Niche dating services are growing fast. Grant and Sarah Edwards met through FarmersOnly.com.

By J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN

Stephanie Betit first read “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead” and Ayn Rand’s essay collection “The Virtue of Selfishness” in 2004. The books changed her life, she said, turning her from a devout Christian into an atheist and a follower of objectivism, Rand’s philosophy of independence and rational self-interest.
“From then on, I was looking for a partner who shared my outlook on life,” said Ms. Betit, a 28-year-old teacher in Walpole, New Hampshire.
Finding him proved a challenge. By winter she had all but given up on love. Then a friend told her about TheAtlas- Sphere.com, an online dating site for Rand fans. Ms. Betit posted a profile, which caught the attention of James Hancock, 30, the chief executive of a business software company in Orillia, Ontario. He sent her an e-mail message, and within a few days they graduated to talking on the phone. Three months later, they were engaged.
The couple is among a growing number of people who have found love on dating sites that pair members based on a specific shared interest or background - sites like HorseandCountrySingles.com, Nerdsatheart.com, DateMyPet.com, STDmatch.net (for singles with sexually transmitted diseases), Mature SinglesOnly. com (for people over 50) and Veggielove. com.
“Singles are increasingly eager to narrow the audience and really target their needs,” said Mark Brooks, a dating consultant who keeps his own blog, OnlinePersonalsWatch. com. “It’s the same reason why Procter & Gamble makes so many detergents. We are all drawn to things that cater to our very specific desires.”
According to Hitwise, an analysis company, there are now 1,378 United States dating sites - up from 876 just three years ago. Mr. Brooks estimates that 44 percent of those sites in the United States are niche sites .
Those sites, some of which require a fee, make business sense. Because large companies like Match.com, eHarmony, Yahoo Personals and SinglesNet. com dominate the general market, Mr. Brooks said, “the only real entrepreneurial opportunities left in the online dating world lie in the niche market.”
In 2005, Jerry Miller, the owner of an agricultural advertising agency in Beachwood, Ohio, started a dating site for “down-to-earth country types” called FarmersOnly.com.
FarmersOnly.com has attracted more than 90,000 members so far - 50,000 in the last year alone. Mr. Miller said he knew of more than 65 marriages of people who met on the site.
Sarah Edwards, 26, grew up on an Ohio horse farm surrounded by cornfields. She met her husband, Grant Edwards, 27, on FarmersOnly.
com, when she was living in Columbus and tired of dating city boys .
“I dated lots of guys who liked that I was passionate about showing and raising horses, in theory,” Ms. Edwards said. “But once they realized how much work goes into that lifestyle, they’d be totally turned off. The endpoint of any relationship would always come when I’d think to myself, ‘I don’t see that guy cleaning out my stalls.’ ”