sounds like its time to open up a free site that doesn't store passwords in plaintext and doesn't get sold to the terrible dinosaurs. one can only hope it doesn't turn out badly. intuit hasn't yet ruined mint, so its theoretically possible.
There are several new hot free online dating sites started every year, mine is still running but after stopping my advertising campaigns it has languished.
If you’re still interested in doing a free online dating site then more power to you and I hope you have better luck than I did.
However, if you've got some kind of unique angle (like Set For Marriage's focus on marriage-minded people or Ashley Madison's controversial focus on facilitating adultery) or some kind of newsworthy technology it's not really that hard to line up interviews with local news stations and blogs (the founder of Set For Marriage was interviewed by something like 15 local news stations around the US from a single press release and some nudging). Going to online dating conferences can also be very good too, as many of the people in the industry are very willing to help out serious and interesting newcomers.
There's definitely a challenge in building traffic though. AdWords and SEO for dating terms are very competitive, and affiliate traffic can be very scammer-heavy. CloudFlare, some decent flagging algorithms, and OCD developers who check for spam accounts multiple times a day can help out tremendously with this, and we've given one nice woman a lifetime premium account for reporting a ton of suspicious accounts to us.
Maybe one will even go through YCombinator. pg and crew have said they see that as an area they'd fund:
(http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html)
8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.
if i were to suddenly have more free time, i'd probably give it a shot, myself.
Now, granted, EP is a controversial science, and I'm not sure that those guys are spot-on about everything... but I strongly believe that the ideas coming out of that world do reflect some underlying truths about our world. If that's true, then my questions would be "how do you build a dating site that's optimized for both men and women? Or can you? And if you can't, which do you optimize for? Or does that even make sense?"
its also hard to tell if free sites have come to a weird nash equilibrium, or if their current state is actually optimal and the "best" way to do online dating just sucks. would something more fundamentally different be less successful despite being proven more effective simply because of how it works?
The real problem for me was: when you stop advertising, the traffic is fading off.
There is some kind of secret how Plenty of Fish or OkCupid are getting visitors without advertisement.