Three unvaccinated dating sites are now offline

I don’t usually look at other unvaccinated dating sites, but yesterday and today I tried to look up five of them. Two are still running, but the other three websites are now offline.

At the moment we just have this website. We have not published any Apple iPhone or Android smartphone apps yet.

It is easy to guess why these websites are offline. The issues we’ve faced while running this website are as follows.

• When we needed publicity back in the beginning it was almost impossible to obtain. I wrote to tens of news websites asking them to publish our adverts or mention us. Most of them did not reply. Search engines did rank us for unjabbed, but not for search terms including the word unvaccinated.
• Adverts are expensive. At best the subscriptions will cover the cost of the advert. At worst there will be massive losses as only a small fraction of new members will pay for a subscription in the short-term.
• We’ve never had a significant problem with fake profiles, but it is annoying when the same people or organisations never give up. Fortunately the software this website runs on makes it possible to put them off. I still remember paying almost $1000 USD for adverts in a Canadian newspaper. One “clever” person decided to use our website to advertise their unvaccinated dating site. At the time our website was free to use. I guess this person thought free advertising is nice and decided to make use of the money we had spent.
• At the moment we are advertising on Twitter and targeting the USA, Australia and Western Europe. It is bringing in new people, but the subscriptions are so slow we will have to end them soon.
• We are getting several new members joining us every day. If we get twenty new members a week, at least one of those will tell us in no uncertain terms we should not require payment for the ability to send messages (replying to messages is free though). Without contributions from our members we don’t have the money ourselves to run this website. Of course if we stop advertising costs will go down. At the time of writing, our price for a year’s membership is less than some websites charge for a single month! Having fair costs was one of the reasons this website was created in the first place. Major social media sites are free, because they are funded by government, billionaires, university grants, the stock market (this means your pension funds) and advertising. We have no access to any of those sources of funding, although at the moment we are trying to obtain more advertising revenue. The reality is free does not exist. Many of the free messenger apps you use make backups of your messages and encrypt them with the company’s key or upload your smartphone’s contact list to their servers. Some have made public statements that their customers’ IP addresses and phone numbers will be turned over for any valid request. Internet services with millions of users cost a fortune to run.
• People join our website. They only see a few people in their city or none at all. They then delete their account the same day. As such the money we spent on advertising has been wasted. The fact is people will only join a dating or social media site if there are lots of people already present (and in their city and age range). We are not doing too badly. At the time of writing we have over 5000 members registered with our website. Our numbers would be much higher if people had more patience. If you don’t want to leave personal information on a website, there are work-arounds. Just upload a photograph of yourself wearing a hat and sunglasses. Or just upload photos of your city, flowers, trees or churches. Our analytics tells us our website has had over 500 visitors from Russia in the past 12 months. But hardly anybody from that country has created an account.  We have had over 7000 visitors from France, but only 280 of them have created an account. We have fewer members in Australia than in the USA, Canada and Western Europe. We are currently advertising in Australia, but have noticed people are joining from that country and deleting their accounts the same day stating there is nobody in their city. The desire to have everything in place immediately means finding unvaccinated people in Australia will never take off.
• A fraction of new members don’t upload a photograph or write anything about themselves. When we message them to ask why, their reply is there are not enough people in their city to bother doing so. At the same time, other members complain to us they won’t message people with blank profiles, even if they are in the same city. There may not be many people in your city when you first arrive here, but if you are patient more will arrive later. It may take weeks or it may take months. Blank profiles create a vicious cycle and drag this website down.
• From March 2023 to July 2024, our website was free to use, even when we were paying for advertising in the Canadian newspaper Druthers.ca, which has a monthly distribution in the hundreds of thousands. This was essentially an experiment to see if our website could be funded by voluntary donations. If more people paid us just $5 or $10, we could have had year-round advertising. Paying hundreds of dollars for one advert is difficult for us, but if the cost was shared between the thousands of members on this website it would be trivial. The adverts in Druthers.ca were successful as judged by the fact Canadian people are over-represented on this website compared to other countries.

Big business has turned dating into a game, where people swipe through a carousel of photographs hoping to get double matches. This ensures people stay on the dating applications for longer and all the time they are spending money on packs of messages and boosts to appear higher up in results. It is in everyone’s interest that independent sites can survive.