PlentyofFish.com - Excerpt from Marcus’s blog Post
SOURCE: Marcus’s Blog - Excerpt from his blog:
After reading David evans secret to creating successful dating sites I am left wondering if any new players will enter the market.
3 Years ago david was promoting niche sites as the future of the industry, now 3 years later are any niche sites making money on a grand scale other than Jdate? Even Jdate makes peanuts and doesn’t come close to the $300M plus made by match.com and Eharmony.
Now david is writing about Zoosk and are you interested saying they are the next big thing because they have so many “users”. Sure many of these ”apps” have users but they have no real way of making money from them. As Noah from Okdork points out if you have 100 Million page impressions a month on Facebook you are lucky to make $10,000. Now a site like eharmony gets 400 million pageviews a month and makes over $20,000,000 a month
Even worse facebook apps seem to suffer from fads, users of facebook view apps as entertainment. When you create programs that are for entertainment users will always want to flock to something newer and cooler. Now if facebooks payment platform goes live and these dating apps start charging what will happen? I think no one will use the paid apps and it will make facebook subject to all these bogus dating laws that have come out.
To make matters worse dating sites in the US are facing some 7 or 8 different patent infringement lawsuits, is facebook going to be subject to all of these? I think that facebook apps will be an ATM machine for patent trolls going forward. Nothing is easier than setting up a shell company creating an app and then sueing facebook for patent infringement with a different shell company.
I’ve always told David the reason for my success was doing the opposite of whatever he posted on his blog. :) Sites that are trendy today are rarely the ones that get huge and make money in the long run. A good example of this are webcam dating sites which seem to be trendy every 3 years. Woome is virtually identical to the sites from 2002 in terms of functionality with a slightly better user interface. The problem with them as back in 2002 is the majority of people use them as entertainment and the chat sessions involve a vast amount of nudity.
