28th January 2006
LoopyLove Review
LoopyLove is a UK-based online matchmaking site with which you can send messages for free! You can earn credits by receiving ads in your email and visiting the websites advertised. With enough credits, you can contact people, or alternatively you can pay for the service if you wish.
LoopyLove has a wonderfully clean interface, and loads extremely quickly through broadband, even when viewing profiles; it would be ideal for a dial-up user. A quick search of the matches available from Cardiff showed 500 profiles within 120 miles; as you can try this service without spending money, it may be worth your while signing up. You can only see the first 10 matches without signing up.
It’s worth noting that LoopyLove permits gay and lesbian matches as well as heterosexual. You indicate your sexual preference when you register for the service. However, bisexual matches are not catered for.
As you sign up, the site offers you various other services, and you select whether you wish to receive junk email in exchange for credits. The next page asks you how far you want to go, whether you’re just looking for new friends, or are looking for marriage material.
The third page is the ubiquitous description page where you have to enter hair colour, eye colour, body size (slim to large), height, ethnic group, religion, education, employment (full time, part time, self employed etc), industry sector, income group, whether you drink and/or smoke, status (single, married etc), whether you have and/or want children, and housing (own, rent etc).
You then get prompted for a photograph. It’s always worth uploading a photo, and check out our tips on this site to find out how to make yours stand out from the crowd! If you decide to include a border around your image to increase your click-through rate, I suggest you make it blue.
Next is a 60-character tag line and a 2000-character description. On that page, I happened to notice that the age calculation was off by one, so you may wish to take this into account when doing your own searches.
Reviewing of material is done by the site readers, so there is a chance that you will read something undesirable in somebody’s profile. In that case, you have a link through which you can indicate that you find the profile offensive. I imagine that the profile will then be reviewed by staff at LoopyLove.
I must admit that when I got to do a quick search, I wasn’t keen on the way the profile details were presented. Instead of a quick tabular format listing the person’s details, a much more wordy description is shown. Whereas this would be fine for one match, when you’re trying to sift through many results to find someone of interest, it will slow you down a great deal. It’s made even worse by the fact that the wording is very impersonal, using “this match” and “they” rather than “he” or “she.” This was disappointing, as the sex of the profile owner is known by the site.
However, a very big plus is that if you search for people within 10 miles of Cardiff, you get 500 matches! This does indicate that the site is popular. I imagine there are more than 500, because the initial search showed 500 matches for people within 120 miles of Cardiff.
The next thing to try is a detailed search. You can indicate things that are vital to you, such as non-smoker, or religion. You can set default search options for future searches, which saves you having to keep clicking on boxes to indicate your desired match. Unfortunately, even though the profiles have been filtered, you get the same, impersonal description. I believe that with this site, you must upload a picture in order to get any sort of response at all. I don’t believe people will click through to see your complete profile unless they see a picture first.
There is a “My Cupid” section, which takes you through a 24-question multiple-choice personality assessment. This will then show further insights into your character in your profile; you can delete this if you’re not happy with what it says about you!
This service does allow you to upload a 30-second video clip, in which you can describe yourself and what you are looking for. This is a good idea to do if you have the required hardware, and not all services offer this capability. It also gives you more exposure, as through the ‘Video Wall’ feature, you can see who has uploaded a clip (only 303 matches at the time of writing), but to view these does require that you have subscribed to the service. You can also record a voice greeting through the phone system; calls are charged at a nominal fee. People can send you audio messages in reply, but this service costs 50p per minute to receive them.
If you decide to subscribe to LoopyLove, there are three available plans: £19.99 per month, £29.99 per quarter, or £99.99 for access for a year. You get to send unlimited messages with this option. The monthly and quarterly plans are repeating subscriptions and require you to set up a continuous authority. I suggest the £29.99 option; you get three months to find someone, and I believe that you will stop using a service like this within six months or so if you don’t get results. There’s not much to be saved compared to the cost of access for a year, but the monthly cost is basically twice the price. All of these options include a 3-day trial period, during which time you can cancel and not be charged.
I don’t know the frequency of the ads that are sent to you by email yet, so please look out for a future comment on how well that system works.
