On Feb. 13, thousands of young people will pour onto the streets of Paris, Milan, and Barcelona. But they won't be protesting -- they'll be looking for love. The Valentine's Eve street parties, dubbed "St. Single's Day," are sponsored by Paris-based Meetic.com, Europe's leading Web matchmaker. The festivities will include DJs and speed-dating stands, where singles have only a few minutes to chat up a potential partner.
Yes, now even Latin lovers need help playing the seduction game. Online dating, virtually unknown on the Continent five years ago, is taking off in a big way, even as the phenomenon seems to be slowing on the other side of the Atlantic.
SPREADING CONNECTIONS. Revenues of the leading European dating Web sites will more than double over the next five years, from $200 million to $450 million, predicts Paris-based analyst Olivier Beauvillain of consultancy Jupiter Research. While sales in the U.S. are still higher than in Europe, they're expected to grow only 9% this year, to $515 million. "The European market is the most exciting right now," Beauvillain says.
The region's biggest online dating service is Meetic.com, a private company launched three years ago by Web entrepreneur Marc Simoncini. The site is set to hit 10 million members around St. Single's Day and will book around $55 million in sales this year. In France, a country inextricably linked with romance, one adult in 15 is a Meetic member. In Italy and Spain, it's one in fewer than 50.
In these and Meetic's eight other country sites -- Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and Britain -- membership is soaring by as much as 20,000 a day. Over the next six months, four more country sites will be added -- Poland, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland.
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