So I could see how they could lure in a lot of straight men with the promise of casual sex, just not how they could keep the enormous churn rate down when they found they were barking up an empty tree
Even better, if you have friends who often ask the fatal question: “How can someone remotely access my phone?”, make sure to pass on the insights above.
people (not all of us are developer) but already generating $4M of net income last year(not try to brag on it, since I’m sure we’re not the best) and by 
the way we did end-year party last night I am pretty sure it’s more than doubled. We choose not to raise fund or sell IPO because we feel steadier without it. Unless you have great growth that can ensure market (remember, todays market is mostly based on fear) or you have great trouble and IPO is the only thing that can save you, don’t enter the market 🙂
Maybe they just haven’t burned through 100% of the population quite yet, and want to IPO so they can cash out before they do, or maybe just a lot of people have lower standards (even when sober) than I would have guessed. Or maybe AFF is nothing but a ruse to lure men into porn sites they own, since you’d probably prefer it to your options there.
While that doesn’t affect AFF’s population (I haven’t heard of gay people using it that much) I would imagine the same is true for straight folk.
When they were privately (and before being sold to Penthouse) they were still very profitable and paid generous bonuses to employees (although they had a fairly high churn rate due to the nature of their business). AFF, by the way, is a big Perl shop.
I believe most of their income comes from pornographic portions that they offer / affiliate programs (but I’d imagine the “adult personals” portion is what draws its audience).
As for gay men, there are many men who hate the idea of finding a hookup or boyfriend in a bar
Once in the early day’s, my friend’s manager (the company’s founder) had been asked by a former classmate if he could host a site for his start-up in exchange for stock options. The manager refused. That classmate’s name was. Jerry Yang.
2) AFF’s founders could have already been hosting sites before founding AFF (indeed, it would logically follow that he’d have experience running a site before launching a successful company).
Conru is registered wih Verisign and on 03-NOV-94 (Andrew Conru is the founder of AFF and you can see the FFN address and name when doing ‘whois conru’). Yahoo is registered 18-JAN-1995 (do “whois ‘=yahoo'” to check). Seems like it’s at least plausible (Stanford is a small place).
Over there, you will see that the same company runs a number of age/gender/ethnicity specific networks (GayFF, AsianFF) and even a Christian dating site called “BigChurch” Also, the nerve personals section is run by fastcupid, which is also owned by FFN.
I think that perhaps a large part of the “ew” factor in this (and many other) threads come from the idea that enough money to warrant an IPO can come from such ‘seedy’ business as facilitating one-night stands, but in my mind it is quite questionable whether the vast majority of the income comes from the one-night-stand part of their business.
In fact, I am willing to bet that it is not. It seems plausible to me that the number of people who simply are not meeting a partner that meets their criteria is on par with the number of people who require one night stands.
