One of the great joys about the web (indeed, about the internet itself) is that it offers us huge new opportunities to try out new ways of doing business. You might think that all possible ideas have already been tried but that would simply not be true. Think of Just Say Hi! for example.
Ás the late great Julian Simon pointed out, the only scarce resource we have is human ingenuity and it's that which throws up this cornucopia of new ideas for us. You might think that a market niche like online dating was already crowded, full in fact. There are the large companies like Yahoo, then those who chase various niches, like Jewish Singles, Christian Singles and so on. There's even one for single parents. Just Say Hi is doing it differently.
Instead of charging people to connect via their site, like Plentyoffish does, why not make the site free? There's enough advertising revenue to be had from people like Google's Adsense to make this a viable strategy.
So why not? A free site is going to get a lot more people joining than a paid one (unless we think that dating is a Giffen Good, which we have evidence that in fact it is not) and as it's the network effects that make them such desirable destinations, it should work very well indeed.
OK, that's the end of the economics. If you're looking for a date why not check out Just Say Hi!...?
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