Starting a dating site?

[ubaidabcd]

I found a niche that only has a few dating sites and none of them are quality sites, except for 1-2 but there is traffic coming to this niche.

I started an affiliate program with one of them. As soon as I started making money, I think they started shaving since the traffic I was sending them started to not show up in my affiliate reports! It was a huge difference let's say I'd send 30 clicks and my control panel shows 1 hit??!!! I spoke to them but they say it's not them. It's not fraudulent traffic it's from YSM, so I doubt they're the problem especially when this started after I started making money consistently.

So what would you suggest should I start a dating site in this niche? What are the costs? Do you have to pay extra for hosting? Is it complicated to run a site like this?

Only thing I'm wondering is that, if he was making money in this niche he wouldn't have a reason to shave, correct?

 

[mike82]

i'd say go for it. i run a network of dating sites, but they arent profitable for me yet.

you can start off on shared server but if you ever get popular you'll need a vps or dedicated.

maintenance is relatively easy... you just have to watch out for spammers and bots.. this can be utterly annoying if your site isn't coded properly to prevent this.

 

[Dullspace]

A lot of it depends what kind of scope the project is going to have along with the retention rates you expect for profitability. Dating sites are one of those things that can be turn-keyed dirt cheap or can easily eat up 250k on preparing a seed database before launch. Personally, I do affiliate marketing for heavy competition niches and make my own sites with billing for small niches I believe I have a chance at dominating.

 

[ImagesAndWords]

This summer one of my goals is to set up a dating site as well (in a certain niche of the dating scene here in Scandinavia). I will host it myself, but pay for the outsourced code.

Give it a try. I figure if it becomes too high maintenance, I can always sell the whole site in its entirety. Make sure to pay attention to good branding right from the start. I know I will.