You can pick up the original
Gizmodo article here if you don’t believe me, and I would completely understand
if you didn’t. It turns out that there are dozens, or perhaps thousands, of
sites specifically oriented to promote connections between people of all
descriptions, including Trump voters, anti-Trump voters, conservatives,
liberals, centrists, tall people, short people, runners, swimmers, bikers,
people who support gun ownership, people who support gun control, people with
allergies, people with bad haircuts, people who give haircuts but aren’t very
good at it, and a bewildering array of business owners, managers, supervisors,
hourly workers and academics – all of which apparently utilize the same
database…
Researching the article, the
author apparently discovered dozens of stolen profile pictures, and a few
outright stolen identities, some of which appear on every niche dating site
they had time to audit. A little digging turned up a company that will sell you
all of the back-end code and data you would need to start your own dating site,
including a massive (and apparently completely compromised) database of
members. All you have to do is customize the front page to suit the demographic
you are attempting to attract, promote your new site across the Internet, and
split the $25 membership fees you will be collecting from each new member 50/50
with the company that is providing you with the code…
This isn’t a new idea, of
course. The folks at Gizmodo compare it to WordPress, but to me it recalled the
instant web pages on Geo Cities twenty years ago. There’s a supposedly “nominal”
start-up fee (they won’t tell you how much it is unless you sign up for it
first), plus optional charges to help you design your part of the state,
develop a concept, put together a logo, and so on. You then get to keep between
42% and 50% of every subscription and renewal you sell. What I found the most
amazing, though, was the answer on their FAQ about referrals. If you refer a “quality
partner” to the provider, you will then get 10% of their commissions for life.
Whether or not you get 10% of their 10% of the people they recruit is unclear,
although it is certainly implied that you do. If that’s true, we’ve definitely heard
this story before…
Why exactly no one (not even
the Gizmodo reporter who blew the lid off this story) seems to have recognized
this as an online adaptation of the classic multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme
is beyond me. Of course, why anyone in 2018 would still want to pay money to be
involved in anything as sketchy as an MLM is also beyond me, but that’s really
not the point. Even if the idea of making money off a dating site in a world
that already has the Tinder, OkCupid , and Match sites, plus dozens of social
media channels that don’t cost anything to use doesn’t make you want to call shenanigans
on the whole concept, you’d still expect anyone who encounters it to ask if
anyone has ever made money on this or any other MLM scheme…
I’m not going to post a link
to the actual dating site provider because I don’t want to encourage this sort
of crap; I’m not going to mention them by name, either, because I don’t really
enjoy being sued by people who make their living by taking money from the greedy,
the gullible, and the occasional credulous idiot. I will just suggest that if
you have your heart set on diving into some get-rich-quick scheme there are better
ways to go about that…
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