True.com

» see true.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

True.com bought television time in the United States and banner space on MySpace during the years I was finishing university in Ankara and living on MSN. Online dating in Turkey then was small and slightly furtive, nothing like an industry, and the American version of it with a national advertising budget behind it never came anywhere near. This one I read about in 2026.

Herb Vest started it in 2003 as TrueBeginnings, out of Texas, and the pitch was a single feature nobody else would touch. Every member who wanted to communicate with another member got run through a criminal background check and a marital screening first. Accounts belonging to married or separated people were canceled without warning and reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. Vest also sued individual members for misrepresenting themselves, which is not a thing dating companies normally do to their own customers.

The money behind it was serious. Between January and November 2006 True spent 52.2 million dollars on advertising, more than any competitor in the category, and pushed that to about 75 million in 2008. The creative went the other way from the safety message, all "it's nice to be naughty" and skin, which is how a service selling background checks ended up best known for its banner ads. By May 2007 there were 16 million registered users and 3.8 million unique visits a month.

~ the dossier ~

~ the law it went and got passed ~

Vest spent years lobbying state legislatures to require dating sites either to screen their members or to say plainly on the site that they did not. New Jersey passed the first such law. Bills followed in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. The rest of the industry, Match.com loudest of all, fought him through NetChoice, on the argument that a background check on a self-reported name is close to worthless and selling it as safety is worse than selling nothing.

They had a point and he had a business. What actually decided it was that True never got big enough for its own regulation to matter, and by the time the shape of dating moved onto phones the whole fight was about a product category that no longer existed in that form.

~ the bid that could not close ~

True Beginnings filed Chapter 11 in Texas in 2013. PlentyOfFish agreed to buy the assets for 700,000 dollars, and what it was buying was the member database: 43 million records, 2.6 million of them belonging to Texans. On 16 October 2013 Attorney General Greg Abbott filed an objection saying the state was moving to stop an online dating service from selling millions of Texans' personal information without their consent. The privacy policy those members had accepted did not permit it.

PlentyOfFish gave up on 23 October, telling the court in a letter that the transfer of the customer information did not appear to be legal, valid and effective. In December the attorney general's office cut a deal covering what happened to the records instead. A company whose entire marketing identity was built on knowing who its members really were had assembled a file so sensitive that it could not be sold in a bankruptcy.

~ what the archive shows ~

On 8 January 2014 true.com was still serving its own homepage, the one with the login button and the couple and the heart. On 8 February the title tag says nothing but "True". By June 2014 the address belonged to TrueCar, the car pricing site, which had paid 350,000 dollars for the domain in a sale reported at the end of January. It still holds it.

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