Q: How old is your web site?

A: Date.com was started in 1997, it originally was a free dating site, and was later converted into a membership site in 2001. Matchmaker.com which is also owned by the same company is actually the oldest online dating site. It was started as a BBS (Bulletin board system) in 1986. We recently launched a 3rd site, Amor.com. This site focuses on Latin singles in South American and those people interested in meeting Latin men or women.

Q: Do you have any statistics on happy matches you created?

A: Over the years we’ve received thousands of success stories from happy couples who’ve met through our sites. We often get invited to weddings and people even send in photos of babies who’ve been born through relationships started at Date.com & Matchmaker.

Q: How did you start your dating business?

A: It seemed obvious to us… the internet would become a great way for people to connect.

 No matter where they live, what their ethnicity, religion, or personal beliefs were, you could meet new friends, or even fall in love via the computer.

Q: There is a lot of buzz going about ‘viral marketing’. Have you used it and do you think it can be used for promoting dating sites?

A: About 20% of the business that we receive comes from friends or family of those people who have been successful on our site. We try to provide a great service and make sure that our members find dates. Once they do, the word naturally spreads.

Q: Could you please tell about your affiliate program: why is it different from the others, acceptance criteria, do you offer white-labeling, how to apply, etc

A: We offer 3 types of programs for affiliates.

The first program and the one that most of our affiliates are a part of is our CPA (cost-per-action) program. We pay the affiliate when a subscription is purchased. We pay between $40 (USD) to $60, depending on the volume that an affiliate is able to send.

The second program is a CPL (cost-per-lead) program. This program pays for free leads sent to us. Right now we are focused on buying leads from the US, UK and Canada. We are also focused on buying profiles of older singles, those 25 years old or older. We pay between $2-6 per lead depending on the volume that an affiliate is able to send.
Our third program is a Rev-Share program. This program pays a percentage of revenue for all initial and recurring revenue based on subscriptions purchased. We pay 80% to the affiliate and keep 20% for ourselves. This program is reserved for affiliates that can send large volumes of business, at least $5,000 a month.

We have the ability for partners to create their own landing page in their own look and feel. We encourage them to post a notice that XYZ site is “powered by Date.com”. This way when the member gets inside of the members section that says Date.com they will not be surprised.

Based on testing we have found that because of the strong brand name and reputation that we’ve built, mentioning Date.com helps to convert traffic into revenue better than a complete white-label. Most people on the internet will be cautious who they give their credit card to, and our brands create a sense of trust that a new and unknown brand will not.

Q: What are the most important attributes for success in online dating business? Could you please list these factors in order from most significant to less?

A: 1) First I would say that you should be prepared to work hard and make sure you are enjoying the work you do.

2) Keep your cost low.

3) Study the competition and the market and try to understand what is missing for the consumer, try to solve this problem.

4) Try to find something that differentiates you from the competition. This will give you an edge.

Q: What are the highlights of your affiliate program? What advantages do you have in comparison with thousands of similar projects?

A: First we try to keep our margins low and pay out as much as we can to the affiliate. We believe that if the affiliate is making good money they will stick with us and both of us will prosper.

Second, we pay attention to our affiliates. If they have special requests, or assistance, we are there to help. We have full time affiliates managers who can be contacted by email, IM, or phone.

Q: Is it possible to start an online dating business from a scratch today? What minimal starting capital would be required and what advise can you give to beginners?

A: Be prepared to spend millions of dollars if you are going to build an online dating business from scratch. The programming cost and the computers will cost a lot of money but this is not where you will spend the most money. Your money will be spent in marketing. You will need to attract singles to your site and build enough ‘critical mass’ of singles that people will want to use your site.

Think of a dating site like a nightclub, you can buy a nice building, put in cool lighting, nice décor, and a great sound system, but if you walk in and there are no people…

Q: What other projects do you have? Any adult or non-dating projects?

A: We maintain 3 sites, Date.com, Matchmaker.com, and Amor.com. All 3 of these sites are non-adult and we pay great detail to making sure that there is no adult content posted on them. We do not allow nude pictures on the site or vulgar language in the essays.

Q: If you have several dating projects, do you promote them on your own sites?

We are doing a limited amount of cross promotion, almost none. We keep the brands separate from each other.

Q: How many employees do you have? Do you do outsourcing?

A: We have a small staff of 8 people working for the company. We outsource our programming to Canada and our customer support to the Philippines. We are happy with these outsourcing arrangements and are always looking for talent who can help us grow, while at the same time keeping our cost at a minimum. We are currently looking at several programming tasks outside of the US and looking to expand in the projects that we are involved in.

Q: How much do you spend monthly on advertising? What are the other costs?

A: We spend millions of dollars a year in advertising. Most of this money is spent on Affiliates who drive traffic to our sites via Rev-Share relationships, CPL (cost-per-lead) relationships, or CPA (cost-per-acquisition) relationships.

