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.