Messaging people in foreign countries

There are some countries on this site less well represented than others. This is a combination of luck and also the availability of newspapers and websites (with large numbers of readers) where we are allowed to display our adverts.

Several members have informed us they have formed real-life relationships with people originally in different countries to themselves. This is excellent news and we wish them well.

There is a flip-side to this. Some members of our site tell us they receive substantial numbers of messages from people in faraway countries and, for which, they have hardly anything in common with. The primary purpose of this site is to enable real life meetings. You may think one message to one person in a faraway country won’t hurt, but the issue is twenty other people will think the same.

If meeting someone in real life is not realistic, you should think twice before sending them a smile, contact request or message. The reality is unvaccinated people are 20% of the population and reasonably priced advertising is difficult to obtain. A little patience will actually result in better outcomes for everybody on this site. Is meeting someone unvaccinated important to you or not? For some people, things can be slower on this website, but the alternatives are the vastly more expensive mainstream sites. Some are money making machines which make dating a game of elusive double-matches with expensive bundles of messages and search result boosts. Those same sites promoted the covid vaccination campaign a few years ago with virtual badges and search result boosts for for the vaccinated. If you give money to people who caused the problems in the first place, the problems won’t go away.

There is nothing wrong with sending a few messages to people far away, but anything more is going to be counter-productive. People do this because it is easy and quick. The real solution is to think about how to bring more people from your locale to this site. The newspapers who displayed our adverts told us their readers had already asked them if such sites as ours exist. Contacting independent news sites and asking them to write about us helps everybody. You might also consider downloading and printing out our adverts and displaying them on the public noticeboards available in grocery shops, cafes and bars.

We have a constant, but small, stream of people who think our website should be free. At the same time, when we approach news websites to display our adverts, we are told to increase our prices so we can afford to advertise with them. Ironically we cannot afford adverts in alternative news websites, but we can on Twitter, which is very much a mainstream social media site owned by a billionaire.

We received one email from a man who told us he used to work in Silicon Valley. Many Silicon Valley developers are millionaires with salaries, at least, in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He told us our website should be free, as all Silicon Valley social media sites are free. At the time our annual fee was $10 for a whole year. The issue is we have no funding from government contracts, Wall Street or the stock market. We can’t even get an account on a mainstream advertising network. We tried and it was deleted the same day. We believe it is better a large number of people pay a small amount of money to fund this website, rather than we have to pay thousands of dollars a year to keep it going. I suppose if we stop advertising, our running costs will go down. We may do that at some point. At the moment we can still get a stream of new people from online advertising. After going to the effort of setting up this site, we actually want it to work.

We are not fools and everything we do is for a reason. It is better to charge a small amount of money and try to be a better site rather than go for the lowest common denominator. Our site was free from March 2023 to July 2024. During that time we had hints that free sites are on a slow timer to self-destruct. A small minority of people will send large numbers of messages to everyone regardless to whether they are on the opposite side of the world. The people here who want to meet those in their city will be chased off the site. Charging a small fee makes people think first. It will also be a barrier to spammers.

For most our existence we have either been a free site or have charged between 12 and 24 times less than other sites in our genre. We intermittently pay a mainstream social media site with half a billion active users (every month) for online advertising. Our daily budget is very low. The majority of people on this site do not pay us any money. This mean we can never advertise as effectively as we could. Some people say advertising does not work. The number of people on this site from Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands has gone up from hardly any to between 700 and 1100 after advertising. Without advertising people register with this site and then delete their accounts within days stating there aren’t enough people in their city. It is almost impossible to accumulate enough people fast enough organically. People only stay if they see lots of other people around. A better solution to spending thousands of dollars or Euros on moving to another country, might just be to donate a little money to us for more online advertising. 400 Euros is a lot for us to pay out for one advert on a news site, but divided by 100 people is trivial.

A handful of women on this site have told us they have deleted or hidden their profiles because they receive too many messages from men too far away to realistically have relationships with.

Since March 2023, we have done everything possible to bring as many people to this site as possible. We have spent almost $7000 USD (as of January 2026) on advertising, which given the low income from this site does not make financial sense. We have e-mailed every small and alternative website we are aware of and asked them to tell their readers about our site. Most of them do not reply to us, even if we are informed at least half the journalists there are unvaccinated.

A few women have informed us they received messages from men whose profiles contain scant details. If you are contacting a member with photographs and a good written description on her profile and have hardly said anything about yourself, then it simply isn’t going to work. I don’t understand what the problem is here. It only takes a few minutes to write a few sentences about yourself. Some people don’t even say what their line of work is. It is quite possible to talk about yourself and not violate your privacy at the same time. If you don’t want to publicly share photos of yourself, paying members of this site have access to a private gallery where photos are only shared with people specifically approved first. Just hit the My Gallery button at the bottom of a profile and the owner will have access to your photos. This is not difficult.

Don’t just use this site for romance. Our site should be a general tool for finding local like-minded people. This is even more the case now we have added functionality to find people near to you with our map-based search. You should message everyone in your surrounding area and arrange a group lunch meeting.

We are still seeing a cycle of new registrations from people in their twenties, followed by rapid deletions with messages stating they found nobody in their age range in their city. Although we have around a thousand members for some countries they tend to be in an older age range. If younger people stuck around, they could actually meet the other young people who deleted their accounts the month before!

If you are running a small scale site it is important to look at the number of emails being sent out every day. Last year I found our site was sending out large numbers of notification emails. Notification emails just inform a member of unread messages and contact requests – they do not contain the message itself or anything private. I inspected some of them. One member of this site (without a paid account) was sending large numbers of contact requests to other members on different continents. It looked like the man was just clicking on as many contact request buttons as possible. I deleted his account and disabled contact requests for non-paying members. This is a pity because contact requests can be used to see if a member is interested in you without having to pay. People who don’t think about what they are doing can ruin it for everyone else. At the time membership of this site was only $10 USD a year. It would have been far more efficient just to directly message a handful of people, instead of sending free contact requests to as many people as possible and hoping somebody sends back a written message.

Smiles can still be used by everyone, but they only send out a notification email if the recipient also has written messages sent to them on the same day. Each member has a link to a list of the last fifty people who smiled at them.