ReadWriteWeb

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. People, especially Internet users, are either happily coupled up and doing something lovey-dovey, or they're hunting around on dating sites for their soulmate. Because, you know, true love only happens on the Internet. Unfortunately for some, there's danger in online dating.

"Cyber criminals are constantly looking for that common interest to capitalize on and in this case it's love," said Molly O'Hearn, Vice President of Operations at Iovation. "Just like in the face-to-face world, if something seems too good to be true it probably is."

According to the Yahoo help site, Yahoo Personals will close permanently on July 21. Users may either quit the pay-to-date service or transfer their profiles to Match.com.

Dating services have been online for quite a while - the debate over their efficacy beginning about eight seconds after the first personal appeared - and have grown in popularity since. But the shuttering of Yahoo Personals may owe as much to a change in revenue models as anything else.

Last year, we ruffled a few feathers when we posted some OKCupid data on dating and race. We're sure this latest news is going to be equally unpopular, but the data support the conclusions, so here we go.

Women users of the online dating site state a range of preferred ages for partners that is relatively normal, and when it comes to reaching out to other users, they stay pretty strictly within their own self-imposed guidelines. However, men on the site continue to state a preference for 20-something girls well into their later years. And even when male users state a cut-off age, they continue to contact women who are below that age.

According to a recent study conducted by dating website OKCupid, "Black women are sweethearts... white men are sh*tty," and white people in general are a horrible bunch of xenophobes.

The company recently ran some numbers on response rates for messages sent between almost a million otherwise compatible men and women of varying races, and the results are eye-opening. "Whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same," the related blog post reads. "However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved."

Don't pour your soul out into an email, don't send an online mix tape and whatever you do, don't write any poems longer than a limerick or a haiku. According to popular dating site OK Cupid, only 32% of dating site messages receive a response. Of the successful efforts, the majority of first contact messages are brief. The ideal message length from men to women is between 200-300 characters and from women to men it's a mere 50 characters. This doesn't bode well for chatty romantics, but power Twitter users may find themselves in their element.

We've written before about PlentyOfFish, a leading online dating site that is run by a single person and is raking in money. Markus Frind is the singular force behind PlentyOfFish. At the time of our last review, June 2006, PlentyOfFish was earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense (around $3.5 M per annum).

I caught up with Markus today via email and asked how the business is doing now. He didn't want to get specific about earnings, but he said that POF will earn $10 Million + next year (which puts it at around $30k per day). So just in earnings, POF has grown rapidly over the past year or so. As well as Adsense, income now comes from banner ads and affiliate marketing. A May Wall St Journal article has a good general profile of Markus and his company.

There is one former fact about PlentyOfFish that has just become a myth - Markus hired his first employee a few weeks ago! This person is doing customer service, a task previously done by Markus and his girlfriend. So technically POF is a two-person company now, but that doesn't make quite as good a headline ;-)