Answering my own question, but now there is:
Which does exactly that: "generous" members bid to go on dates with "attractive" members. It's done in a little too gender-rigid fashion, in my opinion, and also seems very openly to be skirting prostitution laws, rather than outright avoiding the potential linkage altogether.
Still, interested in any other competition, or failed prior attempts…
What are the arguments against paying singles to participate in online dating sites?
There are a quite a few ways to do this:
Leverage a user group/mailing list/other asset you already have. For example, if you ran a physical dating service, you could encourage your brick and mortar customers to join the site – even offering to pre-fill their information, and possibly give them a nice discount/comp account
Incentivize your first 5-10,000 users – free lifetime accounts, one on one consultations, the chance to win prizes, etc. Then further incent them by giving them an "extra chance to win" for each additional person they recruit, etc.
Use a white-labelled dating software solution to run your site. These solutions often come with the ability to leverage an existing pool of accounts shared by all the sites using the software. Warning: what you get in numbers is offset by having a large pool of members who aren't actually aware they joined your site – because they didn't!
Pay people to generate real user accounts and commit to participating in the site to some extent.
Pay people to generate fake user accounts, across a variety of demographics, to give the site the appearance of being fully populated. Alternately, pay someone for a pre-existing list of such fake users with all associated profile data/profile pics/etc included in a single tidy ZIP file for your site admin to integrate. For bonus points, once you start getting real people to sign up to the site, you can start removing/hiding the fake accounts incrementally over time, until all your users are "realish".
The last tactic even has a name in the industry – "Seed and Weed".
Some other "non-seed" methods you might try:
The media blitz. Just advertise the hell out of it, really pushing a unique selling point to the jaded media. Sometimes, that initial explosion of awareness can snowball into a healthy/sustainable volume of users. But that's pretty rare.
Give people something useful while they wait for enough potential matches to join up – even a regularly updated blog with insights similar to the OKTrends blog might get people interested enough to join… And when you start turning on the spigot of dating matches, they might stick, because they already appreciate your content. Other ideas – some form of integration with their existing dating life – analytics on their profile(s), email replies, etc… A curated events list to give them dating itinerary ideas. That's just a couple to get you started.
Begging. Never underestimate its power! Just ask people to join, and be honest about the likelihood that anything will come of it. Go door to door if you have to. Get it done!
Create a product so new, different, and amazing that people just can't help but sign up to try it out, and tell their friends about it. Often possible to leverage nascent platforms to achieve this – think of the first dating sites to "get" Facebook, for example. Simply by staking claim to empty territory, they were able to ramp up quickly before the traditional "big sites" could react.
In the "real world", dating is largely about taking chances, and exposing vulnerabilities in order to attract and comfort a potential mate.
Online, it's precisely the opposite: trying to attract and bond with someone without going out on a limb, or revealing one's negative traits as much as possible.
Whereas all sorts of unspoken signals (body language, hygiene, fashion) are immediately related when bumping into someone promising in a bar, their corresponding online proxies (spelling, grammar, writing style, and photoshopped pictures) do not actually provide an insight into the "real world" experience of meeting a particular person.
In fact, the online information more accurately conveys a combination of how this person behaves AFTER they are comfortable with someone, or just as likely how they aspire to be, rather than how they actually are. This can lead to all kinds of unmeetable expectations being set, with corresponding heartbreaks when the real world finally disturbs the perfection of online relating.
More recently, the particular phenomenon of group dating/looser coupling has grown in popularity. But this, as well as other "tactical" real world dating structures (speed dating, for example) HAVE been transitioned with much greater positive effect than the "catalog match" format, which is a closer analog to newspaper classified ads.
Without giving too much away about NaviDate's intents, I could suggest that a few things online could be better at are:
Nailing any one of these should produce a profitable business. Nailing them all could easily upset the current leaderboard of dating companies.
From whose perspective?
For daters:
"Advanced Search Engine" might have the edge, as the perception that they can easily filter/target their search across the thousands or even millions of daters in a given site's database may increase their likelihood to join and/or pay a premium to use the site.
For the dating company:
A "Superior Matching Algorithm", which demonstrably and verifiably resulted in more successful dates/hookups/relationships/marriages (depending on the site's niche/vision) would be a critical technical victory over a field of competitors who do not currently release detailed statistics.
Either way, at least in the near term, it is unlikely that EITHER would produce a significant upheaval in the online dating industry, where advertising dollars spent seems more correlative with marketshare and revenue.
My own opinion is that both are still great goals for a new/smaller online dating company to pursue, as both types of technology could potentially be re-used/licensed outside the dating sphere… But it's likely that some other factor (mobile app, new site niche, security event) will result in greater overall changes to the dating landscape.
The best way to get around this issue is to have an extremely well written profile that does the following:
Then, you have a clear sequence of "good etiquette" actions based on what comes into your inbox:
I tend to advise people to only reply to those they'd actually be willing to have a terrible first date with solely based on the initial email interaction. Still, the kind of person who asks a question like this usually has some pretty strong feelings about what it's like to "put yourself out there and hear nothing back", and I think the world would be a better place if everyone knew how to write a good rejection letter, and those who received them knew how best to react upon receiving one.
Still, as others have mentioned, responding to anyone you don't want to go out with has the potential to open a Pandora's Box of bad experiences. Wish it weren't so, but online dating is unlicensed and unregulated, much like offline dating – there are no guarantees that your prospects will have the same experience, background, and general etiquette as you these days. Which, again, is why it's nice to state your defaults in your profile.
What is the etiquette when you are not interested in a person who has messaged you on a dating site?
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