Check out the error message I caught on Match. “This persons picture is too sexy to display.” I’ve never seen this before.

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I ranted about updating my Match profile, mobile dating and open profiles on Facebook over at The Progress Bar.

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Dating site and social networks dedicate considerable resources to making sure user-generated content adheres to their terms of service. Online dating sites in particular often have a large group of people reviewing profiles, or no review process in place whatsoever.

ProfileApproval provides outsourced profile and content review services. They knows that processing profiles is not sexy, but necessary, estimating cost savings of up to 50% of the cost of back office operation.

Profile Approval has been spreading successfully by word of mouth and referral throughout the Online Dating industry since its official launch at iDate 2006 in Amsterdam. I wrote about them in a post called cleaning up your dating site database in July of 2006.

Mark Biernat, Profile Approval sales manger:

ProfileApproval.com is the premier approval service for the online dating and social network industries. Our aim is to assist our clients in keeping their sites clean by ensuring only quality photos & profiles with appropriate content appear on their databases, protecting the online experience and safety of their members.

The genesis of ProfileApproval.com was born out of the idea that the online dating & social network industries are by their nature very dynamic and constantly changing. We saw the need to give the companies and entrepreneurs behind such sites, a powerful support tool to increase their profitability and the experience of their customers. It makes sense from both a cost saving and a time standpoint. ProfileApproval.com is a B2B operation and our existing clients have universally expressed high levels of satisfaction and said they wished they knew about this sooner. So now we have scaled up operationally in both our Krakow and Limerick bases, and want to increase awareness of our services.

I’ve talked with several companies interested in providing profile approval services to dating sites. Most of the systems were built circa 2003, and I haven’t heard from any of them in a long time.

I’m impressed with Profile Approval’s business model, although I have no idea how often they let curse words, IM handles or too much bare skin through the system, which is really the metric they should be measured by, after the cost reduction to the dating site. They clearly understand that dating sites with high-quality profiles is more valuable (in all senses of the word) than sites with no profile review process.

PA services cost $10/hour, which looks like a $2 increase from last summer. A free trial is available. If your site uses the service, let us know how it’s working out.

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