WorldStarMatch Review: What Happened to WorldStar’s Dating Site
It was a rented copy of Fling wearing the WorldStar name, and it has been dark since 2019. Our original review is below, untouched.
What Happened to WorldStarMatch?
Our 2017 review could not list a single pro. The site was so buggy we never managed to reach the terms page or even the payment screen, and the women in those homepage tiles looked like they had never been within a mile of the place. It turns out there was a good reason it all felt hollow: WorldStarMatch was not really a website. It was a skin. Every photo tile on that homepage was a stock member thumbnail served straight from Fling.com, and the page even told Google in its own code that its real address was fling.com. It kept that confession up for its entire life.
The name was not a knockoff, though. The launch traffic in 2012 came through WorldStar Uncut banner campaigns, and the domain sits to this day in the same registrar account as WorldStarHipHop’s other properties. So the arrangement looks like this: WorldStar owned the sign over the door, and Global Personals Media, the Florida outfit behind Fling, ran everything inside. The 2012 terms, back when the site still let you read them, admitted the service “may employ compensated members” who chat with users for pay. That is the polite legal wording for the fictitious profiles our review smelled. And the billing ran through third-party processors, so the name WorldStarMatch never even showed up on a card statement.
The end came quietly in the spring of 2019. The last working snapshot is from March 31, 2019, the same rented storefront it had always been, and a few weeks later the archive never saw the site again. No goodbye. There was nothing there to say goodbye to.
The afterlife is the strange part. The domain is still registered, still being renewed, paid up years in advance, and its nameservers still point at Fling’s hosting company, which no longer answers for it. Somebody keeps paying for a name that leads nowhere, seven years after the partner quietly unplugged the machine behind it.
The lesson travels well beyond this one. When a famous brand suddenly has a dating site, the brand is almost never running it. It is a white-label deal, your profile lives in somebody else’s database, and when the contract ends the site vanishes without a word. The sites that actually run their own show are over here.
Our Original Review
WorldStarMatch.com is an online dating website that caters to those seeking fast hookups and other casual encounters. It is not as well known as some other websites, but the brand does occasionally appear in blogs and search engine results regarding casual dating. We undertook a review of the website in order to provide you with some insight as to how effective it is.
WorldStarMatch Review Results
- Popularity - 18
- Value - 21
- Features - 26
- Quality of Members - 29
- Safety - 10
- Customer Satisfaction - 23
Final Word on WorldStarMatch
We were unable to adequately determine how long WorldStarMatch has been in operation. We do not know if its glitches are temporary, if they are growing pains or signs of a site that is being abandoned by its operator. What we can tell you is that the user experience and functionality are so buggy that we would not recommend it. There are plenty of other casual hookups sites out there that are working properly — right now — that there's no need to deal with one that is leaking oil and running only on three cylinders.
— Pros and Cons of WorldStarMatch —
Pros
Normally we would list the pros and cons of a website after using it. With WorldStarMatch we are not able to list any pros as the site is so buggy and poorly designed that we always felt that we were a second away from being disconnected or sent to an error page.
Cons
- Very buggy
- Cannot access terms and conditions
- Could not access membership page for payment
- Most of the female profiles appeared to be fictitious
— First Impression of WorldStarMatch —
The WorldStarMatch.com homepage is not very sophisticated. It consists of a series of tiled images of beautiful women that the viewer is led to believe are members of the site. It also has a search box where you can enter the region where you wish to search for casual partners. When you click on the “search” button, if you have not registered on the site beforehand, you are taken to the membership page.
— Registration Process —
On the registration page, you are once again greeted by a handful of profile pics of supposed members and a set of data fields inquiring as to your age and location. The design problems of the site become not just aesthetic at this stage, but also begin to interfere with its functionality. We tried on three different browsers and were only able to successfully see the complete registration form on the Chrome browser.
— What Do You Get? —
The free version allows you to realize searches using parameters such as sex, age, and location. You can also receive messages and video chat requests from existing members. We started receiving these types of requests soon after logging into the site. This was odd considering we had yet to load our profile.
The internal navigation on the site is a bit quirky. While we were able to access a FAQ and customer support section, we were not able to fully access their terms and conditions. This made it impossible to determine whether or not WorldStarMatch actively uses what are commonly known as “fake profiles” and “automated messages.” Interaction with those who sent us the messages required a paid membership, so we were further unable to confirm their authenticity.
We would have liked to of had determined the cost of a monthly membership to WorldStarMatch, but unfortunately, after several days attempting to access the membership page on different browsers, we were unsuccessful. this might have been caused by a technical glitch on their end. We attempted to procure the information from third-parties, but very little information has been written about the site on other blogs, that we could not find a reliable source for their pricing information.
