Let’s talk about online dating, specifically how you can become (and remain) successful with online dating for the rest of your life.
Every online dating technology, whether it’s a website, an app, or a service, goes through five phases of effectiveness. This is normal and natural. When you understand these phases and you use them to your advantage, you will no longer be worried when a certain dating site, service, or app stops working or doesn’t work as well as it used to.
There’s been a lot of angst about online dating. A lot of guys are complaining that it “doesn’t work” anymore. When you understand these five phases, you’ll never have that problem again. As an Alpha Male 2.0, you can’t be monogamous for the rest of your life. That means you need to have a mechanism to bring new women into your life, at least sporadically, for the rest of your life.
You probably don’t want to do night game / daygame for the rest of your life. If you’re well over the age of thirty-five—your only other options are social circle game (which is still viable) or online dating.
It’s very important to understand these five phases and how to leverage each one when the time comes.
Phase One: Early Adopters
This is when the service is first created, and it’s kind of an oddity—it’s “cute” or “funny.” No one actually uses it, a lot of people think it’s weird, and most don’t know it even exists. There are people on there in this early stage, but not enough to provide enough scale for the model to actually work. It really doesn’t work very well during the early adoption phase because there aren’t enough women on there.
Phase Two: Hyper-effectiveness
This is the fun phase. This is when normal, everyday beta male guys can get on here and rack up dates and sex like it’s nothing. I’m not talking about seasoned pick-up artists or ripped six-pack guys; I’m talking about normal dudes who are using this new thing to get laid left and right. It’s kind of the “golden age” of this new service, and it’s fucking great. It’s what we all miss when we fall in love with a particular dating app.
Unfortunately, because all good things must come to an end, it doesn’t last forever. More people join the app or service, it gets more saturated, and it enters Phase Three.
Phase Three: Normal
And at this point, it becomes mainstream. Millions of people pile onto the app—tons of women, dudes, beta males, and even women who aren’t very serious about meeting up with a guy in real life. This means it’s no longer hyper-effective. It still works fine, it just doesn’t work as easily as it once did.
Phase Four: Difficult
This is where several things occur. First, it becomes overly saturated. Tons of dudes are on there now, saturating the hell out of it and pissing off the women.
Second, tons of women are on there who aren’t really there to date; many of them fake profiles, attention whores, or women advertising their Instagram, OnlyFans, webcam shit, etc.
Third, the dating site itself starts imposing all sorts of stupid rules, they change their algorithms to make things more difficult, they limit your ability to message women, they put all kinds of searching and swiping restrictions on you, and it becomes a clusterfuck.
At that point, the dating service still works, it’s just difficult. You can still use the Blackdragon system to get laid or get dates—the difference is, you have to put in a lot of time, be patient, and come up with a bunch of creative ways to make it work for you.
A bunch of the guys who helped me write the Ultimate Online Dating Manual, updated for the 2020s, are still killing it on apps that are still in the difficult phase (like Tinder) because they’ve discovered and implemented all these workarounds.
Phase Five: Niched
Over time, the site or app enters its final phase, “niched.” Now, “niched” is a good word in terms of Alpha 2.0 business structures, but in terms of dating services, it’s a bad thing.
“Niched” means it’s beyond difficult. It means that dating service is only valid and usable for a tiny, narrow segment of the male population. For everyone else, it’s pretty much useless. That’s the point at which you need to either bail on that service or take advantage of that niche, if you’re able.
These are the five phases every dating platform goes through. Let’s look at a few examples.
Match.com
This was really the first mainstream dating site. It went through all five phases. It entered its early adopter phase back in the mid-to-late-90s. No one really used it, and everyone thought it was cute that you could meet someone on this internet site, but they never thought anyone would seriously use it.
Then, in the early 2000s, Match.com entered hyper-effectiveness. A bunch of guys and women came in, but not too many, and normal, everyday beta male dudes were getting laid with ease. It was amazing.
