Even ten or fifteen years ago, online dating didn’t seem to offer any real promise. Many even said that dating sites and apps are the playground for the most desperate. For those who no longer believe that their love can be found offline. But years have passed, and the picture became completely different.
Today already, 17% of marriages in the world begin with online dating. And every third person is honest that they’ve met new people on the Internet. More than 60% have called online dating a positive phenomenon, though that number dropped to less than 50% more recently.
Let’s look into the recent past and estimate how much the web dating industry has changed during this time.
The past, present and future of online dating
In 2019, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences magazine published an interesting article on online dating. In it, the authors called 1995 a turning point in the web dating industry. It was at this time that the number of acquaintances on the Web overtook those that formed through mutual friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances. The reason for such changes is quite obvious — it was in the mid-90s that the Internet began to become publicly available, and the audience of the World Wide Web in developed countries began to increase many times over. Accordingly, interest in online dating has also increased.
The problem of Internet dating in the nineties was different — there were practically no user-friendly sites for dating. In 1995, Match.com was launched. It became the first dating service of the modern type, which dozens of new sites later mimicked. And since the beginning of the 2000s, their number has increased at a tremendous pace. The real giants of web dating began to appear — Badoo in 2006, Tinder in 2012, Bumble in 2014 and so on.
At the dawn of dating sites and apps in the 2000s and 2010s, they were not yet too popular. Also, they were not effective. Users registered out of curiosity — they did not have any serious expectations of meeting their love on the Web. But time passed, more and more real stories appeared of how people found their love on the Internet, got married, started families and were completely happy. The level of trust in online dating began to grow, the number of online couples increased, and the dating platforms themselves were significantly upgraded.
However, at the same time, serious disadvantages began to appear:
- The search for a soulmate has turned from an interesting and quite effective pastime into a routine. Endless swipes and poor matches do not give the expected result, but only waste up time.
- Dating sites and apps are introducing more and more paid features. And with a free account, the chances of meeting your soulmate are minimized. Dating has become a money pumping machine.
- Due to the abundance of dating sites, an ordinary user simply cannot find what they need. Think for yourself how to choose the right service among more than 8,000?
Fortunately, now it is not at all necessary to use classic dating sites and applications to meet your love. There is a great alternative — online video chats.
Online video chat as an alternative to standard web dating: history and modernity
Let’s go back to the past. More specifically, to 2009. It was in the spring of 2009 that 18-year-old American Leif K-Brooks launched the Omegle service. The site was quite primitive, but it had one unusual function — it connected random people in text chat. The format turned out to be interesting, and a month later Omegle was used by tens of thousands of people. But something Omegle still lacked — the ability to see the other person.
Also in 2009, another online video chat service appeared on the scene — Chatroulette from the Russian developer Andrey Ternovsky. It was this service that became the first video chat that allowed you to communicate with random users via video in one click. And it was a real breakthrough. Millions of users from all over the world came to the site, got acquainted, communicated, found new friends or even their true love.
The developers of Omegle hastily added a video chat function, which attracted even more users. So in 2010, Omegle became almost the most popular platform for online dating on the planet. But soon users began to notice serious disadvantages, many of which have remained to this day:
- Seriously bad moderation, which is why the experience of using Omegle is not the most positive.
- The lack of full-fledged settings and filters for searching for specific types of person..
- The abundance of fakes, bots and just inadequate users.
- Unequal ratio of men and women — 85% men and only 15% girls on the site is not uncommon here.
All these disadvantages forced users to look for better alternatives. And after 2010, plenty of them appeared. Many have surpassed and continue to surpass Omegle on all points. For example:
- CooMeet — an online video chat with a 100% accurate and effective gender filter, which is an interesting analogue of Omegle. The site coomeet.com/omegle connects men only with girls. And girls must confirm their identity when registering.
- Chatrandom — offers gender and geographic filters, as well as a section with themed chat rooms. There is even a separate chat only with girls, but with paid access.
- Emeraldсhat — video chat with karma rating. If you have good karma, then the site connects you only with users with the same high karma, filtering out all dubious users.
This is just a small part of the user-friendly video chats available to the modern user. Yes, some of them are paid or partially paid. But here you get a better user experience and a real opportunity to meet your love instead of wasting time chatting with Internet trolls and inadequate people on Omegle. Try them, you’ll definitely like them. And you may never want to go back to the classic dating sites and apps.
There are many interesting things to come
Now we are on the verge of global changes in the Internet dating industry. Classic sites and apps are being actively modernized, online video chats are growing their audience at an unprecedented pace, and everyone is hearing about a completely new format of online communication — metaverses.
So far, it’s difficult to predict what path the metaverse format will take, what opportunities it will open up for Internet users, and how quickly dating here will become more popular than in classic dating. But this is likely to happen. We also think that both dating apps and popular video chat services will soon launch their own metaverses, which will become a new stage in their evolution. It’s already happening. For example, Tinder announced at the end of 2021 that they were working on creating their own metaverse. And this is just the beginning. There are still a lot of interesting things ahead. We’re looking forward to it!