Niche Dating Growing in Popularity

  • Saturday, April 26 2008 @ 03:20 pm
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Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch did a guest post at TechCrunch about how the niche dating sites market share is growing fast while the top 5 sites for the most part are losing ground. The top 5 dating sites in market share, according to Hitwise are:

  1. Singlesnet
  2. Plentyoffish
  3. True
  4. Yahoo Personals
  5. Match

These top 5 sites lost 7% of their overall market share when comparing Match 2008, with a year ago.

The top five niche dating categories in terms of overall market share are:

  1. Gay
  2. African American
  3. Religion
  4. Asian
  5. Latino

The Religion dating niche came out on top in terms of increase market share. It increased by 69% (going from 1.51% total market share to 2.55%) when compared to March 2007. This was followed by the Gay niche dating category at 54% increase and then African-American at 14% increase. The Adult or Casual dating niche also increased its market share by 56% but Mark didn't include it in the main chart of his article since he doesn't really feel Casual dating is a niche. It has such a large market share when compared to other dating categories.

So why are niche dating sites growing so much while the more general oriented top 5 dating sites? I think online dating has hit a saturation point. There are not that many more new people who are using the internet now that they can attract to sign up. Online dating had its double digit growth in the late 90s and the early years of this decade at the same time the number of users of the internet in the United States and Canada was also experiencing huge growth. There where all these new single internet users and they wanted to meet new people. Now days if dating sites want to increase their market share, it is more about attracting web surfers from other dating services and the social networking sites. As Mark points out in his article as well, it is far easier for a small niche dating site to double its subscribers and there by having a huge percentage increase in market share when compared with itself, while still having a relatively small overall market share, when compared to the top dating sites.