One thing that really surprised me is that within an hour of adding my profile, a message was sent to me! I didn’t even upload a photo! As I’m trying to find out how well the system works if you try it for free, I haven’t been able to look at the message yet.
Please check out the comments for further information that I will add as soon as I have it. In the mean time, I believe LoopyLove is worth a try, and it may be worth subscribing if you find that you are being contacted regularly. Why not go to LoopyLove and try it for yourself?
Comments
31st January 2006
David said:
So far, I have had five people view my pictureless profile, and two of those have sent me messages! I have revealed the profile I’m using in my Sample Men’s Dating Profile article, along with the reasons why I think the profile works.
I haven’t had any ads through email yet from LoopyLove, so it seems that it may be unrealistic to expect not to pay to use this service by accumulating credits from clicking on emailed ads. For you to be able to do this depends on the emailed ads being frequent enough that you can perform the click-through action. If you get one per week, for example, and you clicked through each ad, you would have to wait 10 weeks before you could receive a message.
4th February 2006
David said:
I have now had four emails from LoopyLove that I have converted into points. The conversion process is straightforward; viewing the email gets you 50 points, and clicking through to the website gets you another 150. You can then simply close the page. I haven’t paid much attention to what was actually on the sites advertised. Each ad is easily identified by the subject line, which always starts as follows:
“LoopyLove Offers:”
You can use this fact to easily separate them from your regular mail, if you so choose.
Having completed the profile and uploaded my picture to the service, this means that I now have 1200 points.
At this time, I have had eight people view the profile, and three messages. Unfortunately, you have to spend 2500 points to view a message, although you can then reply for free. It seems that if you are serious about using LoopyLove for finding a mate, you will have to subscribe to the service.
6th February 2006
David said:
The credit pricing on this site has changed. You now have to use up 2,500 points to view a message sent to you, and then to reply costs another 2,500 points. It may be possible to send a new message to someone who sent you a message, rather than replying to them; this costs 500 points.
I am using the site as a free user because I wanted to evaluate it from that point of view, and at present, I have 1900 points. This means that I still have not had enough free credits to view a message, let alone to reply to one!
Therefore, I suggest that you view LoopyLove as a typical paid site, rather than a free site. Perhaps post a profile on the service, and see how much response you get! If you do use it, do be prepared for some people not to reply to your messages, because they may not have signed up to the service. Having said that, the prices seem reasonable for a paid service, and they do seem to have considerable inventory in terms of profiles.
I also like the fact that when somebody signs up to the service in your area, you are sent an email informing you of this fact.
However, if you’re looking for a true free site, there are others out there that I would recommend over LoopyLove. Check out my reviews of OkCupid and PlentyOfFish for more information!
16th February 2006
David said:
Today, I achieved 2,500 points. This is 16 days after I signed up to the service. I can therefore now read one of the messages posted to me. I could, alternatively, send five messages. Realistically, you’re not going to get anywhere trying to use this site for free. Having said that, at this time, 16 potential matches have looked at my profile, 10 of whom have sent me a message. This is very good! It suggests that a high proportion of registered users are in fact subscribers. As long as you are prepared to pay for the service, LoopyLove may just work out very well for you!
22nd February 2006
David said:
So far, my profile has been viewed by 20 women, 14 of whom have decided to send me a message. That’s far in excess of what has happened at any other site that I’ve reviewed at this time. A 70% reply rate from a profile view is really amazing! This is only over a period of 25 days. My opinion of LoopyLove is that it is definitely worth a try!
14th March 2006
Rob said:
You may get lots of emails but I hear the girls can ‘carpet-bomb’ a whole load of guys. I think its true, I mainly get emails from girls that would not have emailed me if they had actually read my profile.
15th March 2006
David said:
Thanks, Rob. At least if they have sent you a message, you have a foot in the door, and a reason to email them back.
30th March 2007
Test said:
Hi all!
Bye
30th July 2007
Steve said:
Bunch of charlatans - “mail” from attractive ladies appear in your inbox to entice you to pay up, then mysteriously disappears once you have subscribed. Cannot select who can see you so you end up with mail from ladies of all ages and far flung places. Best aviod this site.
