In the last five years, mate-finding and courtship have seen changes due to online dating services. Telecommunications and computer technologies have developed rapidly since around 1995, allowing daters the use of home telephones with answering machines – mobile phones – and web-based systems to find prospective partners. "Pre-dates" can take place by telephone or online via instant messaging, e-mail, or even video communication. A disadvantage is that, with no initial personal interview by a traditional dating agency head, internet daters are free to exaggerate or lie about their characterisitics. While the growing popularity of the Internet took some time, currently one in five singles is now said to look for love on the Web, which has led to a dramatic shift in dating patterns. Research in the United Kingdom suggests that at 2004 there were around 150 agencies there, and the market was growing at around twenty percent a year due to, first, the very low entry barriers to setting up a dating site, and secondly, the rising number of single people. However, even academic researchers find it impossible to find precise figures about crucial statistics, such as, first, the ratio of active daters to the large rump of inactive members whom the agency will often wrongly claim to still be potential partners, and secondly, the overall ratio of men to women in an agency's membership. Academic research on traditional pre-internet agencies suggested most agencies may well have far more men than women in their membership. Where traditionally, men were expected to fill the role of "the pursuer", the anonymity of the Internet (as well as other factors) has allowed women to take on that role online. A recent study indicated that "women pay to contact men as often as the reverse, which is quite different from behavior in telephone-based dating system" (from Wired magazine). The trend of singles making a Web connection continues to increase, as the percentage of North American singles who have tried Internet dating has grown from two percent in 1999 to over ten percent today (from Canadian Business, February 2002). More than half of online consumers (53%) know someone who has started a friendship or relationship online, and three quarters of 18-24-year-old online consumers (74%) say they do. There is also some academic evidence that the 18–25 age group has significantly taken up online dating. There is still plenty of room for traditional matchmakers to thrive, however, and only time will tell which industry wins out in the end.
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