As reported in the last post, Frumster has now become a paid subscription service. I concluded that “the bottom line is that much work went into creating and maintaining Frumster, and they deserve something back.” While I still agree with that assessment, I question their choice of implementation.
Today I conducted a little experiment with the help of Shosh. Shosh is currently a paid member, although she suspended her profile, and I am not . To test the system, I sent Shosh a message (after she temporarily activated her account). Being a paid member, Shosh was able to read the message I sent her. However, I was not able to read her response unless I subscribed to the system.
So for those keeping score, paid member can send and read all messages. Basic members can still send messages, but not read ones sent to them. As implemented, this system provides little benefit to subscribing, and will serve only to annoy everyone involved.
Practically, if you’re a paid member, you can only communicate with other paid members. If you’ve paid and the other person hasn’t, that person can’t read your message. Even if you can read the message of a non-member, you still can’t respond unless the other person pays!
If anything, this system will encourage people to move conversations off of Frumster’s system. To avoid paying, a basic member will simple write in the message to respond to an outside e-mail address.
In contrast, JDate seems to have a better system. Last time I checked, anyone can post for free and read messages, but only paid member can initiate contact. The paid members have the advantage, and they do not are not penalized for the other person not paying.
If Frumster doesn’t take the JDate route, I have one possible suggestion for improvement. If a premium member contacts or responds to a basic member, then allow that conversation to continue. The advantage to being a premium member is then the ability to communicate with everyone. However, basic member would only be allowed to communicate with premium members.
I don’t know if this will provide enough incentive to attract subscribers, it would make subscribing a much better value.
(כִּי לֹא מַחְשְׁבוֹתַי מַחְשְׁבוֹתֵיכֶם וְלֹא דַרְכֵיכֶם דְּרָכָי (ישעיהו נה:ח
The New Frum$ter In Action
April 23, 2004 Jewish Dating
Just FYI, Frumster was actually created by another individual originally from Canada. It was sold this year and they are now charging. Also, I think JDate charges to read messages as well. There are other sites out there that don’t charge to READ messages, mitmazel.com, bitachon, and orthodate.com. Has anyone used any of these sites?
this seems to contradict your findings:
Paid Members will be able to:
Read e-mail and e-mail other members including sending e-mail notifications to non-paying members
from:
http://www.frumster.com/changes.php
It just says that you can read the e-mails sent to you. That you can send e-mails out to everyone is a feature for paid and non-paid members.
If you’re a paid member, you can send messages out to non-paid member. However, if the non-paid member can’t read it, it doesn’t do you much good.
another site which is going to be free for a while is futuresimchas. I know the onlysimchas folks and they said they’re beta’ing it now.
Does the site say whether a member is paying or not? It would be sad to email someone and never hear back, only to find that they never saw your message.
Does the non-paying recipient get a message saying that if you want to read the message, you better pay up? If so, that’s pretty evil – it makes people unwitting advertisers for Frumster. It would probably be a lot more straightforward to just make all communication a pay-only feature.
Once you’re charging for all communication, then you might as well charge members for joining.
It makes much more sense to pay once you see people are contacting you. Therefore I say, join for free, and pay when you realize it’s going to be useful.
The way JDate operates is that you have to pay if you want to read or respond to messages. They used to let you send IMs and play in the chatroom for free, but that’s changed too. So if I’m not a paid member, I’ll get a notification that someone’s sent me a message, but I won’t be able to find out who sent it or read it unless I cough up the bucks for membership.
The site does not tell you if someone’s a full or non-paying member, so if you send someone a message and they don’t respond, they may not have ever received it. Very frustrating, but I understand they’re running a business over there…