4th August 2007
a-man said:
I agree - there is something fishy/unusual, that you get many messages compared to to other unpaid & paid sites. Now I cant think why the ladies on this site would be any different to other sites. which suggests that to free memebrs these are ’scam’ messages to entice you to subscirbe. - I cant be sure (as I have not subscribed as such) !
11th August 2007
Janice said:
This site is a complete con bordering on fraud!
If you are a man on this site you are going to get ripped off financially!
I have spoken to a number of men who have complained of being “carpet bombed” frequently!
The site enables women to send out the same template to at least a hundred men - so it’s fair to say they wont be reading most profiles! So even the decent, well written mens profiles with pictures dont get great “exposure”!
If you are paying money to an on-line dating site you should be getting maximum exposure!
After hearing about this I signed on as a man, did’nt put a picture up - but wrote the sort of profile that would entice a lot of women.
It worked! (Well I am a woman-and I know what we women like to read, even if there was’nt a picture uploaded!).
Within a week I had received a handful of genuine messages from women who had obviously read “the profile”.
But I received a lot of carpet bomb messages from women who obviously had’nt read my profile - I answered all of them and did’nt get one reply back! What I did get was a number of “views” of my profile from most of these women who were undoubtely looking and possibly reading my profile for the first time - but none of them ever wrote me a “personal” message in response to mine!
After about two weeks I did’nt get any messages at all!
I stuck it out as a “man” for a further two weeks - which is probably longer than most of the poor men paying for the service would!
I unsuscribed after “fruitless” four weeks - and that’s when things really kicked in!!
Within the space of one week - despite cancelling my payments AND taking my profile down - I was bombarded with over 20 (yes 20!) messages from women!
I re-entered the site to find my profile still “active” but when I tried to read the first of my 20 messages, I was told I’d have to pay to read all of my messages.
Well I am a hot-blooded male(well a female pretending to be one!) so I subscribed once again on the monthly plan (£19.99) enabling me to read my messages.
All the messages were there, all of them were carpet bombs, I responded to all of them - did’nt get one reply!
I stayed on for the four weeks I’d paid for and did’nt receive any messages - that was until I cancelled my payment and left the site again!
Guess what! I received - once again within 7 days - a staggering 22 messages!
Undaunted - I subscribed once more! This time half of the messages had mysteriously disappeared - I read the rest, once again they were all carpet bombs! Did’nt bother writing to any of them!
What I did do was write on my actual profile what a scam I thought it was.
The site deleted it off my profile (well they’re going to are’nt they!) and then - interestingly - disabled my capacity to write ANYTHING in my profile!!
I have since left the site as a “man” and wont be rejoining as a woman!
As someone mentioned above (and I have spoken to many others) this is just a complete scam!
If sites like this are going to take your money - they’ll have to be sqeaky clean and provide a proper service.
27th December 2007
Emrys said:
Thank you Janice for your research. Most helpful. It is clear that fee paying dating sites are getting increasingly tacky and greedy. Match.com was OK when I was last looking, now its a disaster, date.com have doubled the price (and now have no UK members), and of course, yahoo have given up (they are now match.com), and datingdirect have joined match in the sleight of hand rip off. Friends Reunited dating seems to be the only one that still plays with a straight bat, but its still very expensive for what they do.
Plentyoffish is almost good, but I want to know things like level of education - at the moment you have judge from spelling punctuation, and it does encourgae the “I’m going shopping” approach to dating. One lady, aged 48 (allegedly), wanted to meet a man aged 42 to 43, interested in Russian Icons and able to speak Gaelic. The profile was so carefully written that I think she was serious. And of course, this being POF, only men aged 42-43 could email her.
13th January 2008
Roger said:
I concur with Janice’s comments. I am male and after unsubscribing I too suddenly get loads of messages from women. So i pay up to read them, reply and surprise suprise get no responses. Loopylove is guilty of fraud as these women are not real it is a money making scam. Avoid.
19th January 2008
SONJA WILLIS said:
i AM A MEMBER OF LOOPY LOVE AND RECENTLY MET A TERRIBLE
MAN ON LOOPY LOVE I AM SO HORRIFIED I MAY REPORT HIM
TO THE POLICE.
he does a good job hiding under the fact that he is rich and famous
but i am afraid for other women.
How do I report this?
20th January 2008
Emparmabept said:
Hello!
Nice site
Bye
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