few months of membership, Mogre went on dates with many different men. On Thanksgiving in 2005, she unknowingly contacted the man she would marry. “I was dating somebody and it wasn’t going so well,” she explains. “So I thought, ‘Okay, let’s see what else is out there.’” In her search that day, she found Devang Bhatt, a 30-year-old engineer with a goatee. Bhatt had been a member of Shaadi.com for about four years but hadn’t yet found the right woman. Although his profile was “very, very, very generic,” Mogre sent a message to him, along with several other men on the site. When Bhatt responded to her email, Mogre was able to view his picture on the site. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh my god. What did I just do?’” she says, her eyes widening. “He had those really thick glasses and looked like an uncle. He looked like he was 35 or 40 years old!” Bhatt, on the other hand, was enamored by the dark-haired, dark-eyed Mogre’s profile. “When I saw her pictures, I thought, ‘Oh, she’s out of my league,’” he recalls. “I was like, ‘We’ll just see where this goes.’” Mogre and Bhatt chatted via email for a month before they met in person. But mixed signals early on nearly ended their relationship. “The ironic thing was, 15 at the end of that nice three-hour first date, I actually had no idea what she thought of me,” says Bhatt. “We had great conversation but she was very poker- faced. It was very hard to read her.” When Mogre contacted him a few days later, Bhatt was glad to hear from her. After their second date, however, he stood her up. “That Sunday rolled around and I was not going to call and make the plans,” she says. “By seven o’clock, he doesn’t call, and I’m pissed off so I give him a call. He doesn’t pick up his phone. So then I decided I’m not speaking to this guy ever again.” Fortunately for Bhatt, when he emailed her a few days later, Mogre gave him a second chance. (Once she learned he was house-hunting that evening, not on a date with someone else.) Just three months into their courtship, Bhatt took her to meet his parents. That afternoon, he felt overcome with emotion. “We were randomly walking through this furniture store in Palo Alto,” Bhatt explains. “I said, ‘I love you and everything is going great. I want to take things to the next step.’” According to their Indian tradition, it is customary to have a ceremony announcing a couple’s engagement. Even though they had begun planning the party to formally exchange rings, Bhatt still staged an American-style proposal. While dining at a quaint Italian restaurant, Bhatt used technology to pop the question. “He said to me, ‘You didn’t respond to my text message,’” Mogre recalls. “I said, ‘What text message?’ So I picked up my cell phone and I opened 16 it and of course there was a little message that says, ‘Will you marry me?’ I said, ‘This is the dorkiest thing that I’ve ever seen.’ I think I responded by saying, ‘Fine, if I have to.’” Mogre laughs as she relives her sarcastic answer in this supposedly romantic moment. Bhatt and Mogre are both Indian, but remnants of the caste system overshadowed their dating choices in America. Bhatt’s parents originally wanted him to marry someone from the same “class” and part of the old country. They hoped his wife would be Gujarati, from the Gujarat state, his family’s region in India. Although Mogre’s family was from the same social stratum of priests, the two clans lived in neighboring states with different languages and customs. “Everyone I was dating previously was Gujarati,” says Bhatt. “But it wasn’t working out so I broadened my scope.” Once his parents met Mogre, they readily accepted her into their family. The couple married a year after their first meeting. “A lot of people look at our relationship and say, ‘Wow, you guys really moved very, very fast. Are you sure?’” says Mogre. “But being in this relationship it seemed so natural that things are going at this pace.” Romances initiated on specialty dating sites tend to blossom quickly. Knowing she shared a common interest and a desire to find a mate with other members of DharmaMatch.com, Karen Grosso skipped dating formalities by 17 signing up. As a result, she fulfilled her unconventional New Year’s resolution to meet and marry a man within one year. Grosso, 37, chose the site for spiritual singles to guide her to her husband. “I’m very into yoga and spirituality, so I wanted to do something that was more in lines like that,” she says. “I found DharmaMatch.com in a yoga magazine. So I thought I’d just check it out.” To ensure that she would attract the right man, the photographer and writer spent hours filling out her profile information. She even went a step further. “I said a prayer over my computer screen,” Grosso says. “I blessed my words that they were sending out the right message to whoever was the right person to read it, and pushed ‘send.’” On New Year’s Day 2007, Grosso looked through the email messages that had accumulated in her inbox over the holidays and narrowed down her list of suitors. “I erased everybody except three people who looked interesting,” she recalls. “I emailed all of them back and said, ‘I don’t do email but this is my phone number if you want to call.’ And Michel called that night.” Michel Kripalani’s mother had also found an ad for DharmaMatch.com in a yoga magazine. She had left it on the kitchen table for the software company manager when he was visiting. Kripalani, 40, who works from home and dislikes the bar scene, had already tried a more general website to meet women. But he wasn’t happy with the results. 18 “After going through 300 people, I was like, ‘Hang on a second, what I’m looking for isn’t here,’” he says. “Then I went to DharmaMatch, and it was a lot less people. But more of them were a lot more in tune with what I was looking for.” The profile options on DharmaMatch.com include religions and spiritual beliefs that bigger sites don’t. Kripalani follows the Self Realization Fellowship faith and only initiated contact with women on the site who had checked SRF in their profiles. Grosso had tagged that option. The couple also share passions for photography, yoga and traveling. Yet despite their common interests, their proximity was almost a deal breaker. While Grosso’s search parameters included men within 10 miles of her Los Angeles home, Kripalani searched for women within 100 miles of his house in San Diego. “We’re lucky that we met,” he says. “Post office to post office it was probably about 99 miles. So it was right at the edge.” The evening following their initial phone conversation, Kripalani drove to Los Angeles and the two met for the first time at a Japanese restaurant. He knew that Grosso, with her warm smile and infectious laugh, was “the one” almost immediately. “I felt that I wanted to marry her right away,” says Kripalani. “By our second date, it was definite in my mind.” They became exclusive after a few meetings. After a few months, Kripalani decided to propose. But he wanted to get his future father-in-law’s 19 permission first. “He had looked in my phone trying to find my dad’s number,” Grosso recalls, smiling. “My dad does have a cell phone which he never uses. So poor Michel is dialing this cell phone for weeks trying to get my father and he would just leave a message like, ‘Hi, this is Michel, that guy that you met. Can you please call me?’ But my father never listened to his messages.” When Kripalani finally reached him, Grosso’s father grilled him. But he eventually relented. “My father said, ‘It’s not up to me. It’s up to Karen. You know I support her in whatever her decision is,’” she says. The difficulty Kripalani experienced in getting permission to marry his girlfriend foreshadowed the engagement experience for him as well. His plan was to ask for her hand on Easter. But the three days prior, he learned the diamond ring he had designed was stolen. Devastated, Kripalani hesitantly explained to Grosso what had happened. “He took me outside to the backyard,” she says. “He looked like he was about to break down completely. He told me that the shipping company had called that morning and said that they found the package from the ring and it was ripped apart. He was sick.” Kripalani then asked Grosso to marry him. “I said, ‘Of course, absolutely.’ And we sat out there and we cried and we hugged,” she reminisces. “We decided not to even tell anyone yet because people say, ‘Oh, you’re engaged, let’s see the 20 ring.’ So we said we’ll wait.” Kripalani designed another ring and proposed again two months later, while the couple vacationed at a bed and breakfast in Japan. Two engagement rings and two proposals yielded two weddings. Their first ceremony was on the beach in Connecticut. The second one celebrated Kripalani’s heritage with Indian traditions to honor Michel’s late father. Five years before she met her husband, Grosso had unknowingly purchased all the decorations for her Indian ceremony. “I always felt like I had past lives in India,” she confesses. “There was something about India that felt like it was going to be a huge part of my life.” On her five-week trip there, Grosso bought fabric, saris and pillow covers. “I put it in boxes for years,” she explains. “I didn’t know why I had all this stuff. So when I met him and we ended up getting married, I was like, ‘This is perfect.’” Grosso says Kripalani had a similar experience on a vacation in India. “On our second date, Michel pulls out this outfit and says, ‘I bought this when I was in India and I didn’t know who it was for. But I knew that it was for the woman in my life. It’s for you.’” She wore the colorful garments to their rehearsal dinner. The couple freely tells people how they met, but Grosso is still surprised that she connected with her husband through a website. “I never thought I would find my spouse online,” she admits. “I thought, ‘Oh please, there’s no way I’m going to date this guy, he lives in San Diego. I’m not moving. But I did. And I’m so glad. Never say never.” 