The traditional and casual dating audiences have gradually come closer together as many sites that are considered as being casual are accepted into the mainstream. Mostly because this is a better fit for real life and realists have concluded that we do not go out actively looking for a husband or wife as soon as we turn 21.
What we really want is to continue having fun with our friends and at the same time to make new friends and have a lot of fun along the way.
Of course this doesn’t mean that there is no room for traditional dating sites.. actually quite the opposite. They compliment each other very well and because of this reason it could actually be worthwhile creating both a traditional and a casual dating site and use the opportunity to cross promote your sites.
It is generally well known that casual dating sites can provide a higher income, mostly because they can convert better and the Average Revenue Per User can be higher. However, this doesn’t always need to be the case and it is very much dependent upon your source of traffic.
My advice would be to launch both a traditional and casual dating site and cross market them to get increased ARPU. What have you got to lose?
There are so many traditional sites today that it is quite complicated for a visitor to choose the right one. On the one hand - it's really good for the websites owners as they may create 10 dating sites with slightly different design and cross-promote them giving themselves increased revenues. This also applies to WL sites that use one common database. On the other hand, common traditional sites have a lower conversion rate than those that are targeted to some specific niche. They say Christian dating sites have amazing conversions as this is a very targeted audience.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to traffic sources there are often some difficulties with the marketing of casual dating sites. Casual does not mean traditional, so many ad networks reject the ads although they might be absolutely clean and not provocative at all. So many of the better known traffic sources may be closed for you. So you really do need to scout around for reliable traffic sources.
There are good sources of traffic out there for casual dating sites. You just need to ask around.
Great blog, keep it up!