Jupiter Media estimates that about 40 million singles are using online dating services in 2004. There are thousands of dating services hosting in the Internet. Most sites charge monthly fees in order for members to contact other members.

These monthly fees usually range from $10 to 50 dollars. The average yearly cost to join a dating services is about $300. If 5% of dating singles are the paid members, then the dating service market will reach 1 billion dollars membership fee in 2005. Besides membership fee income, all big dating services still have huge amount of revenue from advertisement and local dating party events. That's why many people still want to get into dating service market.
Inadequate membership size is the biggest issue for online dating services. Many dating sites keep ambiguous reporting of the size of the membership database. When a company reports that they have millions of members, actually only a small percentage of members are active or subscribing members. Since the dating services accept the members worldwide and half of the members are of the opposite sex, so the chance of you to find your right match close to your city is very small, unless the database is extremely huge.
The good search function of dating services should help people to find and reach the right match. The basic search function is to filter matches by member's profile, state,city, zip and distance. Also, they provides a quick search function, which means they want to find someone for you, in case that you cannot find any match for the standard search function. In order to make sure you can reach someone, the advanced search function can look for current online members, new members, most active members, most popular members, most networked member, most inviting member, keywords in the profiles and even members of today's birthday.
The key is to contact the match. Some dating services allow people to create multiple profiles to increase the matching possibility. Therefore, to find the company owns a very large membership database is a better bargain to join. According to traffic report in June 2002, Match.com had more visitors than all other competitors.