Onlinedatingpost
After reading David evans secret to creating successful dating sites I am left wondering if any new players will enter the market.
3 Years ago david was promoting niche sites as the future of the industry, now 3 years later are any niche sites making money on a grand scale other than Jdate? Even Jdate makes peanuts and doesn’t come close to the $300M plus made by match.com and Eharmony.
Now david is writing about Zoosk and are you interested saying they are the next big thing because they have so many “users”. Sure many of these ”apps” have users but they have no real way of making money from them. As Noah from Okdork points out if you have 100 Million page impressions a month on Facebook you are lucky to make $10,000. Now a site like eharmony gets 400 million pageviews a month and makes over $20,000,000 a month
Even worse facebook apps seem to suffer from fads, users of facebook view apps as entertainment. When you create programs that are for entertainment users will always want to flock to something newer and cooler. Now if facebooks payment platform goes live and these dating apps start charging what will happen? I think no one will use the paid apps and it will make facebook subject to all these bogus dating laws that have come out.
To make matters worse dating sites in the US are facing some 7 or 8 different patent infringement lawsuits, is facebook going to be subject to all of these? I think that facebook apps will be an ATM machine for patent trolls going forward. Nothing is easier than setting up a shell company creating an app and then sueing facebook for patent infringement with a different shell company.
I’ve always told David the reason for my success was doing the opposite of whatever he posted on his blog. :) Sites that are trendy today are rarely the ones that get huge and make money in the long run. A good example of this are webcam dating sites which seem to be trendy every 3 years. Woome is virtually identical to the sites from 2002 in terms of functionality with a slightly better user interface. The problem with them as back in 2002 is the majority of people use them as entertainment and the chat sessions involve a vast amount of nudity.
April 4, 2008 at 3:29 am
Marcus, “Even Jdate makes peanuts… “?
If $25,000,000+ revenue with around $18,000,000-$20,000,000 of that being profit is peanuts, then what is a lot to you?
April 4, 2008 at 5:33 am
awwww, you rick rolled me.
I even clicked it despite the pre-view pop up thingy.
April 4, 2008 at 7:10 am
25 million verse 300M is peanuts… especially now that they have competition and the profile margins are going south fast.
April 4, 2008 at 8:23 am
Markus, is it intelligent now to incroporate branch in US? I would like to have my company US and Canadian presence besides here in EU member states. I don’t know if website will be liable to US laws if data and the head office is outside the country(EU privacy laws here are stringent)?
April 4, 2008 at 5:52 pm
$25M & $300M are the wrong figures. It is the profit figures you should be looking at.
JDate continues to grow. In Q4 2007, revenue was $8.6M, or $34.4M annualised. That likely means around $25M in profit. So, contrary to your assertion, JDate is not going south.
The company as a whole doesn’t make much, but that’s for a variety of reasons, chief among them being:
a) they should jettison every other site in their network
b) they shouldn’t be public.
I am not sure about you, but’d take $25M/year in profit. Perhaps that is “peanuts” to you, though. Or, you are way off base, and won’t admit it. Hmmmm?
Other niche players do well (present company included, ahem), but a lot less than your “peanuts”. It does lead for a nice lifestyle, though (as I type sitting here in Brazil)….
April 10, 2008 at 8:14 am
Starting Dating or Networking business is becoming more and more difficult as there are many strong players in the market. You should be skilled and experienced in the sphere to succeed. Nevertheless, if you’re not so professional you still can profit if you have a brand new idea for your site and put much effort to promote it.
Professionally developed Software is a key to success. When choosing a Dating or Social Networking Script you definitely need reliability, flexibility and support.
If you’re planning to start your Dating, Personals or Social Networking Business, PG Dating Pro (http://www.datingpro.com/dating/) and PG Social Networking (http://www.datingpro.com/social/) Software is a way to go!
April 11, 2008 at 1:08 am
Any idea what Speed Date is making? Not entirely niche, moreso a unique approach to online dating.
- nicholas
April 11, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Mark,
There is a new player that will be entering the (mass) market. “Will Be” is what needs to change to “will soon be”.
This new player has an extremely unfair advantage in the marketplace that will more than supplement current online daters and, more importantly, will capture a large portion of the 66% gap that exists.
Would you agree that the problems in the market that allow this 66% gap to exist are split amongst “paid” and “free” site contenders? In other words, some of the problems you face are not the same as the problems that a “paid membership” site would face. And likewise, the problems paid memberships suffer are not the same problems that your model suffers?
So, how do you solve those problems simultaneously and close the gap?
This new player to enter the market has that solution and will be coming for those profits at a viral speed.
This key player is currently searching for an industry experienced mind to launch with. You may be interested to take a closer look?
April 12, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Not all niche sites like JDate are going south, only the trendy sites like speed dating are the ones that can go south at any moment.
April 12, 2008 at 9:45 pm
[...] at Plenty of Fish Rickrolled me on April Fools day, nice one Markus. Read his post so you have a context for my [...]
April 16, 2008 at 1:00 am
I think as long as POF and markus allow people to go onto his site and say what ever they want and openly and publicly accuse someone of something I think fewer and fewer people are going to go else where where that kind of crap isn’t allowed. POF is going down because he allows people to do this. I am already letting people i know that are on that site about his atitude and they are deleting their profiles and I will continue to warn people about his site.
May 5, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Hi Markus, I have started a completely free dating website for practicing Christians. Hope to do for them what you have done with POF. I found a nice gal by the way in Sehelt thanks to your site - thanks, it works..
Problem I have is getting exposure, I tried advertising on your site ,money went faster than warp 9. I did get some sign ups but not enough to justify the expense. I may try again though, I would prefer to pay for click through ads rather than page view.
Site uses Date pro, I had to do quite a lot of debugging the code though, the support from them was ok - but most of time they live in a state of denial.
Mac - Onlylonelyfish.com