Chimmy

Right now, I send a whole lot of traffic over to AFF. And as far as earnings go, I have no complaints. But, I am curious as to which adult personals site has the largest percentage of REAL female members. i.e. If you look at 20 ads, which site are you most likely to find the largest number of ads that are posted by real females and not either a) Fake profiles to entice you to visit a pay site. b) Fake profiles which the site itself has posted to try to increase conversions.

On a side note, AFF, where the heck do you get your stats from? According to your site, there are 1.1 million members in Canada. Uh, yah, sure there is. 1 out of 29 of all Canadian citizens are members of AFF???

pornprotege

I believe AFF and passions are the two largest ( aside from the canadian thing, thats an error for sure)

SexSearch is growing really fast, as is IwantU.. It seems im making the most RPC with AdultActionCash though

__________________
i don't have a sig.

Barefootsies

Every one of them claims to have millions.

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Should You Email Your Members?

Link1 | Link2 | Link3

Enough Said.

"Would you rather live like a king for a year or like a prince forever?"

Chimmy

Interesting.

Start a thread about any of the dating sites, asking which one pays out the best and you are guaranteed that every marketing guy from every site will post a response.

But start a thread asking the sites to comment on the number of real ads, and everyone goes silent.

Hmmm....could it be because they all know that a very large percentage of their ads are in fact fake, expired months or years ago..or in other ways dishonest. Yep, that's what the smart money is betting on.

Chimmy

No takers?

If this was mainstream, I can guarantee that all of the dating site owners would be posting various statements as to how they screen all profiles, remove expired profiles,and so on, to ensure the integrity of their sites.

Come on fellas, I'm asking a very simple question..one which entails the largest single necessary component of any honest dating site..and no one has an answer?

absix

To me sexyads.net has the biggest % real people (knowing the owners and how they work + my personal experience).

I operate my site the same way.

AFF may be the best but they are heading the wrong way, the porn way, not the dating.

Just my humble opinion.

__________________
ICQ: 59eleven5623, ab at zoig dot com

absix

There's no such thing as passions.com It's passion.com

__________________
ICQ: 59eleven5623, ab at zoig dot com

2HousePlague

Hi Chimmy,

Perhaps the lack of serious response owes to the poor phrasing of the question.

You're essentialy asking -- "What percentage of your member profiles are fake?"

We all have delete-as-soon-as-found policies, with each company setting its own criteria for what contsitutes an undesirable member profile.

I think I can safely speak for all when I say even one is too many. But the challenging logistics of detection, verification and removal mean there are usually always some to be found.

If your question relates to an interest in promoting an Adult Personals Site, feel free to contact me regarding SexSearch.com.



j-

__________________
tada!

detoxed

In 20 years the dating sites are gonna be full of dead people or ancient pics. I wonder what they will do to stop this

Chimmy

I tend to agree with you. These sites simply get greedier and greedier, and lose sight of simply providing a quality service. One very telling sign is the simple fact that I have yet to see a single ad placed in an adult based women's magazine or any other avenue that is known to attract women. A quality site would adjust their marketing to ensure that they attract enough of both sex to deliver a quality product to their customers.

Plus, a single look at my own stats would show men to women free sign-ups averages 15 to 1. Factor in the number of these "women" that are really men, and the number probably drops to 1 in 25. Then factor in how many of the real women convert to paid memberships, and I wouldn't doubt that it could be 1 in 50 or worse.

And in the case of AFF, they know where the money is, and that's in live cams...hence, the recent merger of Lars & AFF. I'd like to see more effort put into including in the membership what the men are looking for, instead of trying to develop the best platform to upsell the customer to a cam show.

Xenophage

No actually profiles are deleated with inactivity and it is AFF's policy to delete profiles that are not up to our standards. we go to great effort to weed out bad profiles. But being that we are by far the largest adult dating company, there are a lot of people who want to scam and suck traffic from us, much the same as cheaters on tgps. Even compeating dating sites try to sneak in profiles... and unlike a tgp we cant just have perferred submitters list. We are very motivated to have the best profiles in the industry, thats what helps us be #1 in customer satisfaction, and therefore makes us convert and retain like no tomorrow. Sign up for an account and test out our customer service it is super fast and second to none in the industry.

