🙁 Why reciprocity matters

Why an independent dating site can’t survive on goodwill alone.

This site was launched in March 2023. It was completely free to use until July 2024. At that point we introduced a membership fee of just $10 USD per year to enable the sending of messages. Replying to messages has always been free. At the time of writing, the annual membership fee is $20 USD.

When we last checked, the membership fees we receive from our best-represented countries roughly cover what we spend advertising in those same countries.

A dating site with very few members is of little value. Marketing and advertising are essential if we are to attract enough people to make the site worthwhile for everyone.

Advertising, however, can be expensive.

In the early days we tried to promote unjabbed.net by commenting on relevant Internet forums and under news articles on websites that could broadly be described as alternative, independent or protest media. Almost every mention of our site was removed. On several occasions, website owners explained that they did not allow people to promote their own websites and that advertising should be paid for instead.

We think that is entirely fair. News websites require time, effort and money to run, and their owners are perfectly entitled to help cover those costs through advertising. (That said, a few websites and journalists did kindly mention our site without asking for payment. We are genuinely grateful to them. They know who they are.)

Since then, we have paid for advertising on numerous news websites and on X. Sometimes an advert has resulted in hundreds of new registrations within a day or two. Other campaigns have been far less successful. Advertising is always a gamble, but without it a dating site simply cannot grow.

People generally stay on a dating site only if they can see plenty of potential matches in their own country and age group. Even today, we regularly see new members delete their accounts within hours if they cannot find anyone nearby.

Unfortunately, we cannot afford to advertise in every country. For a period, we even made the site completely free in certain countries and contacted news websites there, explaining this and asking whether they might mention us to their readers at no cost. They politely declined.

We have also asked a small number of websites whether they would consider reducing their advertising rates for us. Again, they declined. That is their right.

Running a website costs money. There are servers, software, security, firewalls, advertising and many other ongoing expenses. On top of that are the countless hours needed to develop, maintain and improve the site.

There has to be reciprocity. Our experience has been that most websites will not provide free publicity for organisations they have no existing relationship with. We learned that lesson during our first year of operation. In the early days of the Internet it was much more common for websites to exchange links and help one another. Today, that is much less common.

So why are we saying all this?

Because from time to time people visit this site expecting everything to be free. We understand that not everyone will want to pay for membership, and that is perfectly reasonable. However, the fact that a service exists online does not mean it costs nothing to provide.

If independent websites are expected to advertise, build software, maintain servers and provide services entirely free of charge, many simply will not survive. We hope people appreciate that supporting a website they find useful is not just paying for a service—it also helps ensure that independent projects like this can continue to exist.