What dating sites won’t tell you #2 – the nasty stuff

January 12th, 2009

Online dating is big business and there are always people out there who’d take advantage of people who are willing to pay. Online dating companies have a whole arsenal of tricks up their sleeves aimed at getting people to pay and stay on their sites. Here are a few secrets of the trade you may have not been aware of.

Number of profiles on site

Whoever said size doesn’t matter has obviously never seen dating sites battle it out over the size of their membership base. Being able to impress your potential subscribers with the huge number of eligible fellow daters signed up to your site is a huge selling point, so every online dating service boasts the most impressive numbers it can get away with. So how do you doctor the numbers to sound more impressive than the competition’s? You could, for example:

• Count every profile that’s ever been registered on your site, including inactive users, duplicate profiles and, on paid sites, those that signed up and never paid (if you require people to sign up for free before they can run a search, even better).
• If you have several sites, quote a figure that encompasses the membership figures of all your sites when talking about one site.
• Blatantly lie.

This way, your membership can quickly add up to millions of profiles, enticing many others to join. The truth is, there is no way for anyone outside of a particular Internet dating company to know how many profiles there are on their sites.

Male/female ratio

On any dating site that isn’t aimed at the gay scene, the perfect male/female ratio is 50-50. In reality, the vast majority of dating sites have more men than women. The only difference is by what factor the men outnumber the women. I’ve only ever known one dating site where there were actually more women than men and it was a very small, niche site. I’ve seen quite a few other sites claiming to have more women than men, but I remain unconvinced.

Serious dating sites (those for marriage/long-term relationship) will usually have slightly more women on them, sometimes resulting in a near 50-50 split. Casual dating and adult/sex dating sites, will generally have a lot more men than women. The more blatant the site is about the fact that people go there to look for sex, the less likely you are to find many women on there. Sites are often less than honest about the male/female split, but again, you can’t prove any of it for certain.

“Uninterrupted membership”

The pretty marketing name for the sneaky practice of automatically renewing your subscription at the end of the period you paid for, thus charging you for another month, three months or six months (depending on how long your original subscription was for).
This is apparently done to prevent you losing precious time having to renew it yourself when you’re keen to speak to someone on the site. In reality, I’ve seen people break the speed of sound signing up to a site and paying when they wanted to speak to someone, so I doubt anyone really needs this service. It does, however, make dating companies tonnes of cash.

Fake profiles

When I worked for an online dating company, we kept getting accused of faking profiles to get people to sign up to the site.
We never once faked a profile while I was there and as far as I know the company never faked a profile ever. Something so shady would be a huge risk for a company to take as it’s basically fraud. Many dating companies get accused of this and I am pretty certain the vast majority of them don’t fake profiles. Many dating sites, however, have ineffective profile moderation in place which means they get taken advantage of by scammers and spammers who place obviously fake profiles on the sites. This is usually the cause of the misunderstanding, as people assume the company who runs the site has put the profiles there.

Mass messages

Some sites offer you the opportunity to send the same message to a whole load of members at the same time. They do this because it means more members will get an alert saying they have a message waiting and will then sign up and pay so they can read it. It works surprisingly well. Sneaky? Definitely. Mean? Perhaps, but I know for a fact that this “feature” occasionally does pay off for members as well. Back in my moderating days I received quite a few thank you emails from people who met on our site after sending/receiving one of those mass emails. This is one hidden cloud that actually does have a silver lining.

Related posts:

1. Adult dating sites (that’s right, the sexy stuff!) – info and list
2. Fake profiles – why are they there?
3. Casual online dating: flirting sites, casual dating sites
4. Free dating sites – no credit card needed Internet dating
5. Serious dating sites: marriage sites, matchmaking sites

Entry Filed under: Online Dating Tips