Niche sites taking over a mainstream market?
The continuing mushroom effect of the dating industry has meant more and more entrepreneurs and lonely webmasters are turning their hand to creating dating web sites.
With the mainstream market dominated by well established, high budget companies the answer for new sites has been to target a niche market.
Sites targeting specific audiences based on race, religion and sexual orientation are understandably popular and deserved of dedicated sites due to the size of their market.
But what of smaller niches? Vegetarians, geeks, environmentalists, farmers and legal workers are just some of the areas covered by new sites being touted within the past couple of weeks.
As an experiment I took the first subject that came into my head (bikers) and performed a google search. The results are typical of those for a range of popular and more obscure past times now catered for by the dating market.
Evidence from Hitwise suggests niche sites are slowly taking an advantage in the US market. This evidence supports earlier claims of a ‘supermarket’ effect at the mainstream sites as too much choice is having a negative effect on a user’s ability to find a potential date.
So, as niche sites continue to prosper how can we expect the market to change? It seems likely that the likes of Eharmony and Match will begin releasing spin off niche sites and in the years to come even the most fussy dater will be well catered for in their particular niche.
