Dating affiliates around?

Some of us do, matey.

The main reason most dating affiliates avoid setting up their own dating service is all about fulfilment. It's easier to send traffic and get your commissions, as opposed to running the business that pays those commissions. At one time or another every dating affiliate gets it into their head to setup a dating site (or white label) but it rarely turns out well. Which isn't to say it can't turn out well. You have to understand the market.

Cheers,

Tom

Edit: BTW, that was a good question. Must have been good - you distracted me from a donut and a cappuccino!

I realize it's a different game. One is about maintaining a community etc', the other is about maintaining traffic magnets in order to forward elsewhere..

What if a startup such as Tinder, before its launch which means before you'd know it would be a hit, would approach you regarding a joint venture? Or even "just" about affiliating with/for them? Same for everyone else reading this message.

3 questions:

1. What do you do the first time your app is data breached and you face a multi-million dollar class action lawsuit?

2. What do you do when a crime is committed on your app and you are facing a liability lawsuit?

3. How do you raise capital when you are not part of any Silicon Valley insider clique?

All an aff has to do is drive traffic.

Type in any successful dating site/app and the word lawsuit.

I was just commenting about this recently. I've had some involvement with dating affiliate stuff for many years now, and honestly it seems pretty dead to me now.

Though I hate one time commission only programs and do not even consider them to be "real" affiliate programs, in the early days I was actually doing pretty well with Match.com before they outsourced. When they outsourced running their program, however, things proceeded to go downhill to the bottom for me.

I've been trying a well known white label for a while now, and just recently removed most of my domains from it after determining it was simply rather dead. Only have a few left there.

Had always thought about running my own site, but was never able to bring myself to do it or completely decide on which software to use. Just seems like too much risk of wasted time and effort now.

Just because you're able to sell a dating product, it doesn't mean you're capable of creating one of equal effectiveness. That comes down to any product you sell really, you may be the best salesman in the world with the best target audience, but if you're selling something that doesn't work, it's only a matter of time before your audience loses faith in you and decides not to trust you anymore.

I pretty much agree with most of what has been said in here already. I too have had the idea of having my own dating backend since I started promoting adult dating some 14+ years ago. However once you understand what goes on behind the scenes it doesn't seem worth the hassle, potential legal implications, etc at this point in the game. It is much harder for a new guy to come in the game, at least on the adult end, at this point and really make a name for themselves.

I however still make a killing pushing adult dating as our sole vertical and so do our affiliates. Instead of creating our own dating backend we've focused on creating our own brands, which utilizing AI functionality and such will rotate the best offers for any given geo/device based on their performance.

In addition you can still have your own "brand" which is basically just a whitelabel but with the right connections you can get a fresh database and such thus it converts far better than going direct and promoting the offers/brands that they already have in their system. Sending quality traffic also gets you better rates.

Of course most of this is focused around the PPL revenue model. So IMHO for the vast majority it is best to simply push the traffic as an affiliate rather than creating your own dating product. Of course there are exceptions to this but not often.

If you or anyone else in here is interested in discussing the best offers by EPV/EPC in dating you should hit me up. Our sole focus is adult dating and we offer 500+ individual offers and we are constantly adding more. Our new AI smartlink/whitelabel solution will be rolling out soon as well.

Ten years ago I did a lot of research into starting a dating site. There's a huge issue in the form of how do you start.

Do you start with an empty site?

Do you start with a bunch of fake profiles?

The "white label" programs I researched offered "galleries" (up to 30,000) to start your site.

I'm not a liar so that was not an option for me.

I did promote several as an affiliate but before long I found much better ways to spend my effort.

Being an affiliate and running a backend system are two very different things it's much more work and not for everyone.

This is a very popular vertical now. you should try hehe

Sending traffic as an affiliate is one thing, but owning a website and app is a whole other ball game. It's easy to send traffic to the offer and the offer converts while the company pays you for that conversion. It's harder when you own the thing yourself and you have to deal with customers and all that other time-consuming stuff.

Sure in your mind it might seem like the best thing to do when in reality it's a lot harder. Some rather just stick with what is working and leave it at that.

Hi Kuku,

These days there are millions of platforms who work with affiliates and they pay good and provide you free training and even free web site to run so i suppose its much faster to start as affiliate with network then to run app your self...
Just my opinion

Good luck

I'm not a dating affiliate, but the answer to your question is clear to me.

Most affiliates are not entrepreneurs. It takes more than having the capability to drive traffic to build a business.

Adult dating specifically has taken a HUGE hit lately with the latest Google Chrome update. They have stopped the display of deceptive-style ads (lots of those were big winners in adult, which is already very low margin).

Some email dating affiliates are still around crushing it. I see mailing and native as two of the last ways to run dating as an affiliate without getting very creative or running through accounts left and right.

You should try it.This is a most popular and easy to monetization vertical now, i think.

So if I have a dating app I wanted to launch/promote - an affiliate network would be the way to go? What else?

what audience?

I did 100s of joins a day and often over 1000 a day for 5 years in adult dating. so what? how does that fuel a site? imagine how it all breaks down. 3 active members in Bismark North Dakota, 7 in Cheyenne Wyoming etc etc etc. it takes a massive database to run a successful dating site. unless its a free site and you have an OBSCENE amount of traffic, you won't get too far unless you white label a site.

If you have volume, you can negotiate high payouts and have zero headaches. look at it this way, if you don't have to run a large business and can get paid 85% of the value of each member, why run your own site for 10X more headaches and only 10% more income? I can use that time to buy more traffic to other things or make money elsewhere.

I did dating exclusively for over 5 years, its much more fruitful to just negotiate high payouts. if you have good quality leads/joins then you can get negotiate high enough payouts that its not worth it to start your own site.

This thread may contain somebody you know. Lol.

I too made a dating site but it's such a high risk niche now that I will probably close it at some point. Actually the site made less conversions from dating offers than blogs about dating sites did. Another dating site owner said it was the same on his site.

I've made some good money from affiliate offers but they're just not converting so well these days. Customers are smart and they have largely figured out that dating sites are no longer that useful due to sharply declining membership quality.

Like many niches all the free sites are killing the paid sites. It's the same with the keyword tools niche.

US congress just passed HR 1865 FOSTA.

Basically holding dating sites legally responsible for their traffic.

I've had a dating site, very specific niche, for years. Never touched the thing after I did the initial content. It produced a few hundred dollars a month, typically. Now, crickets.

@Yukon! Thanks man!

I have decided that turning that niche into a blog, monetizing it in various ways will be a much better avenue.

After I heard from the white label company that 'it's all about the traffic you send'... what? I haven't sent any! LOL... I decided that the domain, which is a really good one IMO, would do better just talking about the niche. No real headaches either.

Dating sites are used up, too many out there. #saturatedniche

~ Theresa

It depends on what you like to do. If you like to communicate, an affiliate blog is a good idea.

If you like to run a business (and if you are very adventurous!), launching a dating site might be a good idea.

But as others have pointed out, the probability of success for a new dating site is almost zero.

This is too much work for some people. Some affiliates just want a good $3k/month, and that's it for the niche. And then go into a different niche and do the same thing. So while a dating app or site could possibly boost revenue, most affiliates are too lazy to do it.

Ya, it's a great idea, since dating industry is increasing you can tap that untapped potential. Going for a niche market is easy and profitable.
If ya guys are interested then I can provide or suggest the easiest method to create dating website with dating software. It is WordPress based though.

creating dating site that converts to paid is tough unless you have the quality members