Gumtree gives up on online dating

Gumtree's Suchi Mukherjee said people were unhappy with the dating section.

Online trading website Gumtree has shut down the "dating" and "casuals" areas of its listings website.

Gumtree's Managing Director Suchi Mukherjee told the BBC she made the decision following a customer survey.

Gumtree was founded in 2000 and taken over by ebay in 2005. It is designed for users to post small adverts about a number of goods and services.

It is free to use but users can also choose to pay for more prominently displayed ads.

Ms Mukherjee said the customer survey, taken in the summer of 2009, found that users of the dating services reported the worst levels of satisfaction.

"I'd love to be everything to everybody but I just can't. I had to draw a line and that's where we drew it," she told Working Lunch.

"We did a lot of soul-searching."

Suchi Mukherjee declined to explain why users were so dissatisfied with Gumtree's dating service.

However some web surfers have speculated that the dating service was closed because of the amount of adverts which were not genuine lonely hearts.

"I do know a couple of people who used Gumtree "Dating" for "Dating", but a casual browse of the listings in those sections isn't something I'd have recommended for my mother or the local vicar," wrote blogger Chris Dawson wrote.

Meanwhile another dating website has reported a "huge surge in traffic" over the last few days.

The people behind IllicitEncounters.com, which specialises in introducing people looking for extra-marital affairs, attributed the spike to the weather, because the majority of its new registrants live in areas worst hit by snow.

E-mail this to a friend

Printable version