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Find your (online dating) niche: For your type, just keep typing
According to his online profile, he's a single male looking for outdoor fun, long walks, hanging out in the park and conversation. Biscuit is his name, and he's just 3 years old - a shepherd/collie mix whose dating profile receives equal billing with that of his owner, Frank Lozano.
"If someone is not tolerant or is allergic to pets, it's better for me to know that now before my heart starts to fall for them," said Lozano, a 43-year-old Valencia, Calif., resident who's been using the online dating site Datemypet.com for about a year.
Lozano, who also has a cat, has communicated with 25 women through the site and has gone on four dates. Last month, he was hoping that using a niche personals site would increase his odds of finding The One.
"If they're on (Datemypet.com), I hope they have as much love and compassion for their animals as I do for mine, which means maybe they have more of a tender heart in general."
Just like generalist dating sites, some are free and some are paid, though paying sites tend to charge lower prices than mainstream sites. Like Match.com and Yahoo! Personals, most use simple matching software, pairing couples based on what they're about and what they're looking for in a potential mate. The advantage of niche sites is that users get to identify their deal breaker.
"There's still a leap of faith involved for a lot of people when they go into online dating," said Nate Elliott, online dating analyst for JupiterResearch, a consumer technologies analysis firm in New York. "Although the stigma has mostly gone away, they're still doing something that might feel a little bit uncomfortable, and to be able to take that step within a predefined community can improve the comfort level for certain users."
According to representative Steve Pasternack, the men living a better-than-average lifestyle tend to be between the ages of 35 and 55; the women they'd like to share it with are in their 20s and early 30s. Of the site's 40,000-plus subscribers - who can post a profile for free but pay $18.99 a month if they want to make contact - women outnumber men 3 to 1.
"Nobody has to hide what they're looking for," Pasternack said. "I think that's why they like our site. You don't have to be embarrassed to say, `I'm looking for somebody with money,' or `I'm looking for somebody who's good-looking.' " Sugardaddie has been online for about three years. Many niche sites have been up and running about as long. There just wasn't a market for most niches until online dating as a whole had reached a critical mass of users and acceptability, and that's only happened within the last few years. According to JupiterResearch, 14 percent of American Internet users browsed personal ads in 2005. In 2006, that figure is expected to increase to 16 percent. Match.com, Yahoo! Personals and eHarmony are the top three players in the market. Together, they account for more than 50 percent of all online dating traffic, but none of them offers niche dating.
"People were complaining that on the big sites they weren't finding people that shared their spiritual interests," Erik Curren said of his motivation to start DharmaDate (http://www.dharmadate.net) - for Buddhist singles - in 2003. "I find that people, the deeper they are into Buddhism, the more important it is for them to have somebody else who's interested in it. The people who meditate or go to a Buddhist center tend to place a high premium on finding people who share their spiritual path."
Curren says the site has about 8,000 registered users, which may seem like a lot - until you spread them out over the entire world.
Ultimately, the success of any site depends on the number of people using it. The greater the number, the greater the odds of finding a good match.
"You have to be able to go on the site on a regular basis and see enough profiles that you're not seeing the same people over and over again, which sounds easy and obvious, but it really depends on the depth of the search you're doing," said JupiterResearch's Elliott.
Veggiedate, for vegetarians, has about 16,000 profiles. In comparison with gargantuan sites such as Match.com, those numbers may not add up to particularly good odds, but they worked for Eric Brent.
"I tried a couple mainstream places," said Brent, 39, a Westwood vegetarian who runs an online vegetarian restaurant guide. He started using VeggieDate.com 2 ½ years ago.
"Basically the people I met were good people, but we didn't have enough in common, even the ones who might have stated on the sites that they were vegetarian," he said. "The people on the site put it as something that they liked rather than more of a definition of their lifestyle."
Brent was on the site six months when he met Diana Hsieh -- a now 29-year-old vegan who was also interested in traveling, hiking and the outdoors. Two weeks later, Brent and Hsieh were living together. One year later, they were married.
"We find that niche sites are attracting people who aren't looking for one-night stands or hookups. They're seriously looking for a relationship, and they've already done the work: What is the must-have in my relationship," said Gail Laguna, vice president of corporate communications for Spark Networks in Beverly Hills, Calif.
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