The Effect of a Recession on Online Dating

by David Evans on October 17, 2008 in Marketing

Markus at PlentyOfFish says that people are going to stop dating because dating is going to get too expensive.

People arenâ€™t going to use a free site or spend $20.00 on a paid one when they have to worry about spending $500+ on dates or dating someone.

That’s absurd, but then Markus tends to buck tradition and logic at every turn, that’s why he’s successful. I would be interesting to read about how people date in trying times. I know a lot of people got married after 9/11, what happened during 1929?

Traffic is down for some paid sites and up on free sites, which makes sense. How long this this trend continue?

Markus wonders how many sites will close down. Dating sites never die, they limp along in obscurity, pulling in anywhere from $25 -$300+ a month in revenue, depending on the business model and how much time the owner puts into marketing. It’s like hundreds of little Ralph Nader’s pulling votes away from the two main candidates.

Reduced ad revenue is going to be less of an issue for dating sites if their ads are targeted, which, at least for the moment, they aren’t, as I wrote about recently.

Markus is right in that many dating sites are promoting the competition. Most ad-supported dating sites are changing over to affiliate links. On the other hand, Dating Ad Network acts more like a web ring, sending traffic to your site and from your site to others in the network. At least with them you are sending out traffic as well as receiving it, whereas with affiliate ads you’re traffic is leaving and not coming back.

I was reading about various team-dating sites, perhaps this is a good time for them, at least for the 20-something set.

Something tells me that while some paid dating sites may see a temporary reduction in traffic, the free and well-funded sites will continue more or less along their current trajectories. Reducing headcount, tightening the reigns and spending marketing dollars more efficiently are the first steps towards weathering a downturn.

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