Appeal for funds

From March 2023 to July 2024 this website was free to use. Since then our prices have increased from $10 to $20 USD for a whole year – less for shorter periods. We are still twelve times cheaper than other sites in our genre.

Human behaviour is such that a proportion of people won’t stay on a site for more than a few days unless they see hundreds of other people around. Not only that, but they have to be in the same city and age range. This is why we have spent significant funds – for us – on advertising.

A lot of social media sites are free. Well they are not really free. Their money comes from the stock market (this means your pension funds), consortiums of billionaires or government contracts (directly or indirectly). Social media sites with hundreds of millions of users must cost tens of millions of dollars a year just for Internet bandwidth alone. Have you considered why such an enormous amount of money is being given away for free? Video messaging is particularly expensive to support.

Over the past three years, we have witnessed messaging apps and social media websites (particularly the smaller ones) disappear from the Internet. In 2023, a Facebook-like social media site was published in the Dutch language. After a short while it was closed down due to excessive spam. There is a push to move people over to smartphone apps which have more control over your data than websites.

Only a small fraction of members here pay us any money. Online advertising is expensive. This website is mostly funded by the income from us working on other projects. If an issue needs to be addressed, it means we have to find the time away from paying work.

As an example, our most successful advertising campaigns were in Canada and the Netherlands. They clearly resulted in increasing our numbers in those countries from hardly anything to over one thousand. The increase in subscriptions just about paid for the adverts! Having hundreds more people on the site took up days of our time and required small changes to our site.

If you can afford it, please consider donating money.

We have recently added map-based searching to this site.

Over the last few days, we have noticed the load on our webserver’s CPU increasing. This could be due to map-based searching.

It can be easy to set up a simple website. Keeping it running for years is more difficult. Even keeping the status quo becomes more expensive.

Depending on available resources our plans for the future are below.

1) Move to a more powerful webserver.

2) Continue running adverts on x.com which reportedly has half a billion users active every month.

3) Try to get an Apple iPhone app version of this website into the Apple App Store. This does involve risk as apps have to be approved first. If members have an app on their phone they are more likely to respond to messages as our notification emails (of unread messages on this site) can sometimes be inadvertently diverted into the Junk/Bulk folder. From limited experimentation, Gmail seems better than Hotmail/Outlook. Google have recently said they are moving over to Artificial Intelligence (AI) filtering of email. You may want to look into alternative email providers such as mailfence.com or mailbox.org.