Is the bloom fading from the rose of internet romance?

MSNBC - Online dating losing steam :
"Jupiter Research, which focuses on Internet analysis, forecasts that the online dating market will increase 9 percent in 2005 to $516 million, a dramatic, if inevitable, falloff from the heady early days when the industry was new and reported growth rates of 70 or 80 percent each year."

According to this story by Mike Musgrove and Frank Ahrens of washingtonpost.com, dating services continue to be the third largest generator of revenue for on-line services. But the growing competition among dating services means that marketing costs are rising faster than the paid customer base.

My personal experience in this field leads me to endorse the sentiment of George (Steve Zahn), one of the sales assistants at the Shop Around the Corner in the marvelous film You've Got Mail: "As far as I'm concerned, the internet is just another way of being rejected by women." Not much different, in fact, from my first experience of computer matchmaking while in college at UVa in the late Sixties. I remember paying good money for a list of six women who matched my psychological profile and who, by a coincidence worthy of the Heart of Gold spaceship's improbability drive, all lived on the same hallway of a dormitory at Longwood College in Farmville, VA.