MidlifeAspie wrote:
starygrrl wrote:
MidlifeAspie wrote:
OKCupid isn't a "dating site" as much as it is an advertising venue.
LMAO. It is ad supported, but the alternatives are honestly much worse. With that being said, even this site is an advertising venue, taking its ad supported. To financially sustain websites you either have to have advertising or charge a fee. I prefer ad supported. Paid dating sites are for suckers and there is more of an incentive for deception on those sites, because they do rely on paid subscriptions. The deception pretty much happens to the guys, since most women don't bother with paid sites.
I guess what I am saying is that this site's purpose is to provide an AS community and it does so by providing advertising space - while OKCupid's purpose is to expose people to advertising and it does so by offering a dating venue.
Honestly speaking, I used to site before it had ads. It was a dating site and a quiz site to start out with. The original purpose was a site to host user generated quizes. Its purpose was not to expose advertising.
There was a time when they debated making it a fee supported website only, but users were against it for the reasons I stated, people were sick of fee based dating sites and wanted something different. Making it ad supported and free to users was central to the evolution of the site, and something the early users of the site pushed for as an alternative to fee based dating sites. It is a dating site supported by ads, not the other way around.
Also the other overall purpose of the site is more data oriented in nature. OKcupid is very stat heavy, they tend to track alot of data, it is up there with google analytics in terms of data. But they specialize in relationship data, something google analytics does not do. It does provide information to people who do marketing, but also social scientists.
I have used the site from the very begining...so I am a bit more informed on these issues. The point was not to make money from ads and build a dating site around it. It was really to run a dating site based upon various percieved flaws in the dating sites that were around during that period, one being that the fee based system allowed for a greater degree of abuse.