Unfortunately, I missed this window; I was in my traditional monogamous first marriage, so I wasn’t able to take advantage of this. But I know a lot of normal, everyday guys who were killing it on there. It was awesome for the guys who were able to take advantage of Match.com’s Phase Two.
Then, around 2006, it moved into the normal phase. I entered the online dating game in 2007, so it had reached its normal phase by then. It worked well, but it didn’t work as well as it did for the guys before me.
After a few years, it moved into its “difficult” phase. A whole slew of fake profiles appeared. The site started limiting your ability to message women and cracking down on all kinds of things. A lot of the more relaxed, happy women exited the site and left behind all the angry, unhappy women, so it became harder to date. And it stayed in this phase for a long time, although it still worked. You could still find dates, sex, and relationships on Match.com during Phase Four, you just had to work it very hard.
Today, unfortunately, Match.com is niched. The best way I can think to describe it is “the place where divorced people over the age of thirty go to find their second spouse.” If you’re a divorced guy who’s 42 and your only goal is to find another wife, you’d go to Match.com. If you’re not in that category, it’s pretty much useless. I don’t even recommend it anymore.
But that wasn’t always the case; it went through all five phases.
Tinder
Tinder is a really interesting example because it went through all five phases, but much more quickly than Match.com. Match took fifteen years to get through all five; Tinder took just a few years.
It was only in its early adopter phase for a brief time. People thought it was so funny that you could swipe through all these pictures and that’s how you matched with people. It was an oddity.
Then around 2011, it achieved hyper-effectiveness. It was awesome for about a year and a half, maybe two years at the outside. During that time, oh yeah—I was able to hit this wave. I was Blackdragon at the time, so I benefited from this for a year and a half. It was the shit! Then, of course, everyone heard about it, it became this fun fad, everyone piled on, and it became mainstream and normal.
A bunch of women joined who were mostly attention whores looking from attention from men but not dates. A lot of women learned they could link their social media profiles to Tinder and use it as a de facto social media site, and it became more difficult. It was normal for quite a while, so it still worked, just not nearly as well as it did during the eighteen months it was hyper-effective.
Then, over time, it became difficult, and that’s where we are today. It is difficult. But I’m going to keep repeating this: It still works. Just because an app or site is in Phase Four doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. You just have to use all kinds of creative techniques to make it work for you.
In a few years (or less), it’ll move into Phase Five and it’ll become niched. It’ll be viable only for a certain narrow segment of the male population, and if you fall outside that, you shouldn’t even use it at that point. It’s not there yet, but we will get there soon. It’s normal and natural.
Sugar Daddy dating sites
Like everything else, these went through the same five phases. They got started around 2013 when sites like Seeking Arrangement came online, and no one really used them. Some people even thought it should be illegal, like prostitution. People were kind of intimidated; men, especially.
Then, around 2015, it achieved hyper-effectiveness. I started researching this, and I was shocked. It was pages and pages of super-hot younger women. And you often didn’t have to pay them as long as you were an older guy. This went on for about two-and-a-half years, and during that time I slowly started exploring that world. I have philosophical beliefs about paying for dates and sex, so I didn’t just jump into it. But there were times during this hyper-effectiveness phase when I didn’t have to pay the women at all because it was so effective.
Then, it started getting mainstream attention. A whole bunch of guys and women piled in there, all the girls told their friends, and so today, it’s normal. It looks a lot more like a normal dating site in that you’ll find a lot of women who are attractive and some who are not-so-attractive. There are also a lot of high-income, no-game beta males on there offering $1,000 dollars just to have dinner with them, and that really fucks up the market, so now, it’s no longer hyper-effective. It’s just kind of normal.
As of right now, the sugar daddy sites are moving from Phase Three into Phase Four. They’re not at Phase Four yet, but I’d say they’ll be getting there in the next six to twelve months. They’re in that transition period, and at some point down the road, they’ll pass into the niched phase and only be effective for a really narrow segment of guys.
