So love is not free, but how many of us are actually willing to sign up and shell out to date online? Many more than you might think it seems. Online dating was one of the first businesses to operate on the net and it's been going strong ever since. But people are often embarrassed to admit they're looking for love online. Mark Lesnick runs iDate 2013, a huge international dating industry conference which starts today in Las Vegas. I asked him whether online dating has now become more socially acceptable.
"There was a time when it kind of was in this taboo range, which was when Facebook and Myspace were becoming the most popular sites - that was around 2007, maybe earlier 2008. Then dating was seeing a bit of a low period. But that had changed after the economic downturn at the end of 2008. A lot of social networks took a hit and at the same time people started looking more towards dating sites as well. So that was the only time that I've seen in my dealings with this business where there're some sort of taboo-related issues."
