how do free dating sites make money?

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-09-2006
how do free dating sites make money?
2
Thu, 03-09-2006 - 11:57am

im talking about the big free sites like udate4free.com etc

I'm pretty new to dating and have always wanted to start my own dating site but how can i compete with websites that charge no fee's whatsoever?

The most intruiging one was probably udate4free.com as it has no advertising or nothing, so how do they make money, are they paid some other way?

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-10-1999
Thu, 03-09-2006 - 1:20pm

I just checked out the udate4free site, and they had a big link/ad at the bottom to another site that sells cell phones. They're probably getting paid for that. Otherwise, the only way I could think of a free dating site to possibly make any money would be to either sell items on it's website, or to ask for volunteer donations to be sent to them through paypal. I don't know how many donations they'd get, but maybe some people would like the idea of a site that doesn't make anybody pay and that doesn't bother you with any advertisements enough to want to donate so that there can be a site like that out there.

I noticed that the udate4free site seems to be based in England. Are you from England as well? Maybe it is different in other countries, but it seems like here in the US the big sites that charge you money such as match.com and eharmony are much more popular than the free ones. I think that's proably because they advertise a lot more people know about them then know about the free sites.

I think if you want to charge and compete with free sites you either have to advertise a lot and/or offer something that people want that the other free websites aren't offering. For instance, I think part of the reason that e-harmony was so successful is because they were the only site to do compatibility testing and to match people based on test results so there were enough people who preferred that to having a free websites. But you could also just make your own site free and then charge for advertisements.

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-09-2003
Fri, 03-10-2006 - 12:50am

I had few meetings/interviews with a big online company who was looking into creating a special dating site.
I had great ideas but last minute the company decided not to enter this market. If you are interested in discussing opportunities in OLD Software dept let me know.
I work in Research & Development of IT solutions and currently I m a product manager.

If you would like to talk more about it, we can start by email and go from there.
Also one of the guys I met on OLD happens to be an old employee of Match :) "we met on LAVA :)"

so let me know.