Monday, August 8, 2011

The problem with profiles...

I always did well with sugar. I never truly had to wait long to find another SD, and I never had much trouble finding potentials. Honestly until I joined the blog over at SA, I never really knew that anyone found it difficult at all.


Turns out, most do.


Naturally I tried to figure out why. Over the years I have come up with Two explanations.

First of all I believe there's a  cultural difference between the gay and straight community regarding 'Sugar'. 

While the term 'Sugar' is still fairly new to the gay community, the idea of having a "kept companion" goes back for centuries. Read your history. A large number of the artists and musicians of the renaissance period were.. 

A. - Gay, 

B. - Had a 'kept man'.

I think it was simply our own way of having a marriage when marriage wasn't an option. Obviously things have changed over the years, but the idea of having a kept companion remains both widespread and fairly well accepted in the community.

Now while this may or may not be an interesting nugget of knowledge, it's also useless. You can't really do much about cultural differences. However the second factor is a different matter all together.


Most profiles suck!

Sorry. but I write ad copy for a living and I can assure you that the vast majority of profiles are not only poorly written, but he authors seem to be under the impression that they are on a conventional dating site.

Now I want to point out quickly that most members of the SA Blog "get it". I am referring to the hundreds of sugar baby profiles I've read outside of the blog. 

SB's used to routinely list their profile number on the blog so that you could read it. To look at it you only had to pull up any profile link and change the number on the end to match theirs. It wasn't a far stretch from that to realize if you just kept changing the number on the end you could randomly see as many profiles as you wanted. 

So my research began. I just started looking at profiles, one after another. I should note this little trick is absolutely useless for any other purpose, you have no search capability so the results are just random profiles of all types and from all over the world.

But just as a way to look at lots of different profiles and see how people are writing them it was quite illuminating. Roughly 5% of all profiles climbed the bar all the way to "good".  Less than one in a hundred qualified as "great". The rest waffled between "mediocre" and "terrible".

The truth is I have tons more to say on this topic, so if your interested in some concrete ways to improve your profile, stay tuned. I envision many posts on this subject to follow.....

Sunday, August 7, 2011

More stuff tomorrow...

I've had a bad week with what I thought was food poisoning, but seemed to mutate into something much worse. Finally feeling better and will return to the blog tomorrow.

-RC