As some of you may have observed, we run a couple of online dating related services. An online personals/friends site – ezifriends and a directory of Australian dating services – The Australian Dating Guide..
Twelve months ago, during beta testing for ezifriends, we realised that it was difficult to convince people to sign up to a website that only had a few members. So we took the decision to restrict access to the site profile search facilities so that only registered users could view members profiles. As a further incentive we also gave away plenty of free contact stamps that new members could use to contact others.
This led to an increase in signups to the site and the steady growth of our membership. However it also created other issues. Because members profiles were not visible to non-members, we have always had the problem of people trying to create fake accounts. Each time someone discovered another way to fake a profile, we developed a filter to detect it. As a result a whole battery of automatic tests are now conducted on new profiles to weed out those that aren’t genuine. All new memberships are also hand checked and the filters help to guide users towards creating a profile that will be approved.
Last week we decide to try an experiment. We have reached a point were we have sufficient members to return a reasonable result for most search demographics and it seemed reasonable to make the profile search function available to the public again. The trade off is that most of the ways of earning free stamps have been removed.
And the results. Increase signup of women, increase stamp purchases, decrease in junk profiles, and decrease in abandoned profiles. Great results.
It is obvious that having a populated database make a major difference. In our case we wanted to create a unique database rather than buy names or partner with other site. We have demonstrated that this is possible but it takes time and effort.
So if any of you think that setting up a personals site is a quick easy way to make money, well think again. It is hard work and it takes time. If you don’t have patience then don’t even consider it.
As for the title Make millions from online dating . Well that really should read not yet