1. I've been verbally beaten for saying this b4, but I think the pay-for-contact dating business won't last 5 more years. Charging people to communicate with new people isn't going to last as a viable business model. There will be too many sites/companies that enable people to communicate without paying a centralized service/charging a fee.

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by peter caputa

2. Unless I'm missing something, Match and Yahoo! already own the category. Both have, or are rolling out, social networking sites. The problem is that they are not marketing them, yet. Social networking is only going to take off as a paid business model when the likes of Match figure out a way to move singles from matchmaking services over to social networking services. That could easily double their revenue per subscriber and since singles are already used to paying to meet people, continuing to pay to network will not be as much of a problem.

As for pay-for-contacting dating going away, I don't believe that for a second. That's why Google Singles is never going to work as a free service. People want, and will pay for filters to weed out the undesirables. The logical next step is to begin talking about reputation systems, not just the rate-a-date stuff that yahoo is testing.

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by David Evans

3. If most online daters are on 2-3 sites concurrently its natural that they currently do and will continue to diversify the sites they use. Many use a couple large ones and a couple small ones. That behavior along with the diversified nature of the web indicates to me that people will constantly find and use non-major dating sites in the hopes of fishing in a pool that is more familiar to them.

Meanwhile adding dating to any community site will be so easy that many will support it just to further their community offerings. I suppose many will die on the vine, but many more will be legitimate love connections.

I suspect dating will be free or a nominal charge as part of a larger set of subscription-level features but page serves alone could pay a community site to offer dating for free or cheap.

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Ted Rheingold

4. The narrowness of tickbox-driven matchmakers will be the death of these sites, particularly as SNS operators find additional ways of bringing people together in real-time and with various media. Think of it this way: if a web-based service (not a dating service) already attracts users, there's already an affinity that serves as a means of developing a relationship. Want an example? Look at the Guardian Talkboards, and at the number of threads about dating. GUT also run a traditional dating service (Soulmates) with considerable overlap of users. So one might think there'd be interactive features, that Soulmates could be far more interactive with GUT and the Guardian as a whole. But it isn't. In this regard, Soulmates is an ineffective bolt-on. Now take this idea of interactivity and apply it to any popular webservice. Seems to me that Glastonbury http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk had a feature of this sort, a means of meeting both on-and-off-line. With opportunities like that, who is going to fill out questionnairres of dubious utility?

Posted at 8:03PM on Dec 18th 2005 by dglp