Yes, you read that right! We are no longer displaying paid advertisements on ROMEO. We made this rather unusual decision to let go of our second stream of income. We have good reasons for this.
Our reasons
A year ago we decided to turn off automatically delivered advertising through networks like Google or Facebook. As various scandals in the past have shown, targeted advertising and privacy don’t go well together. That being said, ‘Candy Crush & Co’ were irritating anyway 😉
On the other hand, we naturally tried to sell advertising space directly to larger companies. Even if many companies are very LGBT+ friendly, they would rather not like to see their product next to a bare bottom. At ROMEO, we stand for sexual freedom and not shameful hiding. Rather than remove all explicit photos, we’d prefer to say “No thanks”.
What you will see
From time to time, you will still see some advertising banners. These will mainly be from us. For example, when we have big news or we want to seduce you with a PLUS upgrade 😉
In addition, we also want to keep the option for collaboration with other companies open to exchange traffic. Either to become more popular in countries where we don’t have so many users, or simply to support great LGBT+ projects.
ROMEO PLUS
One of the PLUS benefits was not to see advertisements. Dear PLUS users, we ask for your understanding for this change. Rest assured, since PLUS will be our only source of income we will definitely reconsider your benefits. We already have ideas for new great features exclusive for PLUS members. We also want to honestly announce that we are also planning to become a bit more restrictive with out free features in the future.
Finally
Because we have removed Ads step by step during the last year, you may not feel this change directly. As a positive effect, we have already noticed that there are almost no negative comments about advertisements in the App stores 🙂
With this official end to advertising, we want to ensure clarity for our users. Only you pay us, and therefore you are the only ones who matter.
Jens Schmidt
Founder and CEO