Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

Webmaster Discussion
#1

For those of you that don’t know, Bear411.com is one of the more popular bear dating/hookup sites out there. They have an interesting business model where every other day access to the site is restricted to paying members only (on the other days anyone can log in and chat).

The site lists how many members are currently online and on the membership only days I’ve always seen at least 7,000 guys on line at any given time. At $9.95 for a membership that means they’re making $70,000 a month!?! For a site where all the content comes from members?

Wow. This must be what its like to have your own money printing press. Maybe I need to get into the dating biz.

:bang:

#2

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

on the other hand, ask any dating/hookup/chat site owner how hard it is to get the kind of traffic that can get that many signups, even free ones.

#3

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

They probably have way more than 7,000 paying members. That site has been around for ages.

#4

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

Haha, basschick. I hear you on that one. I am a new dating site owner, and we’ve seen a fair number of conversions, but it has not been easy going at all!

#5

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

bboy: what software do you use?

#6

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

no offense but thats not an accurate formula at all for estimating revenues. Sites things never work that way. think more 2-5% of a dating sites members are paying members. More for bear411 since theyve been around forever, but on bear411 theres really no reason to pay.

#7

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

I know nothing about bear411 have never heard of it and have never visited… I do know this, some dating/hookup sites have been accused of boosting their numbers with fake profiles by a huge amount making it appear busier than it actually is. Including the largest around:

http://www.audetlaw.com/case.php?id=58

#8

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

…on bear411 theres really no reason to pay.

Mr.Max, if you go back and read my original post I said that on certain days (odd or even numbered, I forget which), you can only view profiles and chat on Bear411 if you are a paying member. On these days I have noted at least 7,000+ members on-line at any given time so this equals at least 7,000 paying members per month… probably many more.

And although I know some dating sites put up fake profiles I doubt Bear411 is doing this now since they’ve been around for so long. You can also surf through all their profiles of guys on-line and chat with someone to see if they’re real.

#9

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

Just because there 7,000 people there on a membership day doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all paying members. I can understand why you’d come to that conclusion, but this may not be the case. There are other possibilities. First of all, people lie … about everything and all the time, especially in business.

While I’d agree that bear411 probably is one of the more successful paying profile sites – it’s simply been around forever – I wouldn’t base a proposed new business venture, i.e. setting up one’s own profile site, based on this kind of conjecture.

Bearbook.com is a relatively new venture. They’re a Facebook clone for bears and they gave away free memberships for the six months leading up to the launch. Now they’re charging $2.99 initiation and $5 for a year, and they still only have 1700 members.

I used to hang out on chat / profile sites a lot back at the end of the last decade and beginning of this one, and what I saw was that people don’t want to pay for hook-up sites. Everyone hung out on gay.com, then they tried making people pay and everyone jumped over m4m4sex.com because they were free. When they started to charge, everyone jumped to the next free one. Profile sites are like porn sites, everyone wants access, but no one really wants to pay. And if you are willing to pay, which one are you going to pick?

I don’t understand why the profile business model keeps trying to charge. If you just set yourself up as a completely free service with no limits on how many messages you could send etc. then you’d have access to tons of traffic, thousands of horny men who are sitting and staring at their computer screens waiting for someone to want them. Sell them something else. That’s how you make your money. Isn’t that what Facebook is doing? Would anyone actually pay to belong to Facebook? No, because as soon as Facebook started to charge, some other site would pop up that was free and everyone would move over there.

#10

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

Very good points Michael. Well said and I couldn’t agree more.

#11

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

Disagree dzinerbear. Or I at least partially disagree.

You are right that people will not pay for sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc. But how do you explain the business model for AdultFriendFinder? People will pay for discretion. People will pay for a barrier to entry. Now for a regular dating site, I agree people are less likely to pay. But for a NICHE site? Yes, people will pay, because I think that at the end of the day, people all want the same thing: meaningful connections with other human beings. And that is very hard to find on the internet, because everything is so anonymous. When a person visits a site that caters to that individual’s needs and wants, and offers that person a chance to connect with other like-minded people, that person will absolutely pay.

The trick, of course, is finding those niche dating/personals sites that haven’t already been developed. If you can do that, I think you have a recipe for printing money.

#12

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

[QUOTE=Seth;85540]I know nothing about bear411 have never heard of it and have never visited… I do know this, some dating/hookup sites have been accused of boosting their numbers with fake profiles by a huge amount making it appear busier than it actually is. Including the largest around:

http://www.audetlaw.com/case.php?id=58[/QUOTE]

Yes, Seth, AdultFriendFinder has long been known for being a scam site. Now the question we should all be asking is how AFF manages to attract as many PAYING members as it does, and also how the founder (Andrew Conru) is now sitting on a beach somewhere, worth HUNDREDS of millions of dollars LOL.

Anyway, AshleyMadison.com (another site similar to AdultFriendFinder but with a slight twist) has also been accused of creating a bunch of fake profiles. And that business model relies on PAYING to send emails to users on the site–now that is a business model I would have NEVER thought would have worked.

Really, at the end of the day, it seems that a paid dating site can work, but if it works it has to either attract a LOT of horny men (who are probably thinking with their wrong head when they fork over their credit card info), or as I said above, attract a very small niche dating category.

