

Ask HN: my understanding of the dating sites industry - petervandijck

I'm wondering if people here can confirm my understanding of the dating sites industry.<p>The way I understand it, is that the gorilla in the space is match.com. When a new service, especially a free service, has some success, they buy them and then send users who are leaving their (paying) service to those free sites, park them there until they can "re-activate" them. At the same time, there are a few successfull free dating sites that make money of advertising.<p>Correct/wrong?
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kposehn
I've been an affiliate for most dating sites for a long time. We had a really
long run for a while with eHarmony and did a crapton of PPC for several years.

In the end I found a broken industry with players who were far less interested
in providing good service then generally doing everything they could to play
the numbers. Their entire business is built around maximizing conversion and
retention rates, nothing more. While I understand ROI (I live and die it for
my business) most players also have not made any effort to adapt or change by
delivering better value; they simply live by squeezing out another 0.1%

Then again, I've been out of the space since April last year and there are
many new entrants, so I could be out of date :P

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lefstathiou
In correct. You are overly simplifying a fairly complex industry. There are
many other dating sites and similar alternatives, like eHarmony, which has
carved a powerful niche for itself as the PREMIER dating site. There are also
tools in alternative outlits, like skoutmob that have hundreds of thousands of
users, or Grindr, the largest dating social network/dating site for
homosexuals. I would generally caution you away from making large sweeping
generalizations. Match.com is a big player and they are very well funded.

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niico
Wrong, although that would be a perfect/ideal world to work and live in

