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Dating Sites are buying dating profiles with alarming results

Photo credit: betabeat.com

Anyone who’s been on a dating site has seen them. She’s a beautiful girl with poor grammar skills. She wants to talk via her Yahoo email account and within a few emails she’s often asking for money to come visit you. Thats a clear indication of a dating site scammer, and just about everyone who’s ever joined a dating site has experienced a similar situation.

The dating industry is finally starting to come around to protecting the safety of their members in a meaningful way, but only after much legal pressure and several waves of recent bad press. Just Google “Match lawsuits” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

However, a newer, and more insidious problem has emerged in recent years, and its one that, while not an immediate threat to one’s personal safety or bank account, is no less nefarious in my opinion.

More and more dating site startups that are buying dating profiles in bulk to bolster their user databases. On one hand they purport to take your safety and well-being seriously, while in the back room they’re wheeling and dealing with profile vendors, and other dating sites, to acquire profiles to fill in troublespots, where there’s not enough density for the site to be competitive. It could be a geographic area, or it could be a lack of lesbians or bikers.

The reason that profiles-for-sale have become a topic of discussion is because its expensive to acquire new members for dating site startups, and there is a huge jump in dating startups this year centered around mobile and social dating. I’m often asked about whether or not a site should acquire dating profiles to avoid the empty database problem. Each and every time my recommendation is no. Put on your big-boy pants and do what everyone else does, sign up new members, one at a time.

My reasoning is simple. If you can’t grow a site from zero to several thousand members in a few months through Google, Facebook or ads on POF, you probably shouldn’t be in the business. Dating sites are 100% driven by ad spend and affiliate marketing and as I tell new startups, you’re not in the dating business, you’re in the Internet marketing business now. The fact of the matter is that it takes thousands of dollars to acquire enough customers in a specific geographic area to “take off”, and there’s no way around it.

To dig into the cloaked world of dating profile sales, BetaBeat purchased dating site profiles from one of the companies that offers them.

Betabeat emailed 208 men and women whose profiles are being sold on SaleDatingProfiles. Most didn’t reply; 35 emails bounced. Only five people responded, none of whom knew their profiles were for sale. Harry Lin, a 61-year-old in Switzerland, noticed that a profile he started at Jumpdates.com had somehow made its way to Mega Dating and the now-defunct Sensual-Attraction.com. “They have my email, user name, birthday and *former* Jumpdates password!” he wrote in an email.

As BetaBeat found out, its the small questionable niche sites which tend to utilize purchased profiles. The majority of singles don’t use these sites, which is why the topic hasn’t been that big of a deal. A side bar discussion about how white label dating sites share profiles among its customers is mentioned as well.

Personally I don’t understand why more sites don’t band together and offer Mega-subscriptions, where you can sign up once for many sites, potentially across multiple brands. There has got to be a way to do this that makes sense for both dating sites and singles.

Mark Brooks, a popular figurehead in the online dating industry says he once fired a client for buying profiles. That is a great sound bite, but if we’re talking about firing clients for poor behavior, why stop at those that buy profiles? What about the illegal billing practices, the lack of ID verification, the sites full of scammers, the utter lack of any decent verified matching systems and the automated enticement emails from fake members sent to people who’s billing cycle is about to end?

Online dating, like any Internet-based industry, exists because of years of positive efforts attributable to a small number of fantastic companies run by people I admire personally and professionally. Unfortunately these shining examples in the sector are heavily outnumbered by the sheer amount of tenacity of bad actors which continue to make enormous amounts of money by fleecing singles by means of any number of unsavory business practices.

Every so often someone accuses me of focusing on the negative aspects of the dating industry too much. Of that I am guilty as charged. My goal has always been to elevate the business of online dating and help it grow as a whole. Sometimes that means calling out bad behavior in the hopes that new companies will focus on the big picture and opportunity instead of the intoxicating and heady get-rich-quick by any means necessary mindset thats so pervasive in the online dating market. Online dating is never going to be a utopian and perfect industry, but we should at least talk about what is possible and fair and right, for both dating site operators and single alike.

Read Is Your Dating Site Selling Your Profile? To Keep Membership High, Niche Sites Get Sly at Betabeat for the rest of the story.