#13

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

I would take a guess and say that Manhunt is doing pretty well on the paid membership model.

#14

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

Just because there are 7,000 people there on a membership day doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all paying members. I can understand why you’d come to that conclusion, but this may not be the case. There are other possibilities. First of all, people lie … about everything and all the time, especially in business.

I would be very interested in knowing how Bear411 could be faking this and how boosting the online member numbers would benefit them. As I said, ONLY PAYING members have access on certain days and on these days the number of members listed on line is usually over 7,000 at any given time, at least when I’m logged in. It’s easy to verify this since all the members who are online can be viewed (12 members per page, more than 600 pages) and you can instantly chat with any of them.

Yes, anyone can be a Bear411 “member” for free but non-paying members only get access every other day. I haven’t checked to see what the online count is on these days but I assume its well over 7,000.

#15

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

Yes, Intense_Lloyd. I have heard that Manhunt earns about $30M in revenues yearly. And that’s not including advertisements–only paid subscription memberships.

Of course, Manhunt operated as a free site for a year (I believe), built an audience, and then began charging members.

#16

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

I need to qualify my previous statements. Sites like Manhunt do extremely well, so yes, there are men out there willing to pay for a profile / hook-up site. But as someone else pointed out, they offered their services for free for a long time to build up an audience and get people hooked. They’ve also spent a lot of money branding themselves in other media, like gay magazines, sponsoring gay events, etc. Gaydar is also another popular one, mainly in Europe, but they’re making inroads in North America, too.

However, for every Manhunt or Gaydar, there are dozens of sites who are also vying for their piece of the membership pie. While there is a pie to carve up, I’ve cruised profiles sites and gotten tons of messages like this, “Hi, you’re hot, here’s my e-mail, please don’t use up my free message quota. I’m not a paying member.”

I’ve also had bogus messages from sites like m4m4sex.com. I’ve got messages that some guy is interested in me and allegedly sent me a message and when I go to check the profile, well not to put myself down or anything, but I’m a 48-year-old, bald, 230-pound bear, so what does a GQ-type, twenty-something want with me. Yes, hot muscle guys do like bears, but when I look at this alleged sender’s profile, there’s nothing to indicate that he’s into bears. I consistently get these kinds of messages from m4m4sex.com and so does my partner. And it’s not even a site we ever use. We signed up eons ago when it was free, but it’s not a regular place we ever go now.

So if there are any profile sites out there reading this, you might think that these kind of tactics work to get traffic and members to your site, and maybe they do. But for me, they just leave a bad taste in my mouth – pardon the pun – because there’s nothing worse than getting that little jolt of excitement that someone is interested in boning you, then realizing that you’ve been duped, which may make you feel badly for having been duped in the first place, or it may make you feel that you’re really not appealing enough to have gotten a real message, or worse. But in no way does it make me feel like pulling out my credit card to give a site like this any money for having made people feel badly.

I still maintain, however, that if you’re going to start a profile site, you’re going to have a long haul of offering your services for free before you can turn it into a paying model. There are far many more people out there looking for free places than paying places. And if you can log onto five free sites at the same time and end up scoring, then what’s the incentive to paying.

And the problem is even more complicated from an affiliates point of view, and that’s mainly where I’ve been coming from in this discussion. With so many free options out there, with so many contrived affiliate payout schemes offered by these sites (i.e. we only pay if a free member converts within 30 days of signing up), with so many men looking for free profile sites, where does an affiliate send their traffic? In my experience, it’s been like shooting a cannon into a black hole.

If there’s a way to make money sending traffic to profile sites, please, tell me how to do it.

#17

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

every time these sites have less paying members, example gaydar lost a lot of members, migrating to Gayromeo.com because its free, in spain this is the trend, also manhunt have a lot of spanish members lately because its free too.

#18

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

[QUOTE=dzinerbear;85546]
I don’t understand why the profile business model keeps trying to charge. If you just set yourself up as a completely free service with no limits on how many messages you could send etc. then you’d have access to tons of traffic, thousands of horny men who are sitting and staring at their computer screens waiting for someone to want them. Sell them something else. That’s how you make your money. [/QUOTE]

Id rather have Manhunt’s bank account then Adam4Adam’s, even though a4a probably has more traffic.

#19

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

Good examples, and this was exactly the point I was trying to make. It’ll be very hard for Gay Romeo or Manhunt to convince people in these markets to begin paying. And if a new service happens to launch in the meantime, it’ll be even harder because surfers will have another new free service to jump to.

Do any of these services actually include any porn in their memberships? I mean if Manhunt, for example, subscribed to a few of Hardcore Gay Feeds video feeds and included it in their premium membership package, then this sweetens the pot to get surfers to pay for a membership. Not only are members getting access to all the premium features of the profile service, but now they’re getting access to some porn, too.

I don’t use profile sites a whole lot, so I’m not sure if any of them are actually already doing this.

#20

Re: Bear411.com: $70K + per month?

gayromeo.com have some DVD to download for members, but you can use the profiles, search etc… for free, the pay version have more space to store messages etc… gayromeo is used in China too, but the name is Planetromeo.com, this past summer I was in Shangai and a lot of guys in planetromeo :slight_smile: