A serious point about people not filling in their descriptions or adding photos

I know people are concerned about privacy. It is quite possible to upload photos of yourself wearing sunglasses and a hat. Or just use widely available photo manipulation software to obscure part of your face. Or just upload photos of your city. Or flowers.

You can write plenty about yourself that could easily refer to thousands of other people.

Today a man registered with this website from a country not especially well represented on this site. This prompted me to look at other profiles in his country.

I saw most of them were blank. A couple of years ago, I messaged people to ask them to fill in their profiles. The reply was always there weren’t enough people to warrant the effort.

Now that this site is over three years old, we have quite respectable numbers of people in some cities. Yet many profiles are still blank. What is the effect of this?

• People register with this site. They see lots of blank profiles. They delete their accounts and complain to us about the blank profiles.
• People generally won’t message other people with blank profiles. This means people don’t take out memberships. This means no money for advertising when the opportunity arises.

This website was free to use from March 2023 to July 2024. From August 2024 to the time of writing, our annual price has slowly increased from $10 to $20 USD a year. Our site is still twelve times cheaper than comparable dating sites. Creating a profile and leaving it empty is worse than half-measures. It means people won’t save money by having a working, affordable dating site.

In some countries we have over 1000 members, but the age range is of older rather than younger people. This means we have a succession of people in their twenties registering with our site and then deleting their profiles within days. If they actually stayed for longer, they would actually meet all the other people who registered the week before them and subsequently left.

Most dating sites charge $20 a month. Other sites charge a fixed sum for five messages or for search result boosts. The latter sites can cumulatively work out to be very expensive. Even the former can be expensive if you join three of them for a year.