It was fun to see what traffic dating sites in miscellaneous niches get: general, religious, ethnic dating.

In search of new markets and profits we witness new dating services launch that sometimes can surprise with their focus and niche targeting like: military dating, single parent dating, married dating, but that niche targeting does make sense with that industry competition. And in any case before the company develops a dating service site they do a proper niche research. One should be insane to develop a dating site with no clear idea of the targeted niche demand and traffic volume.

Nonetheless, it is fun to check what traffic levels those services get… And compare them to each other…

OK, we will look at a few below dating sites for our traffic research and comparison:

SPECIALTY DATING: Military dating vs. Single Parent Dating vs. Married dating vs. Wealth dating

As you can see - the narrower the niche –> the less traffic a dating service gets. No surprises here. Google reports no data for military dating and single parents services. That might be a glitch or those service really get negligible amount of daily traffic…

Certainly, we did not cover all that myriad of specialty or niche dating services available on the market or even reviewed at this website: big beautiful women, senior dating, mobile dating, etc.

But those comparisons in traffic volume give us a good idea of top industry players that show direction to other dating services.

It would be a great fun to check what traffic top 100% free dating services get. We have made one comparison of top free & free/ fee based – Match.com vs. Plenty Of Fish; to tell the truth, I expected some different result though those paid based services have budgets to market their services.

So, you see we get a dilemma here – start a 100% free dating service that should attract users (everyone looks for freebies online), but get no resources to market your dating site OR launch a combined free/ fee dating service and get funds to market your great site.

What 100% free services should we compare? Plenty Of  Fish, OKCupid, True.com and some more…

p.s. Google has announced today that using its AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool one can get the approximate amount of queries for this or that keyword. In the past Google used toolbars to show the query volume, now it is available in numbers - Google makes more and more data available to public.

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AmericanSingles.com is one of the services that Spark Networks run. A few more niche dating services from this company:

Deaf Singles Connection
BlackSingles.com
ChristianMingle.com
CatholicMingle.com
Date.ca
SingleParentsMingle.com
JDate.com
BBW Personals Plus

Unlike above niche dating services AmericanSingles caters for more general audience. One of the service limitations – they accept US and Canadian members only.

Registration – free and fast (unlike with some services like Match.com that require days to complete the registration – but it is quite a different story: Match.com certainly knows what they do).

- Name
- Location
- Age
- Type of relationship you look for
- Smoking & drinking habits
- Ethnicity
- Religion

And you are a member of AmericanSingles.com

Free membership is limited and if you want to test all service features – make use of your credit card. Subscription plans include 1-month, 3-month and 6-month plans (lowest – 6-month Standard Plan subscription – $9.99 per month at the time of writing).

You are likely to enjoy their ‘Local Online Dating for Singles’ – by State & by City.

Want to hear 10 reasons why you should join this particular dating service or look through the entire list of free/ paid membership features? Just check this page

At the time of my reviewing the service there were about 7000 members online. Dating service packed with lots of active users – one of the most compelling reasons to join it and even become a paid subscriber.

But let’s make a quick comparison of AmericanSingles to a number of other general dating services traffic:

AmericanSingles.com vs PerfectMatch vs Chemistry

So, you have an idea about their traffic. You have idea about their rates. You have idea about their competitors. The choice is yours.

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A few previous posts that deal with the same kind of stats, but for different kind of dating services are available here and here

The idea of these comparisons is to see what traffic dating sites get, who leaders are and what niches generate most visitors.

This post deals with most popular gay/ lesbian dating services. We have omitted gay.date.com – it is hosted on a sub domain of date.com and it is impossible to evaluate its traffic in this situation.

GAY / LESBIAN DATING: GayFriendFinder.com vs OutPersonals.com vs LesbianPersonals.com vs Gay.com

And the winner is… Gay.com (though we see that its traffic curve is declining over time).

100K uniques per day - that is LOTS of traffic that Gay.com used to get back in 2007. Now they are in the range of 60-70K daily uniques - still tons of visitors, but they have lost 1/3 of their traffic over the last 12 months. It is their major concern I guess.

And lesbian dating service gets a fraction of popular gay sites traffic…

While checking the stats of top dating services (general and niche focused) I come across services that are part of big dating networks, as a rule, and I wonder if there are any independent dating sites started in the last 2-3 year that do fine online (except OKCupid) – I assume there is a number of successful niche dating sites that prefer to run their business under radar.

What do I mean by doing fine dating service? Traffic growth, profitability growth, business model that allows them feel safe (more or less) and make some strategic planning (well, I guess only insiders have that sort of information).

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Have a look at the stats below.

Yes, everyone’s talking (and not only those who are in the dating niche) about Plenty of Fish and how Markus Frind makes tons of money with his free dating website. But he is not the only one using FREE as business model with dating. In the below list of some top internet properties we see some dating services that employ the same model (True, Mate1, MillionaireMate - partly):

It is hard for me to say how those numbers are calculated and why we do not see the above mentioned Plenty of Fish if it is one of the most trafficked dating sites, but the stats source is reliable

Unlike Plenty of Fish, Mate1 and True.com run affiliate programs paying for each free subscriber that websites refer them. And they run their affiliate programs via a few affiliate networks – CJ, Azoogle, etc.

I remember Plenty of Fish attempt to test this source of attracting new users – their affiliate program was live with Azoogle for a few days and they promised to pay $1.00 for each new member referred, but then the program was suspended due to unknown reasons – probably the traffic quality was poor or something else - we can learn that only from Markus.

Also all mentioned dating services – Mate1, True, Plenty of Fish – heavily advertisee their services with top PPC engines. And it is not a cheap marketing channel (according to another reliable source):

If free dating services can afford paying for free subscribers for years now it means that they do well collecting advertising dollars from someone else besides their members. Another question – is there any more space for new free dating services eager to enter the game? The story by OKCupid shows that it is likely not…

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Well, it took me some time to realize that my idea to call this website ‘dating in a modern style’ was stupid to put it mildly. I think the proper website title should be ‘online dating in the old fashioned way’ - and I have made changes to some parts of the website already.

Those dating services that we review here are ‘old school’ – Date.com, Match.com, Chemistry, even niche dating sites like Gay.com or JDate launched in the last century keep the traits of ‘that time’ Internet and technology. New generation dating is social websites.

Those dating gurus who stay in this industry for years now have long ago acknowledged this fact and run separate projects focused on traditional dating services and social websites.

Just two samples of popular dating resources:

OnlinePersonalsWatch vs SocialNetworkingWatch
OnlineDatingPost vs TheProgressBar

So, it is time for me to accept that fact too…

Or another feature that really modern dating site should include are videos. With that entire craze about videos, youtube and similar services it would be a smart move to address your website visitors with videos…

And mobile dating? I do not think that I will re-make this website for mobile internet, but I will certainly cover the most successful mobile dating services that come and go really fast (but some should last).

Another thing I would like to discuss in this offtopic post is a limited number of quality dating blogs and resources to read. There are just a few more to add to the above mentioned sites. Probably, I am wrong and it is a result of my improper research.

I guess people in the dating niche prefer to start their own dating ventures and not to waste time on covering its news and trends…

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