Pay vs Free

qagtuirErick Shipmon makes the case for a pay service

Google adsense has given an economic incentive to create free online dating sites. With MySQL and PHP along with all the Open Source stuff out there it is not actually very hard to create a simple social network, and online dating sites are rather simple social networks.

You need is a profile. A picture uploader. A database for storing contacts and email notification. I think it would take 3 coders working with .NET may 4 months to develop a dating site with all the features of the best present ones, and a total hardware software cost of may $10,000. That is two people with some time on their can probably get something from download share ware on a Tomcat machine with PHP and MySQL in a couple of months for hundreds of dollars.

Don't mind if you don't understand the technology, the point is online dating sites are pretty simple, adsense means they can be profitable without charging and their are a lot of advertisers who want to get at the online dating community.

So why pay?

This article clearly is trying to convince one to pay, and it makes two points, one valid and one not.

Shipmon makes the point that online dating sites are somehow better policed. The point that people who pay are going to behave themselves better makes some sense, but the idea that paid sites will provide better filters and service simply does not hold up. Free sites need to have traffic to get adsense revenue and have as much reason to place word filter on them. And frankly 3 nerds with PHP are probably in a far better position to design such software than a company that has purchased the system from a start up.

In short, though lots of free sites are probably small time projects over time big free sites will have as much reason to police their sites and impose policies.

Shipmon's other point is that payment is a block to membership. Oddly now it is having less members rather than more. Considering that more single people are young in lower earner income you can see this as simply saying that the pay sites will be full of older people who can afford the subscriptions while college students probably wont.

In our opinion right now its probably only a matter of time until online dating is free. Young people are figuring how to use online communities which are free, like facebook, bibo, and MySpace as online dating sites anyways and dating is best done in a larger social contact of interaction, so specialists online dating sites probably have a short life span and will have to be folded in to larger online communities that provide services for free.

People in their teens and twenties simply are not going to pay these rates when they know other ways to fin people online.

If the pay for services hope to survive at all they will need to provide much higher levels of service that help people discover potential partners. The present model of form matching is not enough. Online dating sites should make it fun to interact with people who one might date with, make winks and flirts far more interesting. Allow people to interact on line more like Second Life with games and other interactions.

Also more intelligent matching along the lines of chemistry make sense.

In the big picture, perhaps sites run for free by groups of volunteers have one major advantage: they have no motivation to stop you from getting married. Face the facts, the online dating services lose a customer when someone gets married. They want you using their service for years, maybe a life time, since a married person will, for some time, stop their subscription.

A free service without add run by volunteers along the line of Wikipedia could be motivated in helping people find love, not make profits.

So how does Pay vs. Free stand up: in our opinion you can trust pay more than free right now for the obvious reasons presented in the article, but you should not ignore free, especially if you are younger.

Robert Hooker