Will subscription-based dating websites survive?
Just last month an Economist article said that dating websites OkCupid and eHarmony were bucking the economic trend and were seeing more people using their services than ever before.
eHarmony told the Economist that the number of visitors to its site was greater when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by over 100 points! OKCupid says that back in September it was averaging 6,000 messages sent through its system per day, now it’s about 18,000.
Both companies say they link site usage with the recession. Perhaps it’s true, when there are problems in life, having someone to share it with can be a great help.
For me though, there’s a more interesting question: will subscription-based dating sites continue to grow in the long run?
eHarmony, like Match.com and some of the Christian sites, is a subscription based site. But with the availability of free online dating sites like OKCupid (and free Christian dating sites) will its business model continue to work? Perhaps for the time being, but clearly even the big companies are starting to wonder.
In January Match.com launched DownToEarth.com which is totally free (and only available in America at the moment). Clearly it is testing the waters. Perhaps it is hoping that users of DownToEarth will upgrade to Match.com.
I’m sure that despite the current market growth, all subscription-based sites are actually feeling the pinch. It’s not just the economy that’s putting pressure on subscription services, it’s the competition from free services, both free online dating sites, and free social networks that for some are replacing dating websites.
FriendsReunited started out charging people to use its service, but with the massive growth of Facebook, it had to make it free a year or so ago.
The big problem with providing a free service is making enough money to keep going and turn over a modest profit. Newspapers are suffering from readers migrating to free online sources, and subscription-based dating sites will see the same happen to them too.
The man who created perhaps the largest free online dating site, PlentyOfFish.com, has even started to wonder if he should create or buy a subscription-based site – so are free sites commercially viable? It’s a tough one – the bigger the site, the more expensive it is to run, but if no-one wants to pay for it, and advertisers aren’t advertising so much, how will they survive?
Conclusion
Free dating and social network sites will kill subscription-based sites. Free dating and social network sites are commerical suicide. Discuss.
