Much is talked about scams in the mail order bride business, international dating, RUssian bride business, whatever we choose to call it.

I have been looking at this subject for some time and want to share some thoughts about the topic of mail order bride agencies and how they and their female clients scam men, particularly American men.

Pareto is the man behind the well known 80/20 rule that suggest that, for example, 80% of profit is derived from 20% of a business' clients. It applies in most areas where there is a distribution, including from what can be inferred from what we read and see, the MOB industry. So, in this case a Pareto girl is one of the top 20% who get almost all the contacts from American men seeking a Russian bride. A shelf girl, on the other hand, is one of many who gets almost no contact at all. We know, again from what we read, see and are told, that there is a long tail of women who are left on the shelf with nary a contact among them.

It is this insight which is very instructive about the nature of the business, as with some very simple calculations, one can start to arrive at an idea of just how busy the top earning girls (or profiles) are and why it is that the busiest can be thought of as being almost certainly NOT what most Americans are seeking. I did some calculations to illustrate this some time ago on RWG. It also illustrates why it is that the top earning profiles are almost certainly not being dealt with by the girls themsleves, there simply is not time to do so.

A Pareto girl is not necessarily a scammer, she may well be seeking a husband, possibly even an American one, but she can be sure as hell picky and of the agency is actually getting many visitors as opposed to guys paying towrite, she is probably too busy with visiting guys to have much in the way of a normal job.

A shelf girl though is different, she gets very few contacts and each one must be jealously guarded and carefully nurtured. The upside for guys, is that she will look after any visitors most carefully and, if genuine about leaving her home country, will be anxious in the extreme not to put a foot wrong, but there is a catch. If she is so motivated and she is so rarely contacted, then it is also very likely that she will do what is necessary to maximise the opportunity, including marrying the wrong guy, simply because he is the ONLY guy. She can not afford to be too choosy.

Let us take an example, Hot Russian Brides have told us back in 2005 that the 'average' man writes perhaps 20 emails per month, it was their justification for setting their free limit at 30 mails monthly. They have, in their database, about 16,500 women. I do not know how many guys they have, but looking at what they told us about thier costs and what we can see of their monthly charges, I am willing to bet that they had, in 2005, about 2000 paying subscribers and that they were aiming for a lot more. I also think, looking at ther site, that they were aiming at letter writers and not visitors, but that is another matter. At current levels, they say they are not making money, so I reckon that any estimates of volume for a profitable business might be doubled?

Let us also assume that Mr Average is writing to, say, 3 profiles. That means 40,000 mails being sent to 16,500 women. Applying 80/20 we get 3300 women sharing 10,400 emails at the top and 13,200 women sharing 2,600 mails. If each woman receives on average 7 mails that means that only 3% of the bottom slice get any mails in any given month, about 400 women. Those women are gonna fight tooth and claw to get amil from the agency and to keep the contact going. We can start to understand where tales of women giving gifts to office managers come from eh?

But what of the top slice, the lucky 20%. Does pareto apply here as well? It probably does, but assumptions get a touch stretched and, of course this is a continuum, not an entirely seperate group... But go with the numbers for a moment, it might be fun!

So, 3,300 women get 10,400 mails, if pareto is still working hard, then just 660 women are getting 8,320 emails each month, 12 mails a month from two guys, and of course those guys are coming and going, and as yet the business has yet to make money. Imagine the number of introductory mails these girls are getting. How does an agency NOT do something to service those incoming clients eh?

Just remember that Hot Russian Brides and similar sites are simply aggregators, each of these girls may well be on the lists of several aggregators,all fed from her local agency, How is a girl going to manage to deal with the input from, for example, A Foreign Affair, RUssian Love Match, HRB, Anastasia and Confidential connections, let alone the Russian sites like Damochka, Yandex and Mail.ru run.

The numbers I ran before were based upon information provided by Elena's Models and US immigration statistics and provided an more extreme picture. But we can see that there are at least two groups of women to be aware of in agencies. It is not possible to simply state that the less popular women are going to be a safer bet. For a man with something real to offer, the converse may well be true as long as he can convince one of these delights to actually engage in a genuine correspondence and later relationship with him. The problem is, in reality, getting such a one to actually read the mail sent to her and provoking a reply.