We’ve received a lot of feedback on the previous post and would like to give Robert Fathers another opportunity to speak on our blog. Below you can find his thoughts on the dating industry, as it moves and changes in the current economic climate.

The Big Dating Sites

Dating is divided into several markets. Let’s say, the Big guns, like Match, Lavalife, Meetic etc; they are totally focused on their brand and very little else, they mainly rely on mass media advertising which is expensive and, more often than not, ineffective. They are purely working on a Business to consumer basis and miraculously many of them don’t have an affiliate system, mostly rely on expensive alternatives, such as Commission Junction and other larger services for affiliates, but of course CJ takes most of the money and the end result is very little profit and high advertising costs. This year highlighted many of these companies as losing money; my own belief is they will survive by their sheer size and backers, like Microsoft behind Match, but never to be that successful in their own right; their sites are also so basic, that most dating scripts even have more to offer.

Small General Dating sites

A very hard time for them: most are joining systems like our own, as they cannot get good deals with merchant accounts and overheads are difficult to cover in a market that is already flooded. However, the light at the end of the tunnel for them is by joining our system; this will help them to clear all operating costs and expand their brand with other languages, currencies and niches. This is a real solution for sites in hard times to expand and make money in an otherwise difficult market.

One off Niches

Each site should have their own unique quality, whether it’s a concept like eHarmony or a niche like JDate.com. These are, of course, more successful, but, of course, limited to a smaller segment of the market. Many of these sites cannot cope with ethnic sites. For example, try Chinese dating in the USA, or Indian dating in the UK. If jDate could cover all languages and countries then their niche becomes larger and, of course, more profitable.

Multiple Niches

The smaller the Niche the higher the profits, any Google AdWords specialist will tell you that this is the answer to real success. Building through 100 of these is no mean task.

Some ideas to dating webmasters and site owners

• How about starting your own dating empire? Where would you begin?
• A good name, a good Domain. Create your brand and design - and you have the beginning of your supersite.
• Build your site outwards, let’s call it superdaters.com
• Clone your site for each country, using the relevant language and currency for each site, link them all together.
• Create Niches around the same brand that cross sale well, like Gay dating or Adult Dating, and you are already making your own advertising for your other sites.
• Expanding on the above, you could create your own free dating site; why not add it to your social network? It’s a great fit and suits the free concept. Use the free dating site to make advertising revenue and then cross sell your free dating sites to your paid dating sites.
• The combinations of ways you can do this are endless; we estimate that you can create up to 13 million niches in our system. The beauty of it all is that anyone can do it from professional to amateur.
• This is a long lasting strong model that can last a lifetime and, I can say this honestly, completely addictive.

Robert Fathers, CEO, Datech Limited

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.