The Internet was being used for dating almost from day one. Even before the Web itself was created, bulletin board services and newsgroups played host to a variety of Internet dating activities, many of them unintended. In addition to newsgroups and forums created for posting of personal ads, similar to what was going on in newspapers at the time, locals were meeting in city-oriented rooms and people with similar interests were meeting and becoming attached in forums of similar interest.
Much of this was spurred on by the Internet service providers themselves. Services such as Prodigy and America Online offered chat rooms and forums for singles and heavily advertised these features. Because of this, even before the Web became widely used, the Internet had a robust, if technically limited, dating culture.
The first major Internet dating Web site is widely held to be the combination of kiss.com and match.com, which were both registered by the same person in 1994 and 1995 respectively. Though there were other dating sites at the time, most focused on international dating and had more in common with "mail order bride" services than the dating sites we know today.
However, from there, the market quickly exploded. By 1996 there were 16 dating Web sites listed in Yahoo!, which was a directory at the time, and other powerhouses such as Friendfinder.com and OneandOnly.com had already started up.
In 1998, Internet dating got a cultural boost with the release of the movie "You've Got Mail". The movie, which reunited "Sleepless in Seattle's" Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, focused on two business rivals who hated each other in person but fell in love over the Web. Though the movie didn't focus on Internet dating directly, it put meeting someone on the Web in a positive light and showcased the Web as a tool for bringing people together, even those who don't like each other in the physical world.
Riding on a wave of growing public acceptance, Match.com and OneandOnly.com were acquired by Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch for an undisclosed sum. This legitimacy caused the major Internet players, including both Yahoo! and AOL, to work on their personal/dating section. During the dot-com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, there were several other high-profile dating site acquisitions
However, as with most budding Web businesses, the dot com crash in 2001/2002 brought much of the frenzy to an end and changed the online world. However, for dating sites, the change came more from the launch of Friendster and Myspace in 2002. With those sites, the idea of online "social networking" was born and online dating was a byproduct of that. People could meet potential boyfriends or girlfriends on the Web without going to a site dedicated to the cause. Social networking carried with it a much smaller stigma, since it is also used by those not seeking a partner at all.
But despite this wave of social networking, which included the founding of Facebook in 2004, online dating has continued to thrive. In 2007, Americans spent over $500 million on online dating, making it the second highest industry for "paid content" on the Web, behind pornography.
However, the current online dating climate is one of balkanization. Currently the market has been segmented out to an ever larger number of sites focused on an ever-smaller niche audiences. Currently, there are sites for virtually every city, every sexual orientation, every desired relationship, every religion, every race and almost every hobby.
The end result is that, according to Online Dating Magazine, nearly 20 million people visit at least one online dating site every month and 120,000 marriages every year take place, at least in part, due to online dating.
In 2002, Wired Magazine predicted that, "Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love won't look for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because 'the right books are found only by accident.'"
The prediction does not seem to be that far off as it is exactly where we are heading with both online dating and social networking.