21 BIBLIOGRAPHY AGreaterDate.com. A Greater Date, Inc. January 7, 2008. <www.agreaterdate.com>. Anderson, Patti. Personal Phone Interview. December 1, 2007. Arias, Martha L. “Internet Law: Are Online Dating Sites Regulated by Federal Law?” Internet Business Law Services, Inc. March 6, 2007. <www.ibls.com/internet_law_news_portal_view.aspx?s=latestnews&id=1684>. BBWpersonalsplus.com. Spark Networks. March 15, 2008. <www.bbwpersonalsplus.com>. Bhatt, Devang. Personal Interview. Fremont, California. December 11, 2007. Brownell, Ginanne, Jaime Cunningham, and Florence Villeminot. “The Five- Year Itch: Though it only took off in 2001, online dating is already struggling to keep the magic alive.” Newsweek. Newsweek, Inc. February 27, 2006. Carter, Michael. Personal Phone Interview. October 20, 2007. ChristianMingle.com. Spark Networks. December 9, 2007. <www.christianmingle.com>. DateMyPet.com. Date My Pet, Inc. October 10, 2007. <www.datemypet.com>. “Dating Services in the US.” IBISWorld Industry Report. IBISWorld, Inc. November 7, 2007. DharmaMatch.com. DharmaMatch. December 11, 2007. <www.dharmamatch.com>. Gale, Heather. Personal Phone Interview. December 6, 2007. Grapedates.com. GrapeDates, Inc. September 25, 2007. <www.grapedates.com>. Grosso, Karen. Personal Interview. San Diego, California. December 10, 2007. Kovacikova, Diana. Personal Phone/Email Interview. December 9, 2007. 22 Kripalani, Michel. Personal Interview. San Diego, California. December 10, 2007. Lenhart, Amanda, and Mary Madden. “Online Dating.” Pew Internet & American Life Project. March 5, 2006. Li, Charlene, Josh Bernoff, Katheryn A. Feffer, and Cynthia N. Pflaum. “Trends: Why Marketers Should Court Online Daters.” Forrester Research, Inc. June 6, 2007. Lithwick, Dahlia. “The Online Laws of Love.” The Washington Post. The Washington Post Company. June 4, 2006. Lovebyrd.com. Lovebyrd.com, LLC. October 31, 2007. <www.lovebyrd.com>. Mogre, Aditi. Personal Interview. Fremont, California. December 11, 2007. “New Jersey State Issues 2006-2007.”American Electronics Association. January, 14, 2008. <www.aeanet.org>. Passions Network. Passions Network, Inc. October 20, 2007. <www.passionsnetwork.com>. Pelath, Marc. Personal Phone Interview. December 9, 2007. “Public Policy.” Safer Online Dating Alliance. January, 13, 2008. <www.saferonlinedating.org>. Shaadi.com. Shaadi.com Matrimonials. December 12, 2007. <www.shaadi.com>. Sugardaddie.com. New Life Ventures, Inc. November 30, 2007. <www.sugardaddie.com>. Tattoolovers.com. First Beat Media, Inc. November 13, 2007. <www.tattoolovers.com>. TheAtlasphere.com. The Atlasphere, LLC. October 31, 2007. <www.thealtasphere.com>. TripLife.com. AirTroductions. October 31, 2007. <www.triplife.com>. VeggieDate.org. GreenPeople. October 28, 2007. <www.veggiedate.org>. 23 Walker, Michelle. Personal Phone Interview. December 4, 2007. Yau, Robert. Personal Phone Interview. October 21, 2007.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract More than 16 million Americans of all colors, ethnicities, sexual persuasions and ages 11 percent of internet-using adults have tried online dating. Since 2004, the number of niche dating websites has increased from hundreds to thousands, as more online daters are looking for love on these specialty sites. Internet users can virtually find a dating site based on any hobbies, professions, obsessions and even chronic diseases.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Herschorn, Melanie Gayle (author)

Core Title Finding your niche: the evolution of cyberdating

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Broadcast Journalism)

Publication Date 04/10/2008

Defense Date 03/25/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag niche,OAI-PMH Harvest,online dating

Language English

Advisor Celis, William, III (committee chair), Albright, Julie (committee member), Kotler, Jonathan (committee member)

Creator Email herschor@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1098

Unique identifier UC1281627

Identifier etd-Herschorn-20080410 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-51457 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1098 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Herschorn-20080410.pdf

Dmrecord 51457

Document Type Project

Rights Herschorn, Melanie Gayle

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu