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| Home > Dating > Current Dating Services > Online Dating Services, Part 2 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Online Dating Services, Part 2 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Weaknesses of Online Dating Services, (continued) 5. Inadequate Membership Size In order to attract new members, online dating services must have a large database of members. Ambiguous reporting of the size of the database exists with the leading online dating services. Even when a company reports that they have millions of members, only a small percentage of members are active or subscribing members. Some people are on or visit multiple online services inflating the membership numbers. To inflate total membership numbers, some sites do not allow or make it difficult for members to suspend or delete their profiles. Members also forget to suspend or delete their profiles, inflating the numbers as well. What good is a member if he/she has not used the service in over 3 months? Online dating services like virtual communities follow the MetCalf's rule. The bigger the network the more valuable the network becomes. Apply this to online dating, the bigger the membership size, the better the odds that members will find their soulmates. From studying the membership acquisition rates of online dating services as well as virtual communities, a large amount of marketing and sales budget must be invested to reach critical mass. Because these sites are businesses and the two leading services are run by publicly traded companies, they need to make money either through membership fees and/or advertising. Revenue is also needed to offset the technology cost of maintaining these services. These costs include bandwidth, servers, web/database administration, and programmars. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Below is the estimated membership growth history for Match.com, the leading online dating service. The recent spike in growth may be due to the acquisitions of Kiss.com and Udate.com in late December 2002. The majority of reported members are non-subscribers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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According to Match.com, as of the end of 2002, currently only 653,180 members are paying members. This number is worldwide, so the probability of you finding your soulmate near you is very small. Remember that only half of the members are of the opposite sex. In order for two members to contact each other, both members must be subscribers. Below is a graph of our estimated numbers of Match.com subscribers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Because it is one of the most profitable divisions of Ticketmaster, a publicly traded company, I doubt it will be free anytime soon. Yahoo! Personals, the second largest service, is part of Yahoo!, a publicly traded company also. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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