Sean

where i do think that is what more and more dating site members are looking for.

__________________
-sean
skype: sean.a.christian
sean @ revolutionforce.com

Xenophage

Err I have to differ with you on this. Streamray is a small fry compared to the size of adult friend finder.. and already Adult Friend Finder has more live broadcasters than Streamray. It made sense for the merger, so that Adult Friend Finder could use our technology and my marketing skills. more than so that there could be an upsell which has already been in place for 3 years. Of course we are here to make money, but as said in the previous post, we are more about keeping our customers happy and delivering to them what they want. LONG TERM, not just for a quick buck. And we have the staff to prove it ! 180 employees working hard to convert your traffic into $$ for you ! I can tell you that email response to customer emails is 5 miniutes or less, how many other companies can claim that ! And Although you may not have seen any ads in womens print mags, we do advertise to get womens profiles and also we pay more for womens profiles, for obvious reasons !

Chimmy

Perhaps it is time to put my money where my mouth is. Tonight, I am going to join a couple of the adult dating sites. I am going to post my real profile (my real profile is currently on lavalife, and I enjoy a couple of real messages and smiles a day...so I know I won't send the real women screaming into the night :-}). I am going to track all of the emails I receive over a 2 week period. And I am going to send a message out to virtually every woman in my surrounding area. At the end of 2 weeks, I will post my results. And I will make sure my results are subjective...and not simply based on me maybe or maybe not appealing to the site's clientele. Instead I will track how many 'invitations' I get to join them at their own 'private' website. How many are just seeded email, from the program owner and not from any real member...and so on.

And maybe I will be pleasently surprised. I am equally willing to post good results...so no worries of bias.

Penthouse Tony

We have a link in our footer (making it found on every page in our network) that reads "Report Abuse". This is to allow every member to actively take part in flagging any suspicious profiles including fake members.

Because of our size we are in the unique position of being more concerned with quality of members rather than quantity of members. We begin by reviewing every profile submitted to our site. (Our affiliates see this in their stats a pending joins.) Even when a profiles is approved we have a staff of 7 in our Abuse Team who work in shifts around the clock ensuring that our site rules are enforced.

If anyone would like they could report a suspected fake profile directly to me.

__________________
aamos AT FFN dot com
Penthouse.com Business Development
ICQ: 49090846 | Yahoo IM: ff_aamos

Wizzo

Just look at "Who's Online" and if it's a hot chick with only 1 prof. shot pic, likely fake... otherwise many of the others on AFF are real... I've met more than a few hot freaks off of there...

__________________
Looking for Opportunity!

Chimmy

Thanks for the response. And hopefully you had a chance to read about my proposed test sign-up. Believe me, I am hoping that all of my suspicions are laid to rest. I like the money I receive from adult dating site affiliate programs. So, frankly, I would hope to find that I am giving my surfers value for their money. Then I can keep on collecting the money and we can all be happy.

Xenophage

so do you buy memberships to all affilaite programs and pay sites ya send traffic to.. I hope you are real selective, as many paysites do not give up what they say they do ! What sites do you run I would love to see who you are promoting.

lesbodojo

We're very hard core about deleting fake profiles. In fact, we encourage members (and affiliates) to seek them out and let us know. That's why we have the abuse @ friendfinderinc.com email address posted on all our member pages. We also have a 24/7 customer service team that you can call if you see any fishy profiles.

We delete/decline more profiles than most dating sites could hope to drive. We know that this is in our best interest. This type of high road attitude is what's going to keep us around for 8 more years.

Feel free to contact me, if you want to talk about this further. I'm always open to new ideas. You'll find my icq # below.

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Dirty Dane

Dating.dk has almost 650.000 members. Average online surfing users is over 1.000

Chimmy

In fact, yes I do. And I routinely tear them apart with a fine toothed comb. I've never bought into the whole adult industry adage that goes something like this "yah, but other programs do this...so we're really not all that bad". Instead my philosophy is a simple one..."Promise, deliver and retain". An adult business should be run with the same high standards expected from a respected mainstream enterprise.

