MatchNet has swiftly built one of the largest American online dating services, but the company has always had a roving eye. While many of its rivals operate a single site and pipe in any foreignvisitors, MatchNet aims to think globally and act locally. It has established 10 sites that cater to users in different countries and niches: Australians, Jews, college students, Germans and gay menand women, among others.

The company is about to make its most serious effort yet to capitalize on its global ambitions by charging for its services outside the United States for the first time.

Having reached what it considers a critical mass of users internationally, MatchNet started billing subscribers in Britain, Canada, Germany, Israel and Australia for services that had been free. The fees are roughly equivalent to the $24.95 charged monthly to Americans and similar to what other companies charge in various markets.

MatchNet, founded in 1998 by two Israelis living in California, Joe Shapira and Alon Carmel, is one of two specialist companies fighting for supremacy in the United States and, increasingly, overseas, where online dating is not as widespread and growth potential is perceived as greater.

Its archrival is Match.com, a Dallas-based subsidiary of the service conglomerate InterActiveCorp. Other dating businesses are far behind, although the top two must also fight off sites like Yahoo Personals, which draws clients from the rest of the Yahoo online empire.

Match.com is the outright leader it had more than double the U.S. traffic of MatchNet in November, according to the research firm comScore Networks but MatchNet may be catching up. Nate Elliott, an online media and marketing analyst for Jupiter Research in New York, finds MatchNet’s prospects especially bright because of its global ambitions.

Match.com is basically one site, while MatchNet is known for going after niche and international markets, Elliott said. These are two growth areas we see in the dating space. MatchNet has done a very good job at driving much more traffic from international sites.

Online dating is the largest segment of U.S. Internet commerce, with spending estimated by Jupiter at $313 million last year. Jupiter forecasts that U.S. spending will nearly double, to $602 million, by 2007, but it projects a near tripling in European spending to 117 million, or $147.3 million.

Another big difference between the two rivals is that Match.com brings in business through heavyweight partners like MSN and America Online, while MatchNet prefers a more go-it-alone approach.

Match.com partners with all the biggest sites it can find, Elliott said. In doing so, it has gained access to traffic, but it also forces them to share revenue. He added, It is rare that you find two companies that are going at it and doing things so differently.

The two are also going at it rhetorically. Tim Sullivan, president of Match.com, credited his company with making online dating socially acceptable.

We led the legitimization and mainstreaming of this category in the last couple of years, Sullivan said. We are very far and away the leader in this category and the innovator in the U.S. and internationally.

He questioned how big MatchNet really is.

Companies like MatchNet, the way they acquire customers is with the kind of online advertising that generates very high traffic data, but it’s not a very productive traffic flow, he said, meaning that relatively few visitors drawn through pop-up ads and the like go on to be paid subscribers.

Shapira, MatchNet’s chief executive, accepts that Match.com is bigger, but he says he is confident that MatchNet is narrowing the lead.

We had one-tenth of their revenue slightly more than one year ago, he said, and now it’s better than one-third.

Niche markets have always been vital to MatchNet, which began after its founders noticed the growth of newspaper personal ads. They figured that a gap existed between the number of Jewish singles looking for love and the number finding it.

Crucially, they also fathomed the potential for the Internet which was not the ubiquitous presence it is today to help close the gap and earn them a healthy return. The result was JDate.com, one of MatchNet’s sites today.

We felt that there was a great need for a service of this kind because people are more isolated today in the workplace and even at home, Shapira said.

As with the ethereal realms in which its clients connect with one another, MatchNet appears to exist everywhere and nowhere. The principal executives are Israelis who work in Beverly Hills, California, along with most of the staff, but MatchNet is a British company, and the stock is listed in Frankfurt.

MatchNet incorporated in England in order to list on Ofex, a British market for very small companies. That was in October 1998, after a market plunge made fund-raising difficult. MatchNet then enlisted the help of Value Management & Research, a German investment banking firm, which arranged the Frankfurt listing.

MatchNet says it has no trouble attracting investors now. The stock price has tripled in less than a year, helped by the acquisition of a 25 percent stake by the hedge fund Tiger Technology Management.

As a young business, MatchNet tends to slip in and out of profitability. But Shapira said the company turned an operating profit in the fourth quarter, and he projects an operating profit of $15 million for 2004 on revenue of $70 million. Now that international markets have begun to bring in money, revenue for the first nine months of 2003 totaled $25.4 million

We’re devoting more marketing resources and plan to cover most of Western Europe in 2004, he said. Other plans include a share listing on the Nasdaq market in the United States this spring.