Mark Brooks over at Online Personals watch says that online dating sites “could raise their prices without losing customers.” I almost choked on my drink reading that. With the rise in free an freemium-based dating sites, I think that subscription-based sites should, if anything, reduce their pricing.
Lower prices will draw more subscribers, more subscribers = more revenue. Less spam and scammers = more subscribers, which = more revenue. Of course, as a UK contact of my attested to a few weeks ago, getting the price point right takes a lot of testing. Try $3/month, $12/month, $23.67/month and see what happens. People ask me all the time about optimum subscription pricing. I say, let your users tell you what they are willing to pay. There is no magic number across the entire industry.
Look at Match.coms revenue for the year, flat like Kansas, same as last year, same as the year before that. They can’t really raise prices, scratch that… they probably can and get away with it because when people are ready to try online dating, they just want to get the signup process over and done with as quickly as possible.
Dating sites are always talking about raising prices, they test new prices, it usually fails, and they go back to their regular pricing. If anything, most sites should be cheaper unless you are offering a premium service. Enhanced search is not premium, and selling a silly little red box around your search photo is just desperate. Now, enhanced search placement in search results based on a new algorithm, I’m all for that.
Another Brooks quote: “The real measure is the number of people who have logged in, a paid subscription isn’t worth it unless monthly traffic is at least 10,000 unique visitors.” Depends on what you’re measuring there, Mark. I think he means that turning on a subscription paywall doesn’t make sense until 10,000 unique visitors. I’ve heard numbers all over the place on this one.
As for consumers, since traffic systems (at least the free ones) don’t measure logins vs. visitors, the statement doesn’t make sense. Joe sixpack isn’t looking at Comscore when he’s signing up to a dating site buzzed at one in the morning.
Now, effectiveness, stickieness and revenue per subscriber based on unique logins, that would be a decent set of metrics to measure.
A useful metric that Redg used to talk about when he was with Skout was the number of returned emails. Those stats would absolutely turn the online dating industry on it’s head.
The most telling quote of the story is that complaints about dating services rose 62% from 2005 to 2008, according to the Better Business Bureau.
