Screen sizes / Payments

In the last couple of years, many of our advertisers and users have moved much of their use to mobiles and tablets. We have done a lot of work to make the experience on those devices work well - if you have seen anything wrong there please get in touch.

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Payments - we are aware lots of people are having problems paying to upgrade. We are working to get this fixed and hope to do so in the next weeks.

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Apart from the above, more advertisers are getting more enquiries than ever. So we did some things right. Any other comments are always welcome! Kisses, Claire.

Help each other out

We have just released a feature for our advertisers which we hope will be useful.

When you receive a message sent through Massage Republic you get a special link at the bottom of the email. You can use this link to report a person for bad behaviour: by email, SMS, or in person. Please do so!

These reports will be shared with other advertisers when they receive a contact from the person.

We hope this helps everyone share information about problem customers and makes everyone a little safer.

Back to school

A big shout out to those of our advertisers that are working mums. The oldest and - at times - one of the hardest professions in the World is even tougher if you have kids. Oh, yeah, it's already really hard having kids in the first place...

Opinion seems to be split between when or even whether you should tell your kids what you do for a living.

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of good advice out there, a quick Google got these:

• A very frank confession from an Australian
• Random madness on Yahoo Answers
• A reasonably balanced piece from the Daily Beast

When we tried to work out what advice to give, we realised we can't. There is no single answer. It makes sense that the best outcome is probably that your kids never know. For many people, this is the same as 'no-one' should ever know. But if your situation means that they might end up finding out, then this is something which you might want to manage in advance or at least work out how to do so.

The only thing that is probably seriously good advice is don't get caught in a lie: if you are confronted by one of your kids with the question and lie, there is a good chance you can seriously damage both your authority and the relationship. If they are asking the question, you are already probably in deep shi*... Most of those outcomes are worse than either working out how you will react in advance or having your answers ready for them. Even if it is true, you can't tell them that 'I have done this for you'. You need to explain much more about how you made your choices - or ended up without choices - to make them understand; and none of that is 'their fault'.

A new face for Massage Republic

We have recently launched a new look for Massage Republic. One of the main goals was making the site work better on mobile phones and tablets. We also took the opportunity to make the user experience better.  People are viewing more pages each visit, so we think it's working well.

We hope you like it! Any feedback is always welcome.

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In other news, we have carried on growing visits and enquires to advertisers. We have added an icon on listings for videos so users can see there is one there. It seems this is quite popular, so if you don't have a video on your listing consider adding one. We have some new 'stuff' coming in the next months - will keep you posted.

What can we do for you?

We're happy that we have been generating more and more business for our advertisers. Our stats show we have increased enquiries by 50% in the last 6 months. If you are not seeing more enquiries, think about improving the quality of your listing (title, description and services offered), don't use CAPS and make sure you answer questions.

Users are also giving us positive feedback. More people are asking questions on the site and leaving reviews. Great for everyone.

So, what next?

We want to hear from you! What do you want?

Some of you have already provided some great feedback, but we want to hear more. We're here for you - as an advertiser or user of the service - so we want to know what we're doing wrong, what we could do better or what you would love to have on the site.

Leave feedback here us or drop a comment below.

Thanks! We will really appreciate every comment.

April Fools (bit late :)

Got a new mobile version coming soon! We know so many users access the site on mobile so hope this will be a big help.

We're really happy to welcome onboard another 500 people who listed in the last couple of months. You're all beautiful (TS, guys and gals) and we hope you get the enquiries. We're working for you!

Thanks for all the feedback in the last weeks. We know photo verification can be a real pain, but happy most of you put the time in to make it happen. At the end of the day, we need to make sure customers stay happy, right?

Been busy, sorry!

Has been too long since we posted an update. Sorry, we have been working hard on dealing with too many silly things...

So, where are we? Overall, the number of contact actions for our lovely friends with profiles on Massage Republic has increased by 28% in the last 6 months. Visitors to the site increased by 60% in the last 6 months vs. the previous 6 months. All great news, but we still have a lot to do.

We will soon have a more mobile-friendly website, which will make it easier for users to find you.

We have some other improvements coming for users, so keep tuned.