In an interesting development the Australian dating site Oasis Active has now been rated as even more popular than the huge and long running RSVP. What's really notable about it is that Oasis Active is completely free to use, while RSVP is not.

I suspect there might be a few more cases like this, but there will be a limit to the trend. One of the main ways free dating sites make money is by serving ads; ads for paid dating sites. So, the situation is a little bit like a miniature version of what occurs in capitalist societies. That is, if they get too generous with their welfare, and people prefer the dole to working, the economy suffers hugely. The government has to tighten the purse strings eventually and reward business instead.

So, unless things change radically and the free sites find completely new and very reliable ways of making money from their traffic, paid dating will always be around.

UPDATE: Commentor Fred below has real insights into the marketing of big dating sites. It seems that content ads not working now as a means of generating profit for free sites. The landscape is clearly changing. So, it will be interesting to see what happens.
 


Comments

Mark Davis Dating Guide Expert link
07/13/2010 18:50

Australian dating is an entirely different scene than dating in America. I write about the differences on my blog too.

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fred
07/18/2010 04:09

I do internet marketing for some of the major Australian dating sites as a job.
I know Oasis couldn't survive on ads served from Google or Yahoo. Content ads were all the rage about 5 years ago. Today people are immune to ads, they just don't produce results. I've placed ads on Oasis, I typically get about 500,000 impressions in month which results in about 4-10 clicks and I've never had a conversion to one of our sites. And this would be typical for most advertisers. I paid per click so Oasis got about $2.00 for my ads for the month. Believe me Oasis is not making any money from Google or Yahoo served ads.

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