Why aren't there more free dating sites?
 

If the numbers are there (see: http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/20...from-comscore/ ) why aren't there more free dating sites? There's many areas to upsell. Doesn't need to be upsells to paid dating...

It's tough getting them started I think would be the answer.

Profiles that are real and building all the functionality is alot of work.

yeah,i used to have a free message board for dating or whatever at americanbootycalls.com and it was a pain in the ass to get it started.

Do you guys think that with the explosion of social networking sites, it would be easier to get the message out and feed it with profiles?

yeah,but it is still hard to convince the first people to start putting up profiles.thats why people start with fake ones.if you had a ms fb or even craigslist spammer you could probly get going though.

A tube backend is not very different than a simple link dump script. You can buy for cheap several decent tube scripts that will allow you to grow to about 250k - 500k traffic if you know your stuff. Then you will have to move to a custom solution, but the startup price is way low

A dating backend is way more complex. The ones you can buy are unable to scale to many members, so you need either to pay for a custom dating backend (lots of money) or have the knowledge to build your own one (lots of knowledge and time).
Here, you should start from a custom solution as soon as you reach about 10k members, so the startup price is not cheap at all.

because there is already myspace, facebook, friendster, and even yahoo.

Good point. The blog I posted in the original post to this thread discussed the database hassles of running a huge dating site. Not for the fainthearted.

Another reason for not starting a dating site is that you will need lots of lawyer coverage if a minor registers and you get a call from FBI, Interpol or both of them.

Already seen it happen, and the dude that got the minor registered on his dating site got completely slammed. A site that was making him about 500 euro/month in ads got him 50k euro bill for not policing properly the registered members.

Running a paid dating site completely removes that problem because its supposed that credit card users are not minors... yet I had my first credit card when I was 14 years old :)

You have a link for that? How are you supposed to police the members, even if you ask for a photo ID there's still photoshop. There's no way to keep a minor off a dating site if they want to join.