Intimate O(pi)nions

As you know, I’m planning to start my own dating site and my coder is hard at work right now. While I wait, I am studying more and more about the industry, the tips and how they operate. I must say, I spend most of my day trying to keep my breakfast down.

Here’s the obvious: They can sell your data. There’s constantly new sites coming up that need members to attract more paying members. Who’s going to sign up to a dating site that hasn’t got anyone on it to date, right? So the idea is to buy a database of users of another dating site. Some users are not real, some have already found their mate and moved on, and some will never check the site they are supposedly members of. This coin has two sides, as most coins do; the side that sells and the side that buys. Both of them are the types of sites you want to steer away from.

I don’t know yet, how to accurately find a site that will sell your info. Just when you join, keep this in mind and if you’re worried, do a google search on the company and see what is said. One big site that is very untrustworthy according to my studies is True.com. They have more than one trick up their sleeve, apparently.

One way to check if a site is a genuine site with its own members is to compare the amount of members to the Alexa rating and the Google page rank. (You can install a plugin for your browser to automatically show you both ranks.) If the site has a page rank of 2 and boasts thousands of members, you might want to check where they got their members from. It could be okay though. Some sites start up as “white label” sites, which means they have a centralized database that several sites use. To put it into more understandable terms, it’s like a dance club with several doors. Each door is has their own name on it, and you can choose if you want to use the door that says “Nite Train” or the door that says “El Gringo”. You pay for your entry at the door and join the same crowd in the inside. You might be surprised by the amount of people inside, as there was hardly no queue outside the door. However, you may end up being seen through the window that proudly writes “The Blue Oyster” (Remember that one?) on top of your head, if you sing up on a site that has a badly organized shared database. But even if you have signed up on a trusted site and everything, you still have little control over who will see your profile, as not even the site admin will know for sure where your face will end up with your complete profile. Sounds unnerving, doesn’t it? And the amount of this type of dating services is growing rapidly. I did consider that as an option for myself, but the lack of control just doesn’t feel right to me.

The next issue dating sites have is that they are a business. They need to keep you paying for the membership for as long as possible, which means no matter how many match functions they have, their goal is to sell you dreams of love instead of real love. They count on you trying for longer to find your true love before you give up and stop the subscription, rather than finding you a good match as soon as possible. If they don’t have matching functions, they will make it difficult for you to reach other members, so that you’ll spend time and money sending messages to each member. And those winks? Guess what the purpose of them is? They are a great way for a site to send you a “wink” by another member to get you to sign up to contact that member, and if you’re not getting real winks, nothing stops them from making one up. This doesn’t apply to all sites, and I’ve read some comments by dating site owners to the effect that they too feel sick thinking about it and they just want to help their customers to find love. (Of course they are then attacked by other dating site owners saying “you are a business, aren’t you?!”) The thing is, that doing what is right and what is profitable can be seen as two separate things, but there are people who see the way they can and will go hand in hand. So the point is, bigger isn’t necessarily better here. The bigger the site, the less likely the owner is going to care about you and your love life, and match profiles are rarely there to make the search faster for you.

This is more or less the reason why I never signed up on a paid site. I never trusted them. However, I now know that there are dating companies out there who are in it for the right reasons. Of course they want to make a profit out of it if they can provide a good service, and I can’t blame them for it. You have to try and make your living by doing something you love, I believe. (And we all love love!) So my advice is… Before you sign up, try to feel the vibe, and don’t forget, there’s other ways of making money off you on the site even if you’re not paying anything – like selling you out or getting paid for your eyeballs.

One site I would now sign up on: http://dating.co.uk/

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