Business

When Dave Coy was seeking love online three years ago, he couldn’t find a photographer to take a flattering headshot, one that would draw scores of female admirers to his profile. Yet, without the perfect picture, he managed to meet his perfect partner on matchmaker.com.

“It’s all about the photo,” said Coy’s wife, Merav Knafo, 33. “That’s the first thing that people see. That’s how they judge you. If you pass the test, they’ll click on your profile.”

A quick perusal of Match.com confirms the worst. Search for men 25 to 45, and up comes a screen full of guys with sunglasses, sweaty temples, hats and earphones; distorted self-portraits; and photos with exes cropped out. Search for women 25 to 45, and it’s much of the same: fuzzy, out of focus faces; dead looking, driver’s-license-looking mugs; and one soft, overly glamorous photo.

To solve the problem, Knafo and Coy – formerly a professional photographer – founded a national photography service for online daters, aptly named LookBetterOnline.com.

The Long Beach, Calif.-based company with 4,000 customers is one of a handful of Web-based businesses pledging to help online daters by providing attractive, natural-looking photographs and/or professionally written profiles. The prices range from $25 for an essay critique at PersonalAdMakeover.com to $129 for a 45-minue photo shoot from LookBetterOnline to thousands of dollars for online dating coaching by Evan Marc Katz, author of I Can’t Believe I’m Buying This Book: A Commonsense Guide to Successful Internet Dating.

Experts say the extra services are just starting to take off, even though growth in the $516-million-dollar online dating industry is beginning to level out. With approximately 40 million online daters in the United States, the businesses have plenty of potential customers.

“We’ve just scratched the surface,” said Mark Brooks, editor of the Online Personals Watch Web site. “We’ve just gotten over the stigma this past year.”

Online dating, which began in 1995 with the launch of Match.com, has definitely lost its desperate connotation, Brooks said. It’s also lost free membership on many sites, such as the popular eHarmony.com, which charges up to $50 a month. But the concept of paying for professionally written profiles or professional headshots is still new.

“What’s the point of spending $25 a month or more if you have a crappy picture?” said Knafo, who advertises on sites, such as JDate.com, Cupid.com and PeopleFishing.com. “You’re basically throwing your money down the drain.”

Without knowing the personality behind the picture, it’s easy to keep clicking, said Katz, the owner of E-Cyrano.com, who calls himself “a personal trainer for people who want to fall in love.” Katz, 33, started his company in 2003 after working as a customer service representative for Spark Networks, which owns AmericanSingles.com and JDate.com, a site for Jewish singles.

“When you’re shopping online, all you have to have is one thing wrong, and they’ve moved on,” he said. “Everybody has more choices than ever before. It’s a competitive market.”

Karen Berntson, who started NoticeYou.com in the Bay area two years ago, compares the competitive edge of a professional portrait to getting a manicure. You could do it yourself, or you could pay someone to do a better job.

“It’s like giving yourself a self-esteem boost before you get out there and enter this whole crazy world,” she said.

Both Berntson, 35, and Roger Kriegel, a New York photographer who takes headshots for LookBetterOnline, say the clientele for professional profile photos are usually in their mid-30s or older.

“I think it’s a combination of serious and desperate,” said Kriegel, 34, who takes the photographs in his fifth-floor walk-up apartment in Manhattanville.

Normally, clients are nervous, he said. So he acts goofy, bouncing around and shaking his tush while posing the clients on his bright, bare hardwood floors, he said. He tries to make them look natural.

“It’s all about the person’s face – their eyes and smile,” said Kriegel, who has taken more than 100 headshots for LookBetterOnline in the last two years. “Posture is very important.”

So is the lighting, he said. That’s the biggest problem with amateur snapshots. Composition can also be tricky. Kriegel, who owns his own photography business, called Engage Design, shoots clients from their best angle.

“Like anything, putting your best face forward, the first impression, really makes a difference,” he said. “You want them to click to your profile.”

Once the profile is clicked, though, online daters have to worry about personal essays, which describe them and the kinds of people they hope to meet.

Plenty of online daters write general essays, mentioning that they like movies and long walks on the beach, Brooks said. The secret to an effective essay is to be specific.

“Many people, including smart and well-educated ones, are lousy at describing what makes them interesting or unique, the qualities and quirks that might attract people or also clearly rule others out,” said Norman Oder of Brooklyn, of PersonalAdMakeover.com. “It’s much better to be specific than generic.”

For $120, a PersonalAdMakeover writer will use a written questionnaire and hour-long interview to create two essays. For $129, Katz’s E-Cyrano will deliver two 200-word essays. And for $99.95 through LookBetterOnline, Dean Shanson, author of Internet Dating: A Personal Survival Guide, will write an essay. All promise to capture daters’ fun, attractive personalities. And like the photos, plenty of testimonials claim the professionally written profiles will garner results.

“This stuff works,” Katz said. “Like everything in life, you get what you put in to it.”

Laura Johnston can be contacted at lej2103@columbia.edu