The great benefit of being part of "Network" of dating sites - as opposed to just one site - is that you have the opportunity to meet lots more like-minded people
As a member of one of our sites it is possible to restrict yourself to just the members of the one site you have joined by selecting the option on our SETTINGS page
However, we really recommend that members remain open to other people from the other sites on our network - and 98% of member are OK with this
All sites on our network are "Nice" sites aimed at people looking for friends and long term relationships. We have never run any adult or casual sites.
Our partner sites tend to be niche or personalised to a greater or lesser degree.
Take GrownUpDating.com - this is a site we run with Mary Balfour who co-founded Loveandfriends back in 1999. GrownUpDating focusses on professionals over the age of 40. We have loads of professionals over the age of 40 joining Loveandfriends.com itself and also across our other sites. It therefore makes no real sense for someone on GrownUpDating.com to just restrict themselves to people who joined GrownUpDating.com itself - as this would reduce their number of potential dates over tenfold.
Now let's look at something a bit more niche - our "Eco" sites - aimed at people who are "Green", into sustainable living, ecology and related environmental concerns. No one Eco site is likely to have enough members to make joining that one single site worthwhile. However, by aggregating members of all "Eco" sites combined with members from our more general purpose sites who are vegans, have stated they are into "Sustainable Living" or are "Environmentalists" (or various other keywords) then we are able to present lots of genuinely like-minded people for our ecology-minded members when they do an "Eco Search".
Now let's look at some of our dating/friendship sites aimed at people who like salsa dancing. Some of these have very small numbers of joiners - so if members just restricted themselves to their "Own little salsa island" then it would not make sense to join any of these individually. However, by aggregation and some clever programming our "Salsa search" button finds lots of people in all dating site across our network who is into salsa dancing - which is exactly what the person who joined the salsa dating website is interested in. From the point of view of the other members - they are not likely to object to being sought out by someone who joined one of our "Salsa Dance Dating" websites given the fact they have listed they are into salsa dancing on their profile.
We have sites aimed at different ages, geographic locations, lifestyles and hobbies. We insist on a high minimum quality threshold and steer away from anything "Dodgy". Our entire network is both "Niche" and "Nice" in the sense it is aimed at "Thinking People" looking for freinds and long term relatiuonships. By this we mean people who are more likely to be graduates and professionals and more likely to be the demographic that reads quality daily newspapers like The Times, Telegraph and Guardian. Daily Mail is OK but we don't seek to operate sites in the "Sunday Sport" demographic. Neither do we run any sites that are in any way "Adult" or "Casual".
Hence why we have longer profiles. Longer profiles appeal to the better educated and more serious dater. This means all sites self-filter to a large degree as both the less educated and people who want "Casual" dating get fed up with filling in our longer profiles and so will not tend to join any of our sites. A similar effect can be seen with eHarmony - where their profile is so damn long it puts off casual daters
There must be a degree of commonality and a high minimum quality threshold across all sites on a dating network or you will end up with a "Lowest Common Denominator" scenario - or worse still some sites "Polluting" the network with low quality or inappropriate members.
We think some other dating networks can tip far too broad a range of people into the one database and you end up with problems as per the above.
On various special interest sites (e.g. Eco, Animal Lovers, Dancing, etc. ) we usually provide more detailed feedback on a per profile basis as to which site the person came from and why they are appearing in search results for that special interest site. We are also developing various badge options ("Animal Lover", "Ecology", etc. ) that members can choose to display on their profiles to identify themselves.
We try to be as open as practicable with members and partners about our "Network". We give you our assurance that all partner sites are nice, decent and high quality but we cannot publish a comprehensive list right here as our less ethical - though highly commercially successful - competitors (see below clip) would use it to relentlessly contact all our partners with a view to getting them to sign up with them instead.
We have a zero tolerance to scammers, fake profiles and fake messages. Since being founded in 1999 Loveandfriends has never generated fake profiles nor sent fake messages to try and entice members to upgrade. Likewise we would never allow any partner-site to do this. All admin is done by the Loveandfriends team.
If one were to disregard ethical and moral concerns it clearly was/is highly profitable to generate fake profiles and messages for this white label dating company and by implication for their partners who are on a revenue share. The partners themselves were blissfully unaware that this was going on
WhiteLabelDating is indeed able to tempt Loveandfriends partner sites with more revenue that we could hope to earn honestly for them. The story they were telling their partners and the world at large for the last years is that their better conversions/revenue is all down to their superior marketing, technology and customer care.
We clearly are not on a level playing field - hence why we don't publish our full list of partner sites.
At Loveandfriends we promise across all our sites the same quality: Nice sites. No adult content. No fake profiles. No fake messages
