Future of Online Dating

Mark Brooks has interviewed Nate Elliot from Jupiter Research about future of online dating and possible tendencies like video dating implement, mobile dating and growth of European market. Full interview you can read at Mark’s blog but I decided to share my point of view on some quotes Nate Elliot has provided in his interview.

„How does the European online dating market look?
It’s doing very well. It’s still growing pretty strongly and we see it continuing to get stronger over the next several years. Similar to the U.S. market, the European market is starting to slow down“

European dating market is starting to slow down because it has started few years later than U.S. dating business. Now when most of the local market are established and we have strong leaders like Match.com and Meetic it’s quite difficult to enter the market and get audience which is required for successful online business.

But there is a hope that sooner or later Eastern Europe integration to European market could make new market boom because currently people there still don’t have any trust to online payments and Europe doesn’t accept them to its games.

„Are there any notable and fast growing social networks in Europe?
We have more data out of the U.S. than we do in Europe because the social networking phenomenon is stronger in the U.S. then it is in Europe. But generally speaking, our surveys indicate that online consumers are not interested in using social networks to find a date. We’ve also found that online daters don’t leave dating sites for social networks“

Seems that Nate has missed one very-very important thing – East European market. There are some very strong players on this market in Russia like Mamba look at their Alexa ranking and imagine if they will find investors from U.S. who would be interested in Russians personals provider on East European and U.S. markets. It could be huge “russian dating” boom as I think.

What overarching trends are you seeing? What’s hot?
All the prices have gone up at the dating sites over the last year and a half. It’s more of an issue in the U.S. where user growth has slowed to a crawl. To continue growing revenues they have to raise prices. Yahoo Personals went from $20 to $25 to $40 depending on which service you take.

Yes, this tendency has started few years ago but at the beginning it was playing with recurring billing when you pay 9.99 for first month and for all other you pay three-times higher sum. When users understood where dating service cheats them they stopped to accept recurring billing and they cancellation notices became immediate after payment. When recurring billing technique stopped working dating services decided to change they plans by increasing price and offering some Doctor’s features (Dr.Phil @ Match.com , Dr.Pepper at PerfectMatch.com and so on)… So the prices are growing from the first day because in this business services do their dollars from the air. And such price increase explain only due the willing to increase revenue and not to survive.

How about video dating? Is there a future?
I can’t see video becoming a very important part of online dating over the next several years. If you remove a level of control from online daters about what their appearance is, I think a lot daters will be cautious about using webcams.

Great saying. Nothing to add here. Online dating would lose all its advantages when it will become real. One thing when you see professional photo on user profile and another story when you see him/her in dressing qown in the morning in front of webcam. Video dating exists from the beginning but it is calling in other words: „Live cams“.

So in conclusion of this article I would like to say that it‘s online dating is huge business and its growth during last 5-6 years should stop sometimes until other world (Eastern Europe, Africa, China) will be able to pay real money for service. When those time will come we will see real revolution in online dating business but until that time online daters are under expansion of leaders like Yahoo! Personals, Match.com, Meetic, LavaLife and few others. Until they don‘t feel any seriuos competition they will earn their millions on people feelings...

Regards,
Alex Smirnoff
CEO of WelcomeToDating.com