McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

As a holiday celebrating love and relationships, Valentine’s Day often puts pressure on single individuals to snag a date for fear of spending the evening alone, in sweats, watching reality tv, and eating greasy take-out. If you’re dateless, dating services love to rub it in with emotionally charged e-mail subject headings such as “Alone on Valentine’s Day?" or “Who will be your Valentine?" The subject headings contrast with pictures of happy couples (presumably, much happier than you) smiling and embracing. With a click of the mouse (and typical payments of $12.99 to $49.99 per month), this could be you!

Filling the marketing funnel with someone else’s dirty work
Subscription fees of $12.99 to $49.99 per month give online matchmaking sites a strong incentive to cast a wide net in search of new users. At the same time, experienced marketers know they can increase their response rates through targeted messages that cater to a particular demographic segment by age, gender, or race.

So how can a matchmaking site cast a wide net and find a way to target? True.com seems to have found a way: by using e-mails collected from an adult site called khans.com (SiteAdvisor analysis: khans.com). After our bots provided an e-mail address on khans.com, we began receiving targeted Valentine’s day e-mail for True.com.

How are True.com’s Valentine’s Day e-mails targeted? Very simply: one version of their e-mail targets black singles, another targets East Indian lonely hearts, and other versions target the Asian and Hispanic loveless. (Our multi-cultural bots were lucky enough to get one of each). There's nothing wrong with that on the surface. But we wondered how True.com could know which version of its e-mails to send to which users?

3 Versions of True.com's Valentine's Day e-mails

Back to the roots and tracing the trail
Let’s trace the True.com e-mails back to the original place we signed up. At the bottom of the khans.com homepage is a link for “Free nude pics by email." Click on that, like our bots did, and you’re taken to a page requesting e-mail addresses under separate sexually explicit banner ads which are customized by race. “Free Asians in your email!" says one banner with an explicit picture and an “enter email" box. “Free hotties in your email" says another from bareblack.com.

A notice at the top of the khans.com e-mail solicitation page caught our eye:

"Almost every day I get email from visitors requesting that I send them nude pictures in their email. Unfortunatly, [sic] for a number of reasons, I just can't do that. However, I have made arrangements with some folks that do. They don't give out your email address so you won't be getting tons of extra spam."

Presumably this helpful message is provided by the site owner of RobRose Net, Inc., who registered khans.com. RobRose’s corporate site explains its purpose: “RobRose is a husband/wife team who excel at helping others use the power of the web to their benefit." Maybe. On average, we’ve been receiving a whopping 422 spammy e-mails per week after signing up on RobRose’s khans.com site. We suppose that’s to someone’s benefit, although we’re not sure who.

The Asian, Black, Hispanic and East Indian-targeted pitches we received from True.com were a direct result of signing up on khans.com. We know this because we provided a unique, one-time use e-mail address when we originally signed up there. We also received duplicate True.com Asian-targeted and Hispanic-targeted e-mails as a result of signing up on a different adult site called OhMyGoodies.com (SiteAdvisor Analysis: OhMyGoodies.com). So it appears that more than one adult site is serving as a source for True.com's targeted marketing funnel.

To trace the trail a little further, we looked at the source code on khans.com, and realized that the site was posting e-mail addresses to another site called ezgreen.com. Type that into a browser and you'll be immediately redirected to another site called adultplex.com, which is "the adult webmaster revenue source," according to their homepage. "We will pay top dollar for your email addresses," they say. Top dollar, according to their FAQs, is $1 for a "verified" e-mail.

Somewhere along the way, our e-mail address was passed to an e-mailer who sent us messages on behalf of True.com. None of the e-mails we received were actually sent from a True.com mailing address. But they all included notices to unsubscribe directly from True.com, and they all included prominent disclosures about “CAN-SPAM" compliance.

True.com's e-mail diclosures

As far as we can tell, the e-mails we received are actually CAN-SPAM compliant. After all, we did sign up somewhere, and there are prominent disclosures about how to unsubscribe. TRUE also includes their mailing address in their e-mail, which is another requirement of the CAN-SPAM act.

Trust me. Please. I have a seal.
True.com goes to great lengths to try to reassure users that it protects personal information and doesn't send spam. True.com prominently publicized its recently-earned TRUSTe Email Privacy Seal “for its dedication to strict privacy and fair email practices." In a press release celebrating it’s TRUSTe privacy seal, True.com CEO and founder Herb Vest emphasizes TRUE’s “industry-leading communication practices" and “the integrity of its email policies."

True.com's Web site certification seals

Before you dismiss True.com as being the victim of a careless media buying agency or a rogue affiliate who secured e-mails from an unauthorized source, have a look at this press release from last June, proudly indicating that the company was bringing media buying in-house. “The move [to manage advertising in-house] is part of a broader marketing initiative at TRUE to best support its sophisticated media tracking and acquisition systems. True.com arguably has the most sophisticated media acquisition tracking system in the industry," according to the company’s SVP of acquisition marketing. With all this sophisticated tracking, we wonder why True.com is not aware that porn sites are being used to seed its e-mail lists.

True.com's media-buying press release also mentioned that the company “spends millions per year in online advertising and promotion." Indeed, buying e-mail isn’t the only way TRUE is marketing online. They also buy paid search, targeting such terms as “teen chat" (where their #2 placed Google ad reads: “Chat & Hook Up w/ 1000's of Teens. 100% Free, Fun & Easy!") Based on this #2 position, a cost per click of about $0.50 (according to Google’s AdWords tool) and an estimated 190 clicks per day, that would come out to about $35,000 annually just for the one search term “teen chat" alone.

Times are tough all over
How and why did True.com’s marketing come to this?

The highly competitive online dating market has recently come under pressure as growth slows and new entrants continue to bombard the space. According to an article published today by eMarketer, TRUE has achieved fourth place in the online dating services arena, capturing almost two million unique visitors in December 2005. Online dating sites must be under tremendous pressure to acquire new customers in order to maintain or grow their share.

At the end of the day, it comes down to this: After we provided two unique e-mail addresses on two separate adult sites, we started receiving Valentine’s Day e-mails from True.com. With all TRUE's talk of sophisticated media tracking, member privacy, certification seals and the integrity of its email practices, we would have expected tighter controls from them to prevent this from happening.