Would you pay up to US$1,000 for a date with an attractive
woman?
That's what dating website WhatsYourPrice.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.
-- Yahoo!