How to Stay Hyper-Effective
So how do you remain hyper-effective at online dating for the rest of your life with all this going on? As an Alpha Male 2.0, you’ll need to be. We don’t have the option of settling down with one woman and never having sex with anyone else for the rest of your life. We don’t do monogamy; occasionally, you’ll need to bring new women in.
It’s important to know this because you’re not going to want to do daygame or night game when you’re older, and you can do social circle game if you’re a hard-core extrovert, but other than that, online dating is going to be a pretty important part of the equation for you going forward.
So here’s how you do this: You use the apps to the best of your ability when they’re hyper-effective, normal, and difficult. Once an app gets too difficult and starts moving into Phase Five, you draw the line there and stop using the app. Stop bitching that online dating doesn’t work, take a look around the internet, see what else is coming online that’s entering its hyper-effective phase, and pivot to that app.
Once you find it, you ride it through its hyper-effective, normal, and difficult phases, and then you do it all again once it becomes too difficult or niched. Very simple.
What’s hyper-effective right now? First, Instagram game. I know guys who helped write the updated book who are doing nothing but Instagram and they are killing it—the last two years in particular. I’m also running into more and more women who hooked up with guys who hit them up on Instagram.
So if you hate OkCupid, for instance, great! Stop using that and pivot over to Instagram. Get the Ultimate Online Dating Manual that comes out on December 3. If you don’t like my content, fine, find someone else’s content, but start going in that direction.
If I’m right and Instagram game is the new hyper-effective thing, soon it will be normal, then it will be difficult, and then it’ll suck and you’ll find something new. There will always be online dating; there will never be a time when there’s no way to date women online. It’ll just be different. Fifteen years from now, the online dating apps will be different, but they’ll be there, and they’ll go through these five phases. It’ll be up to you to always keep your antenna up so you can always be moving through that same cycle alongside the apps.
Yes, that means you have to learn a new app or system every few years. Boo-fucking-hoo. You can do it. It’s better than complaining, which is what most guys do. They have a specific app they fall in love with, and when it gets into Phase Four they spend all their time bitching about how online dating doesn’t work anymore.
Stupid. Follow the apps through their phases. I’ve been doing online dating for thirteen years. Do you think I’m still using Yahoo Personals or MySpace? MySpace was the shit from about 2007 to 2009, but am I still using it? When it went to Phase Four and Phase Five, did you hear me complain? No, I looked for the next new thing, which was Tinder. That’s all you need to do. It’s not that difficult.
Click here to register for the FREE webinar I’ll be doing on December 3rd on how to be successful with online dating in the 2020s, with a full Q&A at the end.
I’m really looking forward to the seminar. I found your book “The Ultimate Younger Woman Manual” to be of immense help. Best wishes…
Will the Sugar Daddy / Sugar Baby dating section of your new book include tips on how to handle police and courts in the event get caught up in a Vice Squad sting on a sugar dating site? And tips for avoiding getting caught up in such a situation in the first place?
As someone who has been around sex worker community (and had to learn the ropes of the legal side of that but always keen to learn more) in some form or fashion for many years, particularly my older more recent years, I can assure you this is NOT a “2% rule” scenario in many places in USA and certain other countries.
Well-written summary from CJ.
So I am in Caleb’s age group, and just recently set up an INSTA account. Never had one until this Fall.
You need to document your life -and bear in mind that nightlife is on pause this year with the Covid crap.
Nevertheless, tag those thotties -because we know they all are that -and let’s see if we can get some action out of it. It is too soon for me to make judgment of whether it works or not.
P.S. (I am also a blogger also and have featured a phone call with a 38-year old guy who’s got 700+ women in bed, beware Google censures results)
Cheers,
Max
No. 2% Rule.
