Adult FriendFinder

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Image:AFF.JPG

Adult FriendFinder (AFF) is an online sex and swinger personals community website. It allows members to meet friends or sex partners.

The site was founded by Andrew Conru (aka Andrew Conreux). It is consistently ranked between the 40th and 60th most visited website on the internet,^[1] and claims to have over 20 million members.^[2] Originally started as FriendFinder, a more traditional online dating site, Adult FriendFinder was spun off when members began uploading more risque photos than were appropriate. FriendFinder has since spun off several other communities focusing on more specific segments.

The parent company had difficulty finding venture capital due to the adult nature of its signature property.^[3] In December 2007, the company was sold to the Penthouse Media Group for $500 million.^[4]

1 Overview
2 Criticism
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Overview

Anyone can freely join and post a profile. Paying users can view others' profiles, and access communication services such as anonymous email, chat, webcam, a webzine, and blogging. Members can purchase a higher membership level for benefits such as higher search rankings. Members can broadcast their webcam publicly to each other. Webcam viewers can page the broadcasting member in an attempt to initiate a chat session.

The website has an affiliate progam, whereby webmasters refer users to the site and are compensated up to $1.00 per unique click.

[edit] Criticism

AFF has one of the most extensive advertising programs on the internet. A key feature of their online advertising system is pictures of attractive women supposedly living local to the website user. This is achieved by IP-localisation software.

On the AFF website (as with many other similar sites) some advertisers use faked details to entice others, including fake photographs. Some of the photographs known to have been used include those of well-known porn stars and similar.

There is some [1] controversy over the true ratios of male to female members. Additional reports state that the user database is rarely purged, and a larger-than-average number of members are professionals "looking for clients". [2]

A velocitypress.com study showed that the male-female ratio is 10 to 1, that 2/3rds of the claimed subscribers have not visited the site for over 3 months and that nearly half of the women were angling for lesbian relationships.