And I don't run any sites. I do spend a considerable amount on PPC advertising and am rather adept at SEO. And I've been around this industry for a long, long time. Yes, I was there when the big craze was cruising a BBS with your new high speed 9600 Baud modem. Hell, I still have my Sinclair 1000 16K 'computer' stored away.

In short, sex can sell with out the tricks...so it's frustrating for me to see the absolute crap that is routinely dished out by our industry.

Varius

Chimmy,

If you want to checkout our site, hit me up I'll give you VIP access. Not to bias your opinion in any way, just so you don't have to pay as you will be providing us, I'm confident, a fairly good review.

Our own practices for weeding out fakes, include some of the following:

a) Browse agents (some work from home, some in office) who must manually approve each submitted or modified profile. Our tools highlight any terms we've come across frequently, ie. if people throw emails in their profile or mention certain keywords like 'escort', 'russia', etc...

b) Extensive fraud scripts to check for fraud from our affiliates, especially moreso since our 'pay-per-profile' program came out.

c) Weekly QA of the agents, to make sure they are doing their job right. Planted profiles are put into the batch and tracked, to see whether they reject them properly (and for the right reason!)...agents not doing their job are replaced.

d) Fraud checks from a member's perspective. People sending too many messages the same hour/day, IP checks, etc...are some of the flagging methods.

This by no means blocks people from having fake profiles 100%, but eliminates as much of it as we can. For example, perhaps a user submitted a photo of a fairly unknown celebrity, chances are good the agent will miss it. In such cases, we can only remove it if people report/complain about it.

As I've joined all our competitors sites and do periodic site analysis, I can tell you for a fact some do have fake profiles. Without naming names, on one of them, I submitted a profile with all the descriptions being 'kgfsdgfksgdkfskjjksgfssgdfjkgsd...'. Not only was it approved within 5 minutes, but before I got the alert of approval, I got an alert I have a new message. A very, very marketing geared message from a women stating she read my profile and though we clicked.

That's an easy sign of fake profiles, and done really badly at that

As for women, I think many adult sites haven't marketed towards them because it doesn't bring instant ROI that's measurable like it is when advertising to Men. We have run promos in the past to offer affiliates more money for female profiles (or bonuses), but all it led to was more fraud, for the most part.

We intend to begin advertising in key women's websites and magazines shortly however; we realize having more women, will convert and retain more men

__________________
Skype variuscr - Email varius AT gmail

Chimmy

Well, an unexpected development has made the first part of the test a failure. I tried to set up a profile on AFF this morning. Filled in the first page of info, and then hit the submit button at the bottom of the page. 7 minutes later, the page was still hanging. Tried hitting the button a few more times. Still no luck.

Plus, a look at my own stats from the last week show that almost all of the sales are rebills. (according to my tracking sub id's to which the sales are being credited to).

I will try again later today.

Chimmy

P.S. A step in the right direction to show your commitment to honesty would be to fix your front page stats. As I mentioned earlier, your front page claims 1,162,000 Canadian members. That translates to 1 in every 30 Canadian citizens being a member of AFF. And if the female to male ratio is taken into account, it would likely be 1 in every 20 Canadian males. And, according to your claims above, expired profiles are removed. So, that means that not only are 1 in 20 males members of AFF, but 1 in 20 males are Active members.

Chimmy

One more test. AFF shows 980,000 members in Texas. Again that is 1 in 20 of every resident...including children and the elderly. If you take this stat a bit further, 28% are below the age of 18 and 10% are over 65. So, that takes the eligible population down to about 12 million. Then take into account the female / male ratio and that means that about 1 in 7 Male residents of Texas, between the ages of 18 and 65 are ACTIVE members of AFF. I won't bother going further, removing the percentage of Texans who don't have internet access either at their home or at the office.

If I keep going in this direction, I would have to estimate that the stats are probably being overstated by 10 to 20 times. (and that's being VERY conservative) Any explanation?

Peace

hi we made site www.romashka.com/konkurs and we would like to promote it.can we partner somehow..We have lots of content.My ICQ 940 42826 I am looking for partner for this site

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samsam

Is there a problem with people signed up for AFF??? the submit button keeps freezing.

maybe thats why free members are down this month

Dalai lama

none of them every reply to your email

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Barefootsies

Interesting indeed.

__________________
Should You Email Your Members?

Link1 | Link2 | Link3

Enough Said.

