Conventional online dating will ultimately make you sick to your stomach, let alone the inherent risks with dating people without any reference whatsoever. Why not consider lead referrals?

Consider the revelation from a published sex study: 62% of married people meet through networks of friends. Private online dating meets the need for a truly private and safe alternative to meeting trustworthy people.

Private Online Dating is for people who value their privacy. Individual profiles are confidential. There is no ability to search for profiles outside each member’s own trusted connections. Each member manages by invitation their own private social network of trusted friends and family. Only a member’s trusted connections can view their profile.

Private Online Dating is for people who value their safety. You don’t expose yourself and trust people you don’t know. References and testimonials accompany romantic introductions. Credibility of romantic introductions can be further verified by asking trusted connections for additional information. This serves to mitigate dubious activity including romance scams and online predatory behavior. Photos and profiles are genuine. Connections will not make introductions if information is inaccurate. It’s an auto-moderated system by default.

The only vendor espousing the virtues of this niche is Sparkbliss.com or privateonlinedating.com.

In effect it creates a niche around each user. This is a very cool feature that may be a way forward for the big sites. Socnets have always had the ability to be a niche for most users and dating sites would do well to cater for those users who want (or fall into) a niche.

The majority of people I talk to who have tried to develop software have run into serious problems. If you’re going to use software, make sure its with a development group that has developed community/social networking/dating sites in the past. You don’t want to have to bring them up to speed on all the intricacies of community site development. Most software specs I’ve seen leave a lot to the interpretation of the programmer and project manager, so find a group that knows your field.

If you have more generic needs you could use an off the shelf package. Off the shelf dating site software is a better bet than developing from scratch in most cases but most packages tend to be buggy and the support costs can add up. They are improving, but my money has always been on using white label services. You can find a list on Online Personals Watch. See the right bar, Quick Links, Build Your Own Dating Site. There’s a lot of software and white labeling providers to choose from these days.

White labeling services help negate operational costs, and help entrepreneurs build a profitable businesses extremely quickly by granting them access to an existing base of users. Rather than start one generic site, I’d recommend starting a number of niches. Niche dating sites tend to convert better than generic sites and tend to garner more word-of-mouth exposure amongst their target audiences because of their more focused approach. Let me know how it goes, mark@courtlandbrooks.com.

Coming at this as a sideways approach mean that Dating networks will eventually control the online dating community…

Old models like Match, Lavalife etc will eventually be left behind to hug there own brand. It seems to me like these companies are blind or don’t understand the concept, one day they wake up and it will be too late.

A word of warning though is to make sure that your due diligence for these companies are thorough, our own experience is that many companies get trapped by misleading information.

History has shown us that time and time again they have joined other networks, but quickly move again, after discovering many pitfalls or discrepancies

Certainly there is an opportunity to do so by offering superior user services, features and perhaps most causally, in this case, by avoiding some of the prevalent and unfortunate typical traffic driving tactics of high traffic ranking sites. That being said, as a founder of a new hybrid mainstream/casual dating site, I’m always after active user and subscriber stats as opposed to traffic.

I agree wholeheartedly with Jane and her argument that dating sites are not “one size fits all”. I personally don’t see the need for the existent polarity between niche and mainstream sites. Furthermore, I fervently see the “niche needs” of the online dater. As such, I think there is a glaring opportunity for a dating site, whether it be an existing or new one (like mine!), to offer niche environments within an overall online dating community. As it stands I don’t know of a site that offers such filtering done effectively that offers this service.

I think, overall, what we’re seeing here is a seasoning of the online dater in terms of experience, needs and expectations that is responsible for the decrease in market share for top 5 mainstream sites. This is something that has been happening for a while here and if the top 5 want to maintain their standing they need to start taking notice and act or move aside.

Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch did a guest post at TechCrunch about how the niche dating sites market share is growing fast while the top 5 sites for the most part are losing ground. The top 5 dating sites in market share, according to Hitwise …

Other sites that are single niches, also have a similar problem, but add to their expaandability by a smaller market, while their conversion rates are higher due to a more focused community.

Dating Networks generally produce only clones of their own niches, so therefore restrict themselves as well as their partners to a small collection of niches.

The real power of niching is where anyone can devise their own niche according to their own research. Also giving them an area to work in on a B2B level where they can offer niches to other companies who are looking for their own branding and filter members to their specific criteria as well.

General sites are declining held up and supported by advertising, brand awareness and the ability to buy traffic at extremely high prices. Their annual inreases around 10%, in comparison to B2B niche models who look towards a 10% increase on a monthly basis.

We literally have offers to aqcuire on a wekly basis from larger organisations, they do recognise the power behind niching and branding, alongside 14 languages, 42 currency choices and 13 million variations of nichesas well as the flexibility to create multiple revenue streams which can be cross promoted.

How is Lavelife, match or any other similar system going to expand at speed into a fast growing market. As a victim of their own initial success, they will only promote and offer their own brand to sell to other communities, not the best recipe.

It may suprse thm to learn that other big brands, (Take Virgin as an obvious example) would like their brand promoted and not someone elses.

Your words in Comment #4 sum up well the point of this data-rich post.

The dating space is still an interesting diversion from the Net at large in that a Google-type approach hasn’t yet worked.

We’re talking online PERSONALS after all, and many people feel most comfortable when they have at least the perception that they are operating within a realm with which they identify. Friendfinder seemed to have recognized this very early on and did well establishing an endless network of affiliate sites.

The online job search space is another area where the ‘monsters’ don’t necessarily have better results than niche. It would be interesting to compare that space’s analytic results to your data here.