Alright, a few of my friends and I have come together to think of a way that we can make money off the internet. Through ads and various other ways, webmasters can make a decent chunk of change, and we want to be a part of that.

We thought of a website that will be like an online dating site. Here is what we have thought of so far.

1. Catchy domain name (its a sercret)
2. To build a base client list, we'll make our own profiles that we'll maintain in order to attract more users. Once we reach a certain number of users to keep the website going, we'll take down our "fake" accounts.
3. Ad placement of course
4. Free membership
5. Premium membership, we don't know how to charge yet nor the price per month.
6. We want to start local and depending on how it grows, we'll adjust
7. We want to have a decent content manager so different people can be working on different parts of the website at the same time. (any recommendations?)
8. We wanted to have some sort of e-mail verification and address verification for the profiles to limit spammed accounts that aren't our own. Address verification obviously for the billing purposes.
9. Possibly even merchendise like hats, t-shirts from CafePress.com

What do you all think so far?

Sounds cool, but don't many of these type of sites already exist?
For this type of thing you would probaly have to creat your own CMS or heavily mod one to handle all the profiles and specialized stuff you want to do.

Hmm .. sounds like an idea .. but i guess i'd pass .. cause a day after you launch your site .. i bet my ISP will block it .. all dating sites in this part of the world are blocked ..

Incase you are bend upon complete user participation .. get your website to connect to https:// .. they cant block https over here

Regards
Dhanesh.

Well, I hope you're being sarcastic.

If you're not, you and your friends are like 6 or 8 years late on this idea... It's been done over and over again, exactly the way you describe it. Not that it would not work, or we wouldn't see these nowadays...

Still...

Sounds good but right now there exists a lot of sites like yours, i think that the only way that your site would success is by offering good contents and also to permit your users to email directly without any restriction.

best regards,

Yes, like a lot of the guys here have already pointed out; the dating website thing has been done to bits.. there is though another method that'll really help you kick off. The idea also has been done a few times but is not immediately in the spotlight.

What I'm talking about is; since you're already making the effort of building a website, why not take this a step ahead in the following manner:
Register an offline firm with all the necessary paperwork.
Reorganize your dating matching system so that instead of the system automatically sending out e-mails to matches - the system sends you the information - upon which you take action by actually calling up the match pairs and arrange for a meeting by them at a common acceptable venue (along with the introduction made by yourselves - like as if you're the pcommon acquaintance/ friend).

This is where you can actually make your financial gain. Your billing would be solely based on this. Since most persons actually shy away from the online billed version of match making (and this is only from asking friends), this would actually work out much better.

All the best

nici, I want to hear more abaut dating web sites, I have one is real www.mylove.go.ro/test.html is real! I like thouse stufff!

I think in order to be successful at dating website, you need to offer something unique that others lack. Like many other people have pointed out there are a lot of extremely dating website who have the resource to be able to advertise a great deal. I think you can successful if you find a niche. What niche? I really don’t know.

I don't think there are any niches left. They've all been done:

Advanced matching system (check)
Obvious domain name (check)
Targeted to a specific group/ethnicity of people (check)
Dr. Phil (check)

Yep, I think they've all been done

In addition, what is strange for me about all those dating sites, that no matter how much new sites like that appear in a week, all of them are getting visitors and people who register and come back to check.. but usually they don't if the dating site is not so popular.. I never spend my time there, unless it is much more of a portal than a dating site

oh yea, I am registered at orkut