Back in the early nineties dating online was nothing like it is now.  Singles would post a classified and hope to get a response.  Nowadays the world wide web is filled with online dating sites with loads of features and services.  There are so many dating sites out there that it's hard to choose just one!  When dating online became popular was when there were just a few sites that offered the most basic features like chat rooms, forums, and email.  The reason why singles flooded to these new dating sites was because the sites had databases of singles that were easy to find.  Rather than posting a classified and hoping someone would see it, singles could search for others by criteria.  

After a while there were a few sites that offered their dating services for free.  It took a while for these 'free' dating sites to become popular because no one really knew about free online dating quite yet.  Shortly after the first pioneering free dating site took off and had thousands of members taking advantage of the free dating services there was a buzz about dating online for free forming.  This was the beginning of the Internet dating phenomenon.  All of a sudden there were thousands of niche dating site that took off, from Christian dating to Vegan dating you can now find just about any dating site that meets your hobby.  Now not only do singles have the option of searching for others by a certain criteria they can find others on sites that most suitably match their personality, belief, and hobby.