"Would you rather live like a king for a year or like a prince forever?"

Giorgio_Xo

eharmony is the best site. Women actually outnumber men on that site.

aiken

Bondage.com is niche specific (obviously), but we actively police our personals and remove paysite ads and other scammers / spammers. We've got about 300k members in the DB, of whom about 13k are active on any given day, 60k of whom have logged in in the past month, and 100k of whom have logged on in the past 90 days (all of these stats are for repeat logins, not signup-and-never-come-back).

Interestingly enough, as I type this userID #1,573,562 just signed up; we've had more than 1.5 million members join since we started in 1997. Now, we *could* claim "1.5 million members*", but why fuck around with that? We could probably torture the stats six ways from sunday and come up with all sorts of inflated claims, but why bother? People learn, and our users appreciate our honesty with our stats. The ultimate test of a personals site is how many people actually meet, and we do plenty well on that, according to our members.

Anyways, just some thoughts on how we operate. Not everyone in the personals business plays the bogus number game.

Cheers
-b

__________________
ICQ: 12005327

BV

Interesting thread.

On a side note:

I was out at a local bar and there was this Hot MILF drunk off her ass with one of her friends. They were RealEstate agents. Somehow she got on the subject of how she was bigtime into AdultFriendFInder and hooking up. Went on to say how some younger dude from SouthBeach maxed out her credit cards for 20k! hahahaha

I always assumed that most of those dating sites are BS. I also find it interesting talking to non webmasters about Adult Internet stuff when they don't know you are a adult webmaster. Like overhearing guys talking about joining porn sites, etc etc., very enlightening and you can pick up good marketing tips.

Cheers,
BV

warlock5

Do people sign up for AFF looking for a wife?

Basic_man

Anybody I ask about AFF don't know them..

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Terenzo

I have made 4 figures a day with AFF and about 1/4 - 1/3 were female joins. So AFF should not be too bad and with Lars' skills they will have a very bright future. AFF seems to me the best adult business to own right before clickcash.

lesbodojo

Feel free to contact me anytime. Check sig.
You can also call our affiliate line @ 1800 388 0760

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lesbodojo

Our money does not come from fake profiles. That's clear. We make every effort to decline and delete fake profiles, because we honestly don't want them on our site. AdultFriendFinder is known for taking the high road.

At the end of the day, our affiliates are making FAT money with us, from REAL profiles. If you run a Media Metrix report, you'll find that our ratio of men to women is 65:35. For an adult dating site, that figure is VERY good. They also state that we have over 7,372,000 unique monthly visitors (just to AFF). As for the under 18 figure, every adult site is going to have inapplicable visitors that don't get past the avp & membership application.

If anyone wants to send me handles of fake profiles, I'd love it. My contact info is below. I'm always happy to work with proactive webmasters.

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SleazyDream

aff is all real.


trust me - i would know

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This dog, is dog, a dog, good dog, way dog, to dog, keep dog, an dog, idiot dog, busy dog, for dog, 20 dog, seconds dog!

Now read without the word dog.

Sean

i just signed up for AFF right now, worked lickity split and im looking at profiles now

__________________
-sean
skype: sean.a.christian
sean @ revolutionforce.com

Chimmy

Nice response, but it completely glossed over the stats that I provided above. This is not a thread aimed at 'affiliates making fat money". This is a thread about some very obvious discrepencies in members stats being presented by AFF, and what these stats imply when compared with population and demographic figures.

Also, as far as the 65/35 figure goes, even your own stats don't support this figure. Go to the Browse link. Pick any state or province. Then compare the "Men looking for" and the "Women looking for" numbers. On average, even these numbers indicate a ten to one ratio.

I'm not looking for a PR / pat ourselves on the back response. That doesn't clarify the points I have presented previously in this thread.

evelknievel

ALL the dating sites (adult or not) have fake female profiles --and they have them for a reason: to make money. hot broads = signups. no broads (or fugly broads) = little or no signups.

now, wether or not the fake profiles are put up by webmasters or surfers--that's another question....but if these ads attract visitors and promote signups they aren't exactly pulled off of the sites.....

