[bumfluff]

Branding and marketing, basically. It doesn't matter how crap a company or product is, what matters is how they're perceived.

Low running costs help to keep some companies running, especially things like directories. They're pretty cheap to set up and run, so you don't need to make a huge amount of money to keep covering your costs. I don't know, but I'm guessing date sites would also fall into this category. As I understand it, software makes the matches by sorting through submitted info about members. If all that had to be done by hand, the costs would be higher and less sites of that sort would survive.