Anyone know about dating sites? Only 1% of my members are paying am I fucked?
 

I have a microniche dating/hookup site. In the past year I registered 18,084 members and the site was always free.
a month ago started asking for donations and a few days ago I took away some bonus features to people who dont donate.

so far only 188 have paid
so I have 17896 free members and thats only 1% of payers.
im fucking depressed about this! I thought I'd have like 4% of people paying, i cant believe how shitty that 1% result is.

Should I give it more time since I only took things away a few days ago?
I'm thinking about fucking forgetting this site and doing something else because obviously these people are cheap fucks. I dont know if it takes time for people to realize they should pay.

btw my price is $4.95/month, super low.

I do not know much but most guys are going to do the free date . I put my dating section on pps . I myself dont belive guys stay paying members for to long anyway. I of course have a cam site.:2 cents:

Easier to sell something for free I guess. If ya think about it, what percentage of guys looking at porn galleries actually join a program? Maybe that 1% number is good??? Not a good comparison maybe, the porn didn't require an email addy....

On the other hand: The PPS conversion on dating sites with free areas is way better than 1%. Mine average about 1 in 13 over time.

You haven't listed the URL of the site in question, would be interesting to see.

Good luck to ya! Raise your price btw..

I dont like linking to my sites because im paranoid, but the niche was chubby gay men. I thought microniching would bring me huge percentage of signups and loyalty but it didnt. theyre fucking cheap.

I think I might switch to the transexual niche for a dating site. That seems to be a big money maker and I want to start making some money. im tired of making pennies and nickles.
Ive hit so many dead ends it really is depressing.

make it a 5 dollar membership, send your current members an email that you are going to make some positive changes and ad some features blah, and you have a specail offer for them. They have been very loyal to you and you offer them a monthly full access membership for like 5 bucks a month.. you re talking serious cash if you ad that up. Even if you get 20% to do it that. 20K

Making a tranny dating site sounds like a big and frustrating task, where will you get the trannies? most of them are hookers and they wont pay for anything.

Either way, good luck.

Thought the gay niche paid well???? Never pushed it. Have made some off the transgender niche. Like everything else, to much given away free.

http://deliacd.com/ prolly rakes it in. See her stuff all over. A CD, that falls into the tgirl stuff, but really is a slightly different niche.

Posting a site addy on GFY has risks, that's for sure.

actually I have a *ton* of featues on my site that none of my competitors have. Most of them dont have video, I got videos, group jerk off video chat rooms, messageboards, pictures unlimited messages, guestbooks, blogs (they use them too) all that stuff.
My competitors all have just messaging and pictures and thats it. Theyre dinosours that add no new features to their sites, but theyve been around forever and my members are used to my competitors sites.
So Im totally stunned that more didnt buy on my site when i offer way more.

The reason I was thinking trannies is because on my gay site I have a lot of crossdressers who sign up and I throw them out because the panty and lingerie pics will turn off the rest of my members, thats why I thought a crossdressing/shemale/ts site might do well. Plus I figure every big program has a shemale site so it must be a big money maker.

I was thinking I could hire like 10 trannies and pay them $100 each to do a 4 minute interview on camera for my site, non nude just be like "Hi im Charelle and im looking for ____" have 10 videos of this and put them on my cover.
Then the guys who are into trannies will sign up, probably pay $19.95 and can contact the tgirls.
just a thought in my head

Just curious, are your donations fixed amounts or do they choose? If it's the latter, have you figured out the average $ amount per paying customer, and also the average $ amount per surfer (paying or otherwise)?

fixed amount
i just raised it from $4.95 to $5. that should make it look better and cleaner

Also, how do you ask for donations? I'm about to start a donation based service (not dating) and I'm thinking of pushing the "if you achieve a satisfactory end result please consider donating" type line. If you're just asking for straight out donations perhaps you could make it clearer that people benefit greatly from your services. Throw in some testimonials for good measure too.

Asking for $5 is a membership, not a donation?...

My experiment with donations won't have any upper limit, although I may impose a lower limit of say $2 in order to cover fees... it will be interesting to see what the average turns out to be. Some people won't pay anything but you may get others you give you $100.

When I average it out the average is $25 per customer. many got the $4.95/month recurring and many got the higher amount non recurring 3month/6month/1 year options

adding high quality one to one video calling which is marketed well will incease convertion rates to over 5%. Try out my service on - http://www.sunriseindustries.ie/news.php?id=34

IMO $4.95 of course sounds less than $5, and it's only 5 cents you're losing.. :2 cents:

I agree raising the 5 cents is not the best idea.
Also do you think you have all of your niche's available share or is there room to grow still? If so perhaps you should provide incentive to your original members, where they eventually will need to pay - yet that would be postponed for now and use them to help upsell you.
Really curious if you are actually marketing to them in the correct fashion as well. I would think there is a whole lot more to it than just collecting the monthly fee.
Hell just full of questions actually as I can not think of many reasons to say fuck it, like your thinking. Hell what kind of costs are associated with this?

How often does the average user sign in? And how many of those members through the past year are active users?

If you just started the pay service, I think it's too early to really get a full gauge. On another note, you have just under 200 paying numbers which makes the monthly total $1000 and it's basically a "new" business. How much does it cost you to operate the site?

I really think that you need to give it more time and see how it plays out. If you were willing to give up a year of time building it through the free route, you should give it a fair amount of time building it the pay route. If anything, perhaps you could try a new approach... instead of taking away features for nonpaying members, give additional features for paying members. Taking something away from people can be extremely difficult... giving them something new for a "fair" price may be much easier. Consumer psychology is bizarre.

You mention adding new features... only allow new features to paying members, something like that.

fake nick

thanks for the spam.

Your price point is too low. People associate quality with price. If you're priced much lower than competitors who are well established, I think your surfers will be expecting a catch.

What I think you should do is stop calling it a donation. Mail all of your members with a fairly short to the point email. Say you've reached a milestone where there's so many members that you can no longer afford to offer the high end (video, group video, etc) features to users at no cost. Go on to say that because you value all the existing members, you will be offering them a special $5 membership not available to new members and of course they can retain their basic membership for free. Raise your price for new members immediately to be competitive with your competition. Feel free to undercut their pricing here, but don't bargain basement on it. People associate cheap with having no value, it's the culture we live in.

Another good point. You've got to try everything and in the end see which is the best way. You never know if you don't try and you could be losing out on a lot of money if you don't experiment.

Bear in mind that discounting your membership price also cuts directly into your profits.

Imagine your membership price is $25 and it costs you $1 to service that member for a month.

If you discount that fee to $5, it still costs you $1. You're making a lower percentage of revenue vs. profit, and your overall per-member profit has fallen by the exact amount you've taken off the membership fee.