How is classmates.com still around?

[anarky]

This site's been around for ages. You can pretty much list yourself, and that's all without paying their subscription fees. I signed up ages ago (like ten years ago) when someone told me about it, realized you can't do shit for free, and never used it.

The only time I ever got any benefit from it was a friend from high school sent me a message through it. He either paid or did a free trial for the upgraded service. The e-mail went to my regular e-mail address, but wouldn't give me a return e-mail (and even parsed out anything with "@" in it) since I didn't pay. (Luckily, all he had to do was say he still had the same address he'd used in college, which I remembered, but assumed he didn't keep.)

Anywho, they send e-mails all the time making claims of how many new people from your school have signed up, and how many guestbook signatures you've gotten. Mrs A first tipped me off that it was bullshit when she supposedly got five inquiries from former classmates, signed up for their free trial, and discovered there'd not been a single one. I've also noticed the number of profile views (about the only thing you can see for free) never jives between the huge number in e-mails and the tiny numbers when you log in.

They also supposedly get about 100 new members from my school during the years I intended each month or so. I occasionally go to look. The names ceased being real names long ago. (Yeah, I didn't know everyone at my school, but with supposedly 100 people every month for a few months, I should recognize at least one or two.)

I supposedly got some kind of inquiry recently and got an e-mail about it. I clicked to sign in and see if they'd made this POS site free yet. Nope. Still have to pay some ridiculously laughable amount to see anything, and they're probably lying about what they do have.

So I'm just wondering--with so many sites (most notably MySpace and Facebook) doing this for free, and even AOL going to free open access, how is it this place still charges and yet is still around? Are there really enough idiots out there willing to pay for shitty service you can get free (and better) elsewhere?

[mabudon]

good question, facebox being the thing that should have wiped it out around a year ago

I wonder the exact same thing everytime I see a banner for it, seeing as facebox is all over the MSM whereas classmates appears as banners on sites for Flornbis

Must be that there indeed ARE enough flornbis to keep it afloat