Yesterday while watching the horrible Patriots loss at my corner bar, the topic came around to dating. I mentioned a few niche dating sites and went into my usual rant about being more interested in a giant single shared database of members than 2,000 separate sites, each with their own walled-garden of profiles, marketing spend and user acquisition costs. (Go look at the JDate financials to see how expensive it’s gotten to land a new user.) Just about everyone I talked to preferred to be on a single site and were excited about a Dating Passport type of feature where your core dating profile is sharable among multiple sites.
Successful niche sites make good to great money for their owners and are useful for members (See various Jewish, Catholic, Asian and Black dating sites), but now we have thousands of other tiny niche sites, supported by even smaller marketing budgets, running on shoddy software. Do you know how many dating sites are stuck in first gear, unable to grow past their current 1,500 members? Too many.
Matchmaker was one of the first large dating sites to segment into various niches. This historical perspective seems to be lost on much of the online dating industry, and when it was acquired by Avalanche (Date.com), they seem to have removed the built-in niche feature.
Now we have monolithic dating sites like the top 10, mid-tier major niches and the rest of the market, which continues to struggle to stay afloat. Much talk in 2009 about the online dating industry consolidating into several large paid sites, a large free site or and a number of niche sites able to get past the 500,000 member mark and achieve serious profitability (as opposed to the smaller niche sites with a few thousand members.)
The places that niche sites can market to their constituency with greater and greater accuracy has grown in the past several years to include Facebook, Twitter and several mobile applications.
2010 is going to see a number of large mergers and acquisitions, following the 2009 trend which occurred mostly in Europe as large dating sites sell off underperforming geographic areas to more locally entrenched competitors.
