By Peter Berton

LONDON – Can adult dating boost the revenues of adult-content sites battered by free porn? Yes, it can, according to Matthew Pitt, operations director for WhiteLabelDating. The company provides dating software and services — including payment processing, customer support and hosting infrastructure — for more than 14,000 dating sites worldwide.

“The online dating market is estimated to be worth U.S. $2 billion globally,” Pitt said. “It has proved itself to be highly recession-resilient, continuing to grow consistently throughout the longest economic downturn in recent history.

“Many adult site operators did not fare as well over the same period, with revenue and profit margins slowly declining as free content overtook paid,” he added. “Consequently, forward-thinking adult sites embraced the incremental revenue opportunities offered by casual dating and launched their own fully branded dating services to great success.”

YNOT.com asked Pitt to make his case for adding adult dating to their revenue-generating repertoires.

YNOT: Are paying adult site customers open to paying for an additional service like adult dating?

Matthew Pitt: Yes. There is a strong correlation between people looking at adult content and those interested in signing up to an online dating service, especially if that service is a branded extension of the core brand. By offering an alternative dating service and advertising it to your current site visitors, you have two opportunities to convert any given user while spending to acquire them only once.

With the lifetime value of a casual dating site user sitting in excess of U.S. $130, it’s easy to see why this platform has proved to be a popular brand extension and revenue-generation channel for adult site operators.

Where does WhiteLabelDating fit into the equation?

WhiteLabelDating offers partners high-converting dating software and support services. Our 60-strong development team builds our technology in-house at our UK headquarters.

Our partners can rest assured we’re committed to continuously improving our platform’s conversion rate to make them money. The team uses agile development processes to release regular revenue-generating software enhancements, typically every two weeks.

The benefits of this process are two-fold. As well as committing to regular product releases, our partners also have multiple opportunities to provide feedback on the features of the product that are making them money.

Adult site operators could simply launch their own dating service and keep all the revenues. Why should they go with your company and share the revenues?

One of the difficulties of launching your own dating site is that it’s hard to build a dating business from scratch. There are legal obligations, issues with populating your database, payment-processing fees, customer support, [customer relationship management], hosting infrastructure and more. If you plan to expand to more than one country, then you have to take care of these things multiple times over.

WhiteLabelDating handles all of this on behalf of our partners, for free, with absolutely zero setup costs or charges. In fact, if you have the design ready to go, you can have a site up and running in a couple of hours.

We don’t ask partners to pay any costs up-front. We work on a revenue-share basis, so we only make money when our partners do.

It’s their job to drive traffic to the platform. When [the traffic is] there, we take over the day-to-day running of the dating business for our partners and convert the traffic into revenue.

There are hundreds of dating sites online. How does WLD create a site that stands out and makes money?

There are hundreds of dating sites online, casual or otherwise, but a lot of them are incredibly generic.

It’s not news that consumer search trends are becoming increasingly specific. Consumers know exactly what they want and they want it at the click of a button, whether it’s content, cams or casual dating. That’s why niche dating really is where the money is.

WhiteLabelDating software offers hundreds of niche options for you to launch a site with. One of the beauties of creating a niche site — or multiple niche sites — is that they help you to achieve a much lower cost per acquisition, as well as a reduction in the cost of traffic. This is largely because you’ll find less competition on keywords like “casual dating for swingers” than on the more generic “casual dating.” Some niches that are seeing a peak in popularity right now are MILF, swingers, grannies and doggers.

As a result, content owners offering niche-targeted services are perfectly placed to launch a casual dating site as a brand extension channel as well as an additional revenue stream.

What about customer support? Who provides that?

We pride ourselves in having an industry-leading partner-account-management team that offers support, insight and guidance to help our partners accelerate the growth of their business.

Our partner managers know the dating industry, and our platform, inside-out. Each partner manager is a Google-certified digital marketing expert able to work with partners to build strategies for expansion and revenue generation. Our partners also receive a wealth of data from our internal reporting server.

Our customer-support team works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to provide round-the-clock support to the 33 million members our network houses across seven territories.

The moderation team ensures members have the maximum level of online safety by moderating every profile item submitted, whilst the retention team processes cancellations. By the way, on average the retention team retains more than one-third of members who intend to cancel.

What are the biggest mistakes people make when launching and operating dating sites?

The most common are:

• Thinking online dating is a get-rich-quick moneymaking scheme. Like everything else in business, success requires hard work. Online dating can be a very lucrative and rewarding business, but revenues don’t occur overnight. However, if you can get it right, the revenues are worth the effort.
• Underestimating the resources needed for an online dating service to be successful. Unless you have a rich aunt or an investor with deep pockets, don’t consider launching a new online dating site from scratch. Instead, select a company such as WhiteLabelDating that can provide you with a highly competitive platform, active user database, and full customer care, moderation and support. This will save you literally millions and enable you to compete with the big players, effectively, from launch.
• Launching without researching the competition. It sounds simple, but all too often people try to launch a dating service without researching the market opportunity or the competition. Do your homework, refine your brand positioning and unique selling point — including your landing page — and it will pay off.

Is there money to be made by targeting smaller niche dating markets like pony play, GILF and the like?

Yes, definitely. We certainly have seen a trend of consumers moving away from large generic dating sites in favor of those offering a targeted alternative.

Our partners who target niche dating audiences have seen a lot of success; however, a niche is only as good as the volume of users it attracts. If you go too specialist or too niche, you’ll find yourself having gone “a niche too far” without the sufficient traffic or visitor volume to make the service viable. This is where seasoned advice from a company such as WhiteLabelDating can come in very handy.

Should I worry about escorts using dating sites to conduct business? If so, does your company have ways to block them?

We do not allow escorts to solicit on our sites. Our team of trained moderators screens all user-generated content to confirm profiles are genuine. This involves analyzing pictures, profiles, diary entries, videos and initial private messages to ensure membership criteria are met for the individual site or network.

Moderators also examine all of these elements to weed out any profiles that are not genuine. If the team suspects an escort is attempting to sign up to a site, [the suspicious applicant] will be removed instantly. Likewise, if the team spots any member asking for money or financial details, whether they’re a scammer, escort or cam girl, they will be removed from the site immediately.

What tools and support do you offer to help new site operators get the most revenue from their dating sites?

To help our partners get the most out of their dating sites, the WhiteLabelDating Partner Portal makes a vast array of detailed reporting tools available. Partners can use their reports to identify how to boost revenues by analyzing the real-time data and interpreting key metrics within their portfolio. This allows partners to isolate areas and identify new opportunities, as well as to single out areas that need to be focused on.

The partner team members really are our greatest asset. We encourage all of our partners to use them, as well as to refer to our blogs and social media feeds for up-to-date advice straight from our team. Partners who work closely with their account managers are those who see the most success.