A few months ago I received several emails from people asking me to take down their profiles. It took me a while to figure out that these were people who found their names on JLove and that they weren’t having any luck getting JLove to take down their profiles.
It turns out that JLove was combing net for high-profile jewish names. They would create profiles based on these names, Google would index the site and when certain popular names were searched for, the JLove profile would show up. This upset quite a few people, as you can imagine.
JLove was started by several ex JDate staff. The idea was to create a new site which would cater to Jewish people not on JDate with new features and functionality, and possible lure people away from JDate. Fast forward a year later and you can see the bump in traffic that JLove experienced due to the fake profiles, and how the traffic dropped off again.
Textbook example of how deceiving your customers can come back and bite you. It’s too bad about JLove but thats the online dating industry for you. For every new scheme that successfully drives more traffic, there are countless others that fail because someone, somewhere, didn’t think through the repercussions of their actions.