Yes it is. At this time, the odds of you individually getting in trouble with the cops by messaging some girls on a sugar daddy site are 2% or less. (And if you think I’m wrong, show me your data that proves this. The reason you have a background in the sex worker world is exactly why you’re worried about this. Very similar to the guys who worked in hospitals who incorrectly thought COVID-19 would be much worse than it turned out to be. You’re too close to it.)
AHAHAHAHA I can’t believe guys like this actually exist. $1000 can get your dick sucked and ridden by a ultra hot porn star.
@Blackdragon “Yes it is. At this time, the odds of you individually getting in trouble with the cops by messaging some girls on a sugar daddy site are 2% or less. (And if you think I’m wrong, show me your data that proves this. The reason you have a background in the sex worker world is exactly why you’re worried about this. Very similar to the guys who worked in hospitals who incorrectly thought COVID-19 would be much worse than it turned out to be. You’re too close to it.)”
2,100 vice arrests per year in Houston. Sounds like not much for a city of millions, but to me as a guy who met a SB who was getting ready to move out of state to avoid re-arrest due to spending $2,400 on attorney to stay out of jail and complete “deferred adjudication” for sex work related charges in Dallas, your last point is key – one has to rationally and realistically assess whether they are “too close” to a situation to figure out if it is a 2% or greater situation for themselves personally.
So as guys get older and are more likely to get closer to the sex worker world as (according to posters on Eccie.net – sorry about the paywall, but that is also a legal protection) sex workers are becoming the most numerous group on sugar daddy sites like seekingarrangement (Phase 5 perhaps?), then some general thoughts on taking basic legal precautions (NOT legal “advice”) as well as avoiding rip-offs might be in order (or at least I would be interested in reading) for the sugar dating section of your new and improved Ultimate Online Dating Manual – to actively and smartly keep legal – and safety – trouble in that 2% realm for us personally.
Also, it would be good if your book covers which sugar dating sites work now, and what phase is each at right now? Looking forward to your new book..
@REDBARON “AHAHAHAHA I can’t believe guys like this actually exist. $1000 can get your dick sucked and ridden by a ultra hot porn star.”
My THOTs exactly.
Much less in certain markets.
Of course. However, lots of these hopeless pussies aren’t looking for a one-night-stand or hooker experience. A lot of them are looking for actual girlfriends. (On a fucking sugar daddy site. Yeah. Pathetic.)
2,100 men were arrested in Huston via sugar daddy dating site stings? Or for prostitution in general?
If it’s the latter then you just proved my point. Give me the number of arrests made directly via Seeking Arrangement.
Exactly. That’s one guy. One guy is not a statistic.
You’re to close to this to assess it rationally.
Incorrect. Professional sex workers make up no more than one-fifth of the women on an SD site at this time, at the most, based on my research and talking to a lot of sugar daddies.
Could that change down the road? Sure. But it’s not the case now.
I have said in the past that I have run into two or three actual hookers on SD sites… but that’s my point… two or three… still not a statistic nor worth concern.
The Ultimate Online Dating Manual is a dating manual, not a sugar daddy manual, so it doesn’t get into that level of detail regarding sugar daddy game. Late next year I plan on releasing an actual sugar daddy manual specifically for older, higher-income men; at that time I’d be happy to include techniques on that.
I don’t discuss the 2% realm. You shouldn’t either.
Yes, among the major ones anyway.
@Blackdragon “2,100 men were arrested in Huston via sugar daddy dating site stings? Or for prostitution in general?”
searching “prostitution arrests seeking arrangement” gave entry after entry and pages after pages of articles about arrests from SeekingArrangement and/or the websites responses to those articles. But I could not find specific statistics.
I agree in general about 2% rule. But all of us have had 2% things happen to us in life so it is also important to consider “what if” and have a plan for the unthinkable and then let it go at that point. Having a plan involving an appropriate legal retainer in place is not hard or expensive – but not having one can be catastrophic.
