• The familiar concept was patented on September 7, 1999 by David J

• Blumberg and DoYouDo chief executive officer Gil S
• Sudai, but several websites were already employing the methodology by that date, and thus apparently were allowed to continue using it
• United States Patent 5,950,200 points out several potential flaws in traditional courtship and in conventional dating systems in which strangers meet online, promoting anonymous matching of friends and acquaintances as a better alternative.

Researchers at MIT and Harvard have found that "people who had had a chance to interact with each other (by adding machine only) on a virtual tour of Online Dating a museum subsequently had another moneymaking face-to-face meetings than people who had viewed only profiles."