Q: How do you manage to fight scammers, do you have an automated process?

A: We do simple things like checking IP ranges, but we have developed a much more complex and proprietary system for identifying scammers. Fighting fraud is an important task for us, keeping our members safe is our top concern. I can not reveal more than this about unique methods we employ for catching fraud; we don’t want the ‘fraudsters’ to learn our secrets.

Q: Did you start your project with your own finances or, as it was a dotcom boom, you found an investor without too much efforts?

A: We started a long time ago, in 1997, with our own finances. At the time the internet was smaller with less competition. When we started, we launched the site as a free site until about 1 million profiles joined, then we turned it into a subscription site.

Q: How much money did you invest in the development of the project?

A: Million of dollars were spent on infrastructure such as servers, we also had teams of programmers, designers, marketers, etc. At the time things like eCommerce were unchartered territories, there were no credit card processing companies. It was a different time on the internet, I like to call it ‘the wild west’.

Q: Could you share some technical details of your operation: how many servers do you have, what database software and OS do you use, etc.

A: We currently have about 80 servers; however, we are currently working on updating older servers and consolidating application functions. This will allow us to operate on much smaller footprint of about 20 servers in total. This would include all functions of operating a large web site such as email, monitoring, databases, caching servers to handle frequent requests, and application servers.

Q: How important is the domain name for your success, would you be able to succeed without name date.com?

A: I think that having a name like Date.com certainly does not hurt your chances of success, however there are so many companies that have achieved incredible success with made up names. One does not have to look hard to find these companies, Yahoo and Google are two perfect examples.

If I were starting a new site today and didn’t have the funds to buy a great, one word, domain name, I’d try to come up with something creative and ‘cool’ sounding.

Q: Do you do anything in business beside dating projects?

A: Right now we are 100% focused on dating.

We are exploring the idea to get involved in new businesses and partner with other people on these projects. If you have a great idea and have something to contribute in terms of programming, marketing, or other, please contact us, and we would be happy to consider working with you.

Q: What do you think about dating affiliate programs; is it possible to earn good cash there, or maybe it is better to create your own dating site and promote it?

A: I think that being an affiliate is a good way to gain some experience in the business before going out and spending thousands, even millions, of dollars to create your own site. If you have success in these marketing efforts then you can evaluate starting your own site from scratch.

Q: What are the latest and most promising trends in online dating?

A: Niche sites seem to be a trend that has been successful for small companies who are experienced, and have marketing connections, or an intimate knowledge of a particular audience.

Free dating also seem to be popping up more and more as they are a little easier to start than a paid dating site. These free dating sites usually make money by sending their traffic to paid dating sites. We are working with a few of these companies, and paying them to send us traffic.

Q: How do you fight spam?

A: Spam is only a small problem on our sites since all email amongst our members is delivered via an internal mailbox. User have to login into the site to retrieve any messages. Also, we have internal systems in place which look out for anyone who want to abuse the system.

Q: All successful web sites pay considerable attention to affiliate program. If it’s not confidential – could you tell us your profit share which comes from affiliate sales, and what’s your commission?

A: We usually keep about 20% of the revenue for our profit and pay out 80% to the affiliate partner. It is important that the affiliate partner is successful so they will continue promoting us. By taking a small percentage from many partners we’ve found a model that allows us to be successful.

Q: How one can attract first visitors to register at a dating site?

A: Create a landing page that is compelling. Look to ‘touch a nerve’ in your visitors, this means that you try to understand what it is that would make them want to join your site, and why they are online dating in the first place.

Q: Also, what are the most important things to consider when launching dating site?

A: There are already thousands of online dating sites. Why are people going to want to join your new site? What makes you different? What is your selling proposition? What is your unique differentiating item? This is what you need to answer before starting your business.

Q: What should webmaster do to make sure his site is not stale? Right after the launch of a dating site there are a lot of visitors, but after some time the number of new registrations and site visitors considerably decreases. What should be done to prevent this?

A: I would recommend implementing content that changes regularly. We maintain a dating blog, Date.info that has new articles, dating advice, and fresh content, it changed weekly. We also send a weekly newsletter to our members letting them know about these new, updated, articles.

You need to be constantly marketing. Just creating a dating site is not enough. Marketing is more than 50% of the battle to success.

Q: Your business can be considered as established. Usually, such persons are more open to tell about some secrets, which helped them to overcome difficulties. Would you be so kind to share some tips which you used during promotion of your project?

A: There are no ‘secrets’. We’ve been working very hard for a very long time, over 10 years, this success has not come easily.

Interview questions suggested by readers of forum Daters.ru, which is our a branch project for the Russian webmasters and dating site owners. The Russian versions of this and other interviews with the world leading dating experts are posted on Daters.ru. Submit your interview inquiries here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 10:15 am and is filed under Interviews, 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.