Well, I'll start off by saying it's not for me - my wife won't approve! Anyway, I'm looking to design a dating site but wondering what the competition is like? My site will be free to join, with optional Paypal payment for those wanting their advert to stand out better. Know of any good dating sites?
I have recently started a new Online Dating website, the website is only 3 days old today but already has 9 members. I refuse to add false profiles to the website to boost its popularity, instead I am giving new members a 6 month fully featured free trial. The site is really nice, fully featured with everything you expect on a dating site as well as some new features I am working. The sites address is http://www.b2bmembers.co.za or b2bmembers.co.za.
well.......myspace and hi5 and such are used for hooking up probably more then "dating" sites themselves, so they should be definitively included as competition
There are thousands of dating sites on the net now. Most people use this fact to assume that the market is over saturated and that you need big bucks to create a big site to pull in members and make money. This is not really true - building a site from scratch can be a complicated and expensive process especially if you hope to be successful and have many active members on your site. Covering development, hosting, support, administrative and staffing costs use a huge burden that stops most sites long before they take off. If you were to create sites to compete with the large and established sites - match, meetic, friendfinder etc then you also need to pump big money into your marketing. This does not mean you cannot build a profitable dating site business. Rather than build a generic dating site the alternative is to target a niche. Internet users, and particularly dating site users are looking to niche sites. Sites which they know they already share something in common with other members. Niches are less fiercely competed in, and more profitable as conversion rates are higher. Of course you still have the development and management costs, and waiting to hit a critical mass before there is enough members in your site to attract others and be able to justify charging. There is a simple solution to this too - use a white label system. A company which does all of this for you, builds and hosts the site, takes care of all billing and customer support and takes a commission from this. You are then free to concentrate on marketing your site, and building your members. worlddatingpartners.com does exactly this. Building and branding of a custom site, and populating it with members (from over 5 million) which match your unique niche member criteria. There are no development or on going costs and you can retain up to 70% of the sales revenue! A quick a and simple solution for entering into on-line dating and have an instantly profitable business.