Will Your Online Dating Site Fail?

If you are planning to start, or just started an online dating site, then you may want to take a look at this blog post at White Label Dating. The post is actually commenting on another post at "Startup Professionals" which attempts to show all new dating site endeavours will fail.

I do agree with most of Startup Professionals reasons about why starting a online dating site is tough:

• Direct competition is huge.
• No longer a growth market.
• Entry cost is very high.
• Intellectual property is tough.
• Social networks and search engines.

The only real exception I have is the point they made about online dating not being a growth market. While growth may be slowing a bit, the Online Dating industry has a huge potential for further growth. The reason is, most single men and women are not online daters. In 2008 there was 93 million single Americans, only 3 million had paid that year to use a dating site (see Stats).

Including the point about "Entry cost is very high" may confuse people who have looked into buying software for a dating site. To buy and setup a readymade dating site script is relatively easy and can be done for under $300. There are hundreds of these type of dating sites out there but they all suffer from a couple of major problems. One problem is getting your website noticed, to do this these days costs money, lots of it. Dating terms in Google Adwords are not cheap and to generate enough traffic to hopefully get people to come back to your site will cost you alone at least $10,000 a month (conservative est.). Of course one month is not enough, you have to keep the marketing dollars flowing. The other problem these dating sites have is no members. People sign up to a dating site to connect with other members, if you don't have any, no one will sign up. This is the same problem as the chicken or egg scenario, which came first?

The White Label Dating post has a successful argument on how someone with a limited budget can bypass these points on why your dating site will fail. White Label Dating provides their clients the dating software, membership database, payment processing, customer support, hosting infrastructure, tax processing and more. All their clients need to do is provide a brand, website design and marketing. If you want to start a dating site but have limited funds, this is really the only option you have if you want a half decent chance at success.