People Will Pay For Sex But Not Love

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it appears that Americans are more willing to pay for sex than for love so FriendFinderNetworks (FFN) recently reported. This is of course incredibly disillusioning for me but probably explains my lack of success in the past selling an online matching service that matches people for great relationships.

Seventeen of FFN’s 22 brands are targeted at a general audience, the company said in a slideshow.

The article that pointed this out for me was Social Media Financials: People Will Pay for Sex ($16, to Be Exact) But Not for Love and I have included some of that conversation below:

Most of those sites are dating sites, but they offer non-racy relationships, such as BigChurch.com for Christians and Slim.com for dieters. Some of those businesses have audiences that are far greater than FFN’s best-known brands. AsiaFriendfinder and Amigos.com both have more registrants historically than Alt.com, the kinky dating site; and BigChurch and Senior Friendfinder have more than Bondage.com, which is what you think it is.
Possibly not. The 800lb gorilla in FFN’s business is AdultFriendFinder, with 224 million registrants since inception. It offers “friends” only in the sense of friends-with-benefits. FFN’s 10-Q shows what’s really going on: Revenues from the adult businesses dwarf those of the general audience. In Q1 2011, FFN had $83 million in total sales, and $55 million of that came from its adult sites

People looking for love, it seems, spend a lot less than people looking for sex. If you do a bit of math, it turns out that FFN got an average of $16.43 from each of its adult users in Q1, but its general audience users paid only 7 cents on average in the same period, and are in “disproportionate decline” to the rest of the business, FFN notes.

Food for thought for me particularly as these results may indicate that carnal pleasures are higher value than great connection between people. Or are the results skewed? Let me know what you think.

I will leave you with a funny video by a nice gay boy Vidur Kapur about Indians & sex. Enjoy….