Ecrush

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The correct title of this article is eCRUSH. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

eCRUSH, launched on Valentine's Day, 1999 by music marketing entrepreneur Clark Benson and Northwestern University fund-raiser Karen DeMars, is a Chicago-based anonymous matching site designed to obviate fears of unrequited love. A user creates a list of people he or she is interested in, and has the option of sending anonymous emails to those individuals indicating that an unidentified person has a crush on them. The recipient can then logon to the site and create a list of people they are interested in. If the two people select each other, then the system notifies them of the match. This system is a type of viral marketing in which awareness of the site spreads among friends and acquaintances similarly to a virus as they list each other as crushes and send emails. As of 2005, the company claimed to have more than 1.6 million users and to have matched more than 600,000 people.

1 Demographics
2 Spam-related issues
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Demographics

In 2000, the company issued a press release stating that, according to a Nielsen Net Ratings report in May, eCRUSH had the third highest concentration of users ages twelve to seventeen and the fourth highest concentration of girls twelve to seventeen on the Internet. Currently the site is recording in excess of 10 million page views per month, with PC Data Online showing more than 661,000 unique users in the most recent month"[1].

In accordance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, eCRUSH shut down the existing accounts of children who identified themselves as being under thirteen. According to a Red Herring article, "ECrush.com is seizing an elusive but highly desirable audience of young, mostly female viewers, ranging in age from 13 to 23." According to that article, the service has seen its biggest growth at high schools and colleges⁶. To improve its penetration of this market, in 2005, the website teamed up with Hanson for a joint marketing effort⁷.

[edit] Spam-related issues

Emails from eCRUSH are sent from maggie@ecrushmail.com, a reference to DeMars' pet dog. It seems to be an inside joke from the days in which Crushlink competed with eCRUSH. DeMars accused Crushlink of spamming people with false emails claiming they had received crushes; she reported that even her dog's account had received "someone has a crush on you" emails from Crushlink³.

The company's emails promise, "At eCRUSH, we know how important your love life is to you, and we would never take advantage of your emotions just to spam your crush." However, an April 22, 1999 article in Ohio University's The Post argued, "It is rare to be matched up with your one and only by trickery or bizarre circumstance. So, when your crush gets the initial e-mail, he or she probably will discard it like a chain letter or an invitation to a porn site"⁸.

An inherent problem may be that the "Someone has an eCRUSH on you" emails do not list the name of anyone the friend knows; therefore, a recipient unfamiliar with eCRUSH could very well interpret them as spam. Moreover, as with many commercial emails, eCRUSH's messages contain images that, for privacy reasons, would be peremptorily blocked by most modern email clients – another red flag suggesting spam to many users. Lastly, the email subject lines – e.g., "Someone you know likes you!" – resemble those employed in mass mailings from other dating sites.