Yeah. So does searching for horror story arrests for people in Dubai or black people getting shot by white cops, but these things are still within the 2% Rule and not worth worrying about for you as an individual.
Not about this you don’t. You’re doing everything in your power to prove the opposite on this particular fear you have (which you can’t).
No we haven’t. That’s my point.
No it’s not. Or else you’d have to devise a detailed plan for things like an alien cyborg invasion, you getting your balls bitten off by a rabid mountain lion, your daughter getting raped by mutant zombies, you getting assassinated by ninjas in the middle of the night, and other 2% Rule items.
Precautions are warranted in certain areas of life as I’ve explained many times, but you clearly disagree with the 2% Rule, which is fine. Let’s agree to disagree. You keep worrying about all that and I’ll be over here being happy.
Caleb, I did not mean to suggest making a plan for every possible 2% risk, just those that in our individual circumstances we judge to be greater than the 2% risk everyone else faces. Like you said, I will concede, not everyone has faced 2% events in their lives (and I have probably faced more than most) and I know plenty of people who have. I can’t count the times I have called vendor’s 1800 numbers for help on something, and gotten the answer “we have never had that happen with our product or services before”.
Your sources say minimal risk of stings via sugar dating, my sources (participants on eccie.net) say otherwise, so yes, I agree that we will just have to disagree on that topic. To me, a good legal retainer when playing with sugar thots is like having a burglar alarm system – not a big deal, probably never have to use, but contributes immensely to peace or mind (and happiness!).
As for long term happiness, your materials have helped set me on that road more than any other expert’s, and worrying much less, so thank you.
I can understand not wanting to do night game when you’re older, but why not daygame? As long as you can find a target rich area, I don’t see the problem of integrating it with a demanding career schedule. I know daygamers in their 40s and 50s.
My impression from talking to people about it is that IG is something that is quickly going to niche, as it was never intended as a dating platform but a social media site. Unless you have a Dan Blitzerian lifestyle, or can easily make it seem like you do, you won’t really get anything by DMing women cold. As in, no women will take any notice until you’ve got a well above average follower count and have a rich page full of “high status” pictures of you partying wildly with cool and popular-looking people, which obviously takes a lot of time and effort to set up to begin with, especially if you don’t actually have that sort of lifestyle.
It’s really used far more often as a part of social circle game for young people these days, they meet somewhere, exchange IGs, then merge their friend groups in some outing and hook up.
So what is in the Phase One-Phase Two stage really right now? In some locations the other newer apps like bumble are well praised as being far more effective than tinder, so perhaps these would be the best examples now.
That’s true. I remember I was using Badoo several years ago (very popular dating app in my country) and it worked but it was hard. I hit it again one year ago and it did’t worked at all, although I was in much bigger city. There was a lot of limits, rules and so on. And there was overrepresentation of single mothers. I was suprised but now I see that this dating app is in niched phase – it’s place for single mothers looking for beta boyfriends. And my buddy was using it several months ago, and now he is in relationship with who? Of course single fucking mother.
my understanding of the instagram game is that you spend a lot of time building huge following which is not that hard if you use certain techniques and then you post a mix of your usual dating photos and some cool photos from your travel. If you do travel a lot you have loads already.
what i dont get is how to search easily by location or how to make it time efficient, seems solid but like a huge effort in time. It kinda feels like starting consulting business as a nobody and looking for clients.
what I find very solid right now is sugar dating sites. Theres enough girls there who dont neccessarily expect or want money from you if you present yourself in the right way (or expect v minimal support) because they are just looking for a quality man and they assume thats what you are if youre there. This has worked for me this year when everything else was grabage.
Are you talking about police entrapment? Thats illegial in most western countries. If the police does that they can go to jail and such evidence cannot be used in court. Its probably the other way in the usa as usual. The advice is to not live in the usa. Not because of this specifically but because of all the other things that come when such stuff is possible.
you clearly dont understand how instagram works if you think its about documenting your real life
There’s nothing wrong with doing daygame as an older man. It’s just that most older men are not going to want to do it.
