Can I counter recommend this? If you're good enough at SEO or online marketing to have a chance in hell at a broad online dating opportunity, there is more money available for less work and less competition elsewhere. The space is competitive, the incumbents are some of the savviest firms online, they have gigantic warchests, the fight will be dirty, and there is easier money elsewhere.

Plus you're competing with OKCupid, which is to linkbait as AirBnb is to PR.

Dating sites are #8 on "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund": http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

Dating sites have very strong network effects. The entry on that page acknowledges that: if you want to start a dating site, the question you answer is not "What should we do better about online dating?", it's "How will we get our initial users and keep them?"

Patrick's point is that if you have the skills to get users in a business with network effects that strong, there are many more lucrative markets you could crack. EBay, for example. Online auctions is hugely lucrative, orders of magnitude more than dating, and EBay sucks in many ways. But their network effect is so strong that it's virtually impossible to break in.

(Online auctions is #10 on the list, BTW.)

Solving the 'chicken and egg' problem has lead to a catastrophe in large dating markets:

Abandoned accounts and men->women spam.

I think a smaller dating site would prosper quite well if it could eliminate wasting people's time. eHarmony has a good practice in this regard, but eHarmony is also marriage, christian, straight focused - and excluded all others.

A dating site that disabled user accounts that hadn't logged in or responded, initiated conversation eHarmony style, and somehow limited the spam that men send, well... that'd be worth checking out. It would drastically raise the signal to noise ratio.

For spam: perhaps you can only send one message per day to new people, and one message per person per reply. Choose wisely.

Also, for every uploaded picture, grab the date it was taken and put that on the page. Might not stop hackers, but that's a small minority.

Other effects to combat: the ego inflation effect, where having many virtual 'options' makes you more selective.

Maybe even a 'ask a friend' feature, where you email a reply history to a friend and ask their advice (helps with network effects).

There's LOTS of room for innovation here, essentially.

definitely, why not? Completely people oriented, and for the most part, people who are on one site, are on another site (match, eharmony, craigslist?, etc.). Nothing wrong with multiple avenues of meeting people - so there's still room in this space.

Don't we all just want to be loved?! ;)

Can you provide some examples of more lucrative segments?

I doubt it.

IAC, the parent company of match.com owns lots of web properties. It's not like match.com now owns okcupid and will use them as they please. Most likely, okcupid ads may become exclusively for IAC sites (match.com, blackpeoplemeet, asianpeoplemeet, [niche]peoplemeet, other dating properties) and they may make the subscription offers a little more prominent (right now they're pretty hidden on okcupid) but I doubt it'll go much further than that.

Free and paid are complementary. A big chunk of upgrades on paid sites come from people who were driven there from free sites.

> A big chunk of upgrades on paid sites come from people who were driven there from free sites.

If this post is correct that the free sites provide a better user experience, why would people move from them to the pay sites? Just out of a lack of information?

For many reasons but the one that seems to come back most often is that people value their time on paid sites more. It seems more "serious" if you know the other person paid to talk to you.

Considering OKCupid's slogan for a while was "always free", I highly doubt that they will switch to a pay-to-use model.

Correct. They will likely use the Nerve/SpringStreet/AdultFriendFinder model of ruining the free options so that the pay ones look attractive.

But match.com might still ruin the site by trying too hard with the upsell.