Relatieplanet

» see relatieplanet.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A national dating site is the least exportable product on the internet after a television listings grid. Relatieplanet worked in Dutch, for people who could plausibly meet each other on a Tuesday, and its entire value was that everyone in the country who was looking was already on it. There was never a version of this that reached me in Turkey, and there was never supposed to be.

Chris van Tuijl launched it in 2002, at the point where online dating in western Europe was moving from embarrassing to ordinary. It grew fast enough that by 2005 it was the largest dating platform in the Netherlands, carrying more than 1.1 million registered accounts against roughly 600,000 active profiles. In a country of sixteen million people that is close to every single adult who was in the market.

That was also the year he sold. Telegraaf Media Groep, the newspaper company, paid 21 million euros for it and attached a five-year non-compete keeping van Tuijl out of the dating business entirely. He had built the thing in three years and cashed out at the exact top, which is the part of this story that worked.

~ the dossier ~

~ everything after the sale ~

Nothing in the next sixteen years matched 2005. The peak numbers in every account of Relatieplanet are the ones from the year it changed hands, which tells you the newspaper group bought a finished asset rather than a growing one.

By 2014 the site was down to around 130,000 unique visitors a month and Telegraaf put it up for sale. No buyer appeared. By 2019 it had 75,000 members left, which is under seven percent of the accounts it had been holding fourteen years earlier. It kept running anyway, which is what happens when a property is too cheap to bother closing and too small to bother investing in.

~ what actually beat it ~

The closing statement named the cause without dressing it up: competition from mainly international dating platforms had made a local platform unprofitable. In the Dutch press that meant Tinder and Bumble, neither of which had to build a Dutch business to take the Dutch market.

This is the specific weakness of the national web property. Relatieplanet had to acquire every user in one country and could never grow past its borders, while an app with one global codebase arrived already carrying the people who had installed it abroad. Being number one in the Netherlands was worth 21 million euros in 2005 and worth nothing at all by 2021, and the site itself did not get worse in between.

~ what got deleted ~

The notice said the closure was decided with heartfelt regret and set the date at 1 July 2021. After that the website and the apps simply stopped answering, and all user data was deleted rather than archived or migrated.

Nineteen years of profiles and messages went at once. It is the correct thing to do with a dating database under European privacy law and it still means there is no record left of what any of it looked like. The domain now answers with a redirect to the corporate site of the media group that ended up owning the parent company.

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