Yeah. Those guys are the unusual exceptions, not the norm.
Tons of things are in Phase One; we just don’t know what they are (unless you do shitloads of research in this area).
Nothing is solidly in Phase Two at the moment though sugar daddy sites and IG are both good.
Do you consider Snapchat being niched?
Most of those things will never make it past phase one anyway so it doesn’t really make sense to think about that.
This year SG has worked for me much better than anything else, even when going only after the small group of women there who dont require payment (from the right man) it still has been way more effective than anything else. When I extend my search area I could find hot women willing to fly to meet me and often all I had to do was pay the flights and that was during partial lock downs. It was so effective last few months it felt like a waste of time to use anything else in fact. And that was with dating only women who didn’t ask for money or only asked for travel expenses or similar.
Also keep in mind that the phases are to a large extent location dependent. I remember when Tinder was in phase 2 and 3 in many place is was clearly barely usable in many other locations or useless even, but now those places are really easy with Tinder. This is interesting because looking at something that has phased out in other places can give an indication of what is likely to work well in near future in another area.
I have never touched snapchat and everyone I know who uses it (or have heard / read about using it) is part of quite a narrow age group and even within that age group it seems to be a certain type of people. On top of that if you want to use it for dating that’s adding another sub group. So without having seen it first hand I’d say that it is extremely niched, much more so than most other examples mentioned here.
My only question is: ” how do you keep IG low-profile when you have an OLTR?”
Even when it’s set up to private, IG automatically seeks your friends and suggests your profile to them. Plus you need some following there to validate the entire thing (chicks would be very suspicious of a 5 followers account).
Have you used IG before? Do you know how social media works? The solution to that is of course obvious. Before I give the answer lets see what you can come up with. Come on, its not hard.
No but I also don’t consider it a dating app nor an app lots of guys are using as a dating app at scale (unlike with Instagram and Facebook).
I know guys have used Snapchat to meet women but I’ve never spoken with a guy who had a specific system for it.
Correct. No one should focus on Phase One items, just Phase Two items or things that look like they might soon be Phase Two.
Use a separate IG account where you don’t use your real name.
I am forced to do this because I have my staff managing my public Instagram so doing my dating on that same account would be complicated, so I have a separate “personal” IG account that doesn’t have my name attached that I use for that stuff.
Also, your OLTR should fully understand that you “need” tools like this to replace FBs as needed so she shouldn’t care. (Though I understand if you’re referring to friends and family and stuff… but again… do you think I care what they think?)
Not as true as you would think. My personal IG account has something like 19 followers and I’ve never had a problem, though I am not a hardcore IG dater so keep that in mind. I use my IG account as a place to point women to once we’re talking, or if they ask (which they often do; women “expect” people to have IG accounts these days). They mainly want to see more pics of you and perhaps use it as a medium of communication.
Again, I’ve literally never had a problem, including with women who had hundreds of thousands of followers on their IG. That could perhaps be that women know I’m almost 50 and I tell them straight out, “I’m almost 50 so I don’t use IG much so I don’t have a lot going on there, just so you know.”
Yep, just keeping it low-profile for her…she’s 41 so she cares deeply about friends, family and stuff (plus she’s kinda of a public figure), so I kindly try to keep things more close to the chest.
Ok, this I can get. My guess it will work better with older guys plus younger women. Older FBs would probably be horrified of this kind of arrangement because they treat social media as sacred ground (could be wrong though).
Probably right. Younger dudes would fuck it up at some point because they care about shit like bragging and being out there on social media.
Unfortunately most women do, yeah. (Women are outcome dependent as fuck.)
More or less true but not as extreme as you’re saying. That’s mostly about ASD which yes, grows as a woman ages.