I heard an ad on Sirius for a dating service with over 1,000,000 members. I was wondering, how do these dating services that I have never heard of and that have 1,000,000 members get started?
If I decided to start an online dating service, how would I get to 1,000,000 members?
You lie to boost your numbers and/or set up a ton of fake profiles to attract customers.
I think a lot of dating sites get started with the intent/hope of eventually being bought out by Match.
And one of the ways a lot of the dating sites that make you pay work is to have a bunch of women with fake profiles flirt with you or send you a message. Only you can’t read the message (or see who’s flirting with you) unless you become a paid member. Then, when you pay, you can try to respond to the woman who wrote to you, only to get no response (or no meaningful response). Some sites are bigger scams than others. Even when a site is not a scam, there can be scammers who send messages leading to other scams (often these users get banned quickly, but they’ve already done their damage).
To validate these sites being scammy, read parts of this:
http://www.daterater.org/General-reviews/Plenty-of-Fish/review373.html
Search for ‘retired detective’ on that page, you’ll get to one of the posts that is most telling.
Either other sites are hiring shills, or the management permits (perhaps controls?) scam profiles.
Match.com started in … oh, 1995, I think. I remember, because I was in grad school at the time. They offered free lifetime memberships for all those that signed up in their first month online. I was one of the “charter members”, and all Match.com services remains free for me to this day; it’s not a crippled membership.