The women who appear in Web ads for the dating site True.com almost certainly do not need to look online for a date.
The buxom and often barely dressed models, posing next to slogans like “It’s nice to be naughty,” are plastered across the Internet these days, and are hard to avoid on the social networking site MySpace.
In part because of its provocative ads, True.com, based in Irving, Tex., has seemingly come out of nowhere to become one of the most visited sites in the $700 million-a-year online dating industry, attracting 3.8 million people last month.
True’s rise has been controversial. The company has riled competitors like Match.com and Yahoo Personals, which say that True’s lowbrow advertisements clash with its high-minded lobbying and legal efforts. True, which conducts criminal background checks on its subscribers, is the primary force behind a two-year-old campaign to get state legislatures to require that social Web sites prominently disclose whether or not they perform such checks.
Figures the Texas site would be the outlaw.
On another note, so what does it take to make a lot of money on the Internet? How many surfers would it take to make $50 million a year in revenue?
