Dating site set up by S’pore-born man draws flak<cite class="byline vcard" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: inherit; display: block; font-family: arial; vertical-align: middle; ">
By Jeanette Tan | SingaporeScene – <abbr title="2011-07-31T03:39:23Z" style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-variant: normal; ">2 hours 35 minutes ago
WhatsYourPrice.com is a portal that allows "generous" members to bid for dates with "attractive"
Would you pay up to US$1,000 for a date with an attractive woman?
That's what dating websiteWhatsYourPrice.com asks -- and believe it or not, tens of thousands of people believe in the idea, either from the payer's or the payee's point of view.
Singapore-born founder Brandon Wey, 40, now a US citizen, established the US-based website in April.
Its simple, practical concept, albeit criticised and controversial, has since attracted 50,000 members -- 60 per cent of whom are men -- and has helped to arrange more than 10,000 dates, reported The New Paper on Sunday.
How it works: a member joins one of two categories: "Generous", meaning the member makes monetary offers to people for dates, or "Attractive", where members join with the objective of being paid for a date, if the amount offered is agreeable to both.
"Attractive" members can 'wink' at "Generous" members they might be interested in to invite them to make offers to them as well.
"If you're an attractive person, time is very valuable because you get a lot of attention and asked out a lot of the time," explains Wey. "This is an opportunity for you to be compensated," he said.
He added that the monetary component provides incentives for "attractive" members of the site to give "generous" ones willing to pay enough money a chance at a date.
"We're turning dating into a free market where the opportunity of a first date can be bought or sold," he said.
The site earns money by taking a cut of between five and 10 percent of the final agreed-upon price between the "generous" and "attractive" members who agree to a date. The "generous" party then pays the balance to the "attractive" person when they meet.
News networks such as Gawker and MSNBC and talk shows like The O'Reilly Factor have called it "sexist" and "no different from prostitution", but Wey says the controversy and negative attention was what he targeted in choosing the website's name.
In a survey he conducted to evaluate public opinion of his site, he told the paper from Las Vegas, where he lives, that people were initially offended because of the up-front and "confrontational" style that the site adopted.
"But after they rationalised it... they realise it's not prostitution," he said. "You're really paying to break the ice."
Nonetheless, such a situation inevitably sets itself up for dodginess, with users who were spotted seeking regular sugar daddies and even partners for threesomes.
"They can certainly hint at something on their profiles. They are welcome to describe personality or even the kind of fantasies they have," he said, qualifying that they cannot say outright that they are escorts, however, as those will be removed for abuse of the site.
Wey was quick to add that he has a team of webmasters who have removed hundreds of members who were "scammers" or "cam girls" (girls who sell sex over webcam). He said also that the team checks users' mailboxes in the event of suspicious activity, to find out if site members are asking to be paid for their time.
There are also users who write on their profiles that they are looking for "discreet affairs", "married dating" and "casual encounters", but Wey says he does not get judgmental.
"As counter-intuitive as it is, a lot of men use the website to keep their marriage," he said. "It's a challenge a lot of men have. I've gone through it myself," added Wey, who is himself divorced from his wife, who is 13 years younger than him.
"You make a decision to get married because you fall in love. But as you grow older, you earn more money and you have attention from more women. I found it difficult to manage that," he admitted.
He adds that it is not his job to be a moral judge, and he still thinks it is wrong to cheat, but maintains that he is simply responding to a void in the dating arena.
"There's a market demand and I'm providing a service," he says.
The St Andrew's Secondary and Hwa Chong Junior College alumnus runs two other dating sites apart from this one: SeekingArrangement.com, which was labelled by ABC News as a "sugar daddies" dating site, and SeekingMillionaire.com.
He is looking to expand his network to China, now believing that Asia will be more accepting of his concept than the West has been thus far, even though the site has members from a long list of countries.
"With a website, everything becomes more transparent and honest when it's out there in the open," he said.
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By Jeanette Tan | SingaporeScene – <abbr title="2011-07-31T03:39:23Z" style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-variant: normal; ">2 hours 35 minutes ago
WhatsYourPrice.com is a portal that allows "generous" members to bid for dates with "attractive"
Would you pay up to US$1,000 for a date with an attractive woman?
That's what dating websiteWhatsYourPrice.com asks -- and believe it or not, tens of thousands of people believe in the idea, either from the payer's or the payee's point of view.
Singapore-born founder Brandon Wey, 40, now a US citizen, established the US-based website in April.
Its simple, practical concept, albeit criticised and controversial, has since attracted 50,000 members -- 60 per cent of whom are men -- and has helped to arrange more than 10,000 dates, reported The New Paper on Sunday.
How it works: a member joins one of two categories: "Generous", meaning the member makes monetary offers to people for dates, or "Attractive", where members join with the objective of being paid for a date, if the amount offered is agreeable to both.
"Attractive" members can 'wink' at "Generous" members they might be interested in to invite them to make offers to them as well.
"If you're an attractive person, time is very valuable because you get a lot of attention and asked out a lot of the time," explains Wey. "This is an opportunity for you to be compensated," he said.
He added that the monetary component provides incentives for "attractive" members of the site to give "generous" ones willing to pay enough money a chance at a date.
"We're turning dating into a free market where the opportunity of a first date can be bought or sold," he said.
The site earns money by taking a cut of between five and 10 percent of the final agreed-upon price between the "generous" and "attractive" members who agree to a date. The "generous" party then pays the balance to the "attractive" person when they meet.
News networks such as Gawker and MSNBC and talk shows like The O'Reilly Factor have called it "sexist" and "no different from prostitution", but Wey says the controversy and negative attention was what he targeted in choosing the website's name.
In a survey he conducted to evaluate public opinion of his site, he told the paper from Las Vegas, where he lives, that people were initially offended because of the up-front and "confrontational" style that the site adopted.
"But after they rationalised it... they realise it's not prostitution," he said. "You're really paying to break the ice."
Nonetheless, such a situation inevitably sets itself up for dodginess, with users who were spotted seeking regular sugar daddies and even partners for threesomes.
"They can certainly hint at something on their profiles. They are welcome to describe personality or even the kind of fantasies they have," he said, qualifying that they cannot say outright that they are escorts, however, as those will be removed for abuse of the site.
Wey was quick to add that he has a team of webmasters who have removed hundreds of members who were "scammers" or "cam girls" (girls who sell sex over webcam). He said also that the team checks users' mailboxes in the event of suspicious activity, to find out if site members are asking to be paid for their time.
There are also users who write on their profiles that they are looking for "discreet affairs", "married dating" and "casual encounters", but Wey says he does not get judgmental.
"As counter-intuitive as it is, a lot of men use the website to keep their marriage," he said. "It's a challenge a lot of men have. I've gone through it myself," added Wey, who is himself divorced from his wife, who is 13 years younger than him.
"You make a decision to get married because you fall in love. But as you grow older, you earn more money and you have attention from more women. I found it difficult to manage that," he admitted.
He adds that it is not his job to be a moral judge, and he still thinks it is wrong to cheat, but maintains that he is simply responding to a void in the dating arena.
"There's a market demand and I'm providing a service," he says.
The St Andrew's Secondary and Hwa Chong Junior College alumnus runs two other dating sites apart from this one: SeekingArrangement.com, which was labelled by ABC News as a "sugar daddies" dating site, and SeekingMillionaire.com.
He is looking to expand his network to China, now believing that Asia will be more accepting of his concept than the West has been thus far, even though the site has members from a long list of countries.
"With a website, everything becomes more transparent and honest when it's out there in the open," he said.
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