WLD -- July 28 -- ‘Startups: Your Online Business Will Fail’ was an article on the site Startup Professional Musings. The post states that online dating sites will fail because:
- Direct competition is huge
- No longer a growth market
- Entry cost is very high
- Intellectual property is tough
- Social networks and search engines will lead the way
Some of the points are only valid when you’re talking about building a site from scratch. By launching a dating site with a white label provider, partners are provided with a database of active members, so that their site is never empty. The UK dating industry is worth £600m a year according to Hitwise, whilst Juniper Research predicts the number of paying members on dating sites will rise to 6M in the next 3 years, from 2.6M in 2006.
The full article was originally published at WLD blog, but is no longer available.