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Comment by Erik816 | Hacker News Reader

A factor in any antitrust analysis is barriers to entry for new competition. In this case, those barriers are extremely low. How much effort does it take to whip up a dating site/app? Not very much. So even if IAC were to own nearly all existing dating sites (and thus in theory charging monopoly prices for date finding), 5 other people could start up competitors to undercut them on price in the next month without much trouble.

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It is quite difficult—just not necessarily in terms of code. What makes it really hard is the chicken-egg problem that people won't come to it until there are people on it to browse, and there aren't people on it to browse if nobody signs up.

OKCupid's clever bypass for this was to get people hooked answering all those little questions. Heck I knew early adopters that signed up just to answer those questions, not necessarily for dating, and then fell into using it.

Tinder's was the swipe right/left that has now become a term used outside of the app in other parts of life.

A dating site is only worthwhile if other people are on it. Obviously it's possible, but you need people on it to attract more people.

Apparently dating websites are notorious for having high churn. See: http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/

Doesn't matter. No matter what your churn is, if you currently have a thousand times more members then your competitors it will be drastically easier to attract new members. In other words, your competitors have a much higher customer acquisition cost. It's still a big barrier.

Well, the whole point of most dating websites ('finding life partner' ones) is to have high churn.

The churn is so high on dating sites that everybody is constantly re-acquiring customers. One test for anti-trust is also how they think the market would respond to a price increase.

Yes, you need a critical mass of people, but what this means can be very different for different people. Some dating sites have a warm body approach where you probably need lots of people because the set of matches is terrible.

However if you had a dating site for swedish people living in miami who only wanted to date swedish people even having 40 people on there might be plenty.

What's funny, is I think there's a company that does a lot of those hyper-local sites... iirc,roadside guerrilla marketing was involved.

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