Previously I reported on the yearly gains of Match.com from its online dating business and how they were continuing to see a rise in this business despite reaching some saturation points a few years back.

This indicates that online dating is making a come back and for many single people it is an efficient platform to meet other like-minded individuals and for finding potential partners. This is all very good news for the online dating business directed towards the subscription based model and the ‘big’ well established companies that have a strong brand presence not only here in the US but in many parts around the world especially in the more developed countries.

On the same token the model for free dating sites is somewhat a bit of a shaky ground. This is because free dating sites do not have the same strategic leverage as the subscription paid dating sites such as eharmony, match etc. The potential earnings by the big players of the subscription based models are pretty staggering especially when you have thousands of monthly paid subscribers on your site. It is inevitable that many of those subscribers will likely not cancel their membership but only continue even if they are not in the market of dating.

Free dating sites have a much bigger concern when it comes to fund their venture and they usually find this through the advertising model such as Google Adsense. However, the potential earnings for such sites through advertising is directly proportional to the traffic levels that you are able to bring to the site. For newly start up free dating sites, this can be a very daunting task and much money will go into the start-up phase to acquire any kind of traction before any kind of reasonable income can be gained.

From the strategic business point of view, it is clear that subscription based dating sites will hold a much higher value than say free dating sites.

free dating sites success depends entirely on how much traffic they can get