According to experts the online-market for finding a parter for life is developing into a particularly lucrative business. In 2006 Germans spent 65.6 million Euros in order to find a mate on the internet. This corresponds to an increase of 49% as compared to the year 2005. For the year 2007 the Jupiter Research market research institution calculated that turnover in this field could increase by another 29% to reach 84.5 million Euros.
This finding was discovered by the above research institution in the course of a study which had been commissioned by the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM). During the presentation of the figures in Berlin yesterday, Mr. Florian Koch, who is an internet expert with BITKOM, said: »Online-dating is a continuously growing multi-million-Euro business. It is more important than the business in music downloads onto personal computers which registered a turnover of 48 million in 2006.«
In total there were on average 6.2 million people over the age of 15 visiting online dating services each month in the first quarter of 2007. This is slightly less than in the same period of 2006. This slight decrease can be explained, according to BITKOM, by the growing popularity of so-called social networking sites such as MySpacee. But at the same time an always growing number of people are willing to spend money on online-dating.
This development is not limited to Germany. Therefore, the forecasts by market researchers are very optimistic. Thus, the number of users of online-dating services in Europe is expected to rise from 2.8 million in 2006 to 6.0 million by the year 2011. Corrispondingly, turnover in this business is forecast to increase from 246 million to 549 million Euros in the same period. One of the most important markets in this respect could be Germany. Here in 2011 online-dating services with an expected turnover of 138.1 million Euros could generate one quarter of Europe´s total turnover. A similar German market share was already registered in the year 2006. 