Dating website, worth it as a business?

[Trevatanus]

Been looking at the idea of setting up a dating website.
It seems you can get a "turnkey" site for between $500 and $1000.
Obviously it will take a lot of promoting in order to get people signed up, or is the market already too full for a new one.
I will obviously try to make it stand out and be different to other sites, I am still working on that bit of it.

[Petrus1983]

They sell turnkey sites as they can't make money out of running a dating website also can't see how you could make it stand out - there's a site for EVERYTHING these days (rich, young, uniforms, Christian, have HIV etc etc), plus the big players like eHarmony and Match are massive these days with marketing budgets to match.

[MarshPhantom]

No personal experience but the market does to be saturated. Getting real women signed up seems to an issue.

[toon10]

A friend of mine who works in IT set up his own site as a business venture and it failed to take off. One issue is how do you fill it with enough people to be able to start charging for it?

There's loads of established sites already for people who are willing to pay and the big problem is, there are free sites for those who aren't such as POF. There's specialist sites (sex, affairs, Elite singles, etc.) so it's hard to find a niche or make it vastly different to what's out there.

[anothernameitist]

Animal dating?

[SystemParanoia]

Fill it with bots that string everyone along!

[Joratk]

Been done to death. Look at the girl from this years apprentice for example, she had a unique angle on the industry but her project didn't get any traction and probably never will.

[jammy_basturd]

If you had a fresh take on the idea of a dating website you'd be 10% there. The big hurdle to get over is the marketing.

[veevee]

Joratk said:

Been done to death. Look at the girl from this years apprentice for example, she had a unique angle on the industry but her project didn't get any traction and probably never will.

Her idea was ste though, to be fair.

But as everyone else has said, too much competition. Main obstacle other than this will be traction. I'd say you need at LEAST high 3 figure amounts of people within travelling distance from each other to make a site like this work. The only angle I can see which would work is some kind of location-specific site, but even then you have to convince several hundred people to join and actively use the site before you can even think about charging anyone.

[Evolved]

Good luck with that one. Think of a new slant on it and maybe but the market is saturated with them, same as most other web business's nowadays..

I can sell you some magic beans 'turnkey' for the princely sum of £250.

[The Moose]

How about a dating site for people on holiday or to meet up when in airports at the same time?

It's not going to be covered by a $1,000 package however!

[Amateurish]

I highly recommend listening to the second series of the "Startup" podcast which examined a startup dating website in some detail. It really is an excellent listen.

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/origin-story-seaso...

[Trevatanus]

Amateurish said:

I highly recommend listening to the second series of the "Startup" podcast which examined a startup dating website in some detail. It really is an excellent listen.

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/origin-story-seaso...

Cheers, I will give that a go over the weekend

[drmotorsport]

I dabbled in a White label dating site a couple of years ago. They provided the backend database of 3 million users and payment processing, all i had to do was brand the site, get domain names, SEO etc. The project completely failed to scale up to beyond pocket money levels despite throwing a lot of cash at google adwords.

[akirk]

marketing, marketing, marketing - that is where your costs will be, and they won't be low...

[CAPP0]

I contemplated this myself a good few years and fairly quickly concluded that unless you can find a REALLY unique angle, the market is, as many have said, saturated.

Perhaps try "One legged alopeciacs with a hairy midget fetish".

[LDN]

Everything has been done... the only angle I see is a genuine dating site / social site for 'adult' encounters - that is NOT 90% populated with escorts and prozzies. Others have tried and all have failed. They just get swamped with sex workers.

[StevieBee]

White Label dating sites tend to be more suited as add-ons to existing businesses that have a very active and engaged customer base already. In some circumstances, this can work very well; radio is a good example. Planet Rock Dating makes Bauer Media more money that ad revenue.