Despite the grave outlook in some press reports, there are no signs that the eruption of social networks has burned the paid online personals market.

“Still, as casual visitor traffic slows or shrinks, competitors will have to seek out harder-to-sell consumers, as well as offer additional services to their existing customers, ” said David Card, Vice President and Research Director for JupiterResearch. “And competition is already ferocious. ”

Personals remain one of the larger paid content categories online. Only music and games are bigger, or attract more than 10 percent of online users.

“Personals are one of the few legitimate billion-dollar paid content businesses, ” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch. “JupiterResearch projects a steady 16 percent compound annual growth rate through 2012 for the category. ”

The complete findings of this report are immediately available to JupiterResearch clients online at www.jupiterresearch.com. For details on JupiterResearch's methodology, visit www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/methodology or email press@jupiterresearch.com to request a detailed methodology statement.