Chimmy

One additional point I wanted to make, so that this doesn't sound like an AFF witch hunt. I did do a test on Erocity prior to Christmas last year. I put up a completely fake profile, without a pic, and with mainly greeked nonsense text. Apparently the faceless giberous speaking male is popular on that site. Prior to paying for a membership I had a number of females contact me, as they liked my profile. Strangely, after paying, these girls and their profiles seemed to mysteriously disappear.

Alot of the dating sites seem to have skeletons in the closet. But, that doesn't make it right, nor does it explain the issues outlined previously.

P.S. Not ALL dating sites use fake profiles. I use Lavalife on a regular basis. I have yet to run into a single 'fake profile'. And this goes for both those gals who indicate interest in me, and the ones that I choose to initiate communication with.

samsam

i'll second that.

this is all talk from small timers who dont know shit.

i dont see how a site that is so over promoted, and so highly trafficked can possibly not have a huge amount of genuine users.

it just doesnt make any sense because everyone and his dog is promoting it. AFF is one of the biggest 50 sites of any kind on the web and to get there you must have truckloads of real users.

Chimmy

You are right. The stats I provided above are simply a lark. And to make the matter even worse, it appears that both the United States and Canadian census bureaus are in on the conspiracy. Oh, what a sad state of affairs.

Chimmy

Let's examine my Canadian members example again.

Adult Friend Finder claims 1.1 million Canadian Members.

32 Million = Current population of Canada
- 7,872,000 (Number of individuals under 18, 24.6%)
- 2,112,000 (Number of individuals over 75)

= 22 Million Note: I'm not even accounting for the percentage of individuals that don't have internet access or have disabilities that would eliminate them from the data sample. Nor have I taken into account the ratio of males to females, which would make the number of male numbers vs population even more astounding.

So, according to the member stats displayed on the front page of AFF, 1 out of 20 Canadian citizens between the ages of 18 and 75 are ACTIVE members of AFF. That's one horny country.

Kevsh

One way to check is to sign up for a free profile on each and see how many "interest/hotlist" emails you get.

I know that on a few it's pretty insane - I signed up for some to review them and without a photo or any profile info I was getting 5-6 / day from women with names like "xxxkitten" and "sexyhornywife", etc. etc.

DateDoc

I always knew those Canadians were horny fuckers. The biggest sex freak I ever dated was a Canadian Redhead. I might have to give her a call!

__________________

Sean

what are you really looking for here. when a site gets to the size of AFF
there might be some holes. several people that work for AFF have posted
in this thread telling you what they are trying to do to make sure that its
an honest program, and they are running it with as much integrity as they
can.

there are a lot of sites that under the Friend Finder banner. you say that you
are looking for something that will bring a quality dating experience to your
membership, to the traffic that you are sending. Adult Friend Finder is not
really geared or aimed for someone looking for someone nice to take a walk
on the beach with. its a little racier than that. you say that dating sites should
not be targeted for selling sex, yet this is what Adult Friend Finder is aimed
at. i just signed up and spent an hour surfing profiles, and it looks to me that
most that i came across in my area are real, because some of those girls are
not that good looking.

maybe you should look at sending your traffic to passion.com and it
might be geared more to what you are looking for. you can use your
same aff code to promote it. the way that it looks to me right now is
you are looking for something that really is not there with an Adult
Dating Site.

__________________
-sean
skype: sean.a.christian
sean @ revolutionforce.com

samsam

theres fuck all to do in canada, but go online. sure, there may be 30 million but theyre spread over a HUGE area and never meet each other.

plus, your point is a good one, canadians are fucking horny. they get lonely and desperate.

Chimmy

As always, lots of interpretations..none of them correct. So, here we go:

a) The membership statistics used to sell the site are grossly over inflated and inaccurate.

b) No where in my post do I say that I object to the premise behind or the material sold by AFF or others. What I do object to is the use of less then above board "marketing" techniques to sell these materials. Actually, I take that back. Out of respect to skilled marketers, the cases I have stated in the thread can not be called 'marketing'.

Why is it that so many of you feel that just because it's porn or adult related, it then falls under a whole different set of acceptable advertising rules.

Clear as mud for most of you?

And where are the responses from the program reps. Again, you all seem suprisingly silent. Could it be the undeniable stats I have provided are just that, undeniable.