THE LIFE: A decade of Manhunt



Jonathan Crutchley, co-founder of Manhunt.net, poses with New York City
bartenders and Manhunt models.

 For 10 years Jonathan Crutchley has equipped and supported gay men in their favorite sport -- the hunt.

As a part owner of Manhunt.net, Crutchley, his co-founding partner Larry Basile, and 100 employees based in Cambridge, Mass.,  provide an outlet for men to connect and possibly meet one another. The hookup site, which is how Jonathan describes it, marked its first decade of operation in April.

During the past six years, the Manhunt team has traveled and worked to extend its reach globally. It's been translated into about eight languages and can be used in 100 countries. With nearly 2 million active accounts, it's one of the leading social networking sites for gay men, but growing the company beyond the U.S. hasn't been all fun and games.

The first attempt to expand into a foreign country in 2005 "bombed," Jonathan said.

At that time Japan had the second highest volume of Internet traffic behind the U.S. and so it seemed an ideal market for Manhunt's services. With a small team in tow, Jonathan spent two weeks in Tokyo introducing the website to "very socially conservative, extremely closeted"  Japanese gay men.

It didn't work. "They're very reticent to anything that is nonconforming," he said. "The Japanese men were just too reluctant to publish their picture and guys need to see a picture."

Despite a $500,000 investment to get the Japanese version off the ground, it didn't get the desired level of cyber traffic, Jonathan said.

Another stumble in creating Manhunt's international footprint was offering a French translation on the site for Canadians. It was Parisian French and the men of Quebec didn't appreciate the translation, he said.

The journey has been far less challenging in other countries. Mexico has 300,000 Manhunt users. In Australia it surpassed the competition to become the No. 1 site for gay men, Jonathan said.

It's also popular in some Latin American countries where sexuality isn't as strictly defined as in the States, he said. Latin "men are not homosexual, they're not heterosexual, they're sexual," he added.

Membership also seems to be growing in India, where 2,000 people use the site. Jonathan and his team visited four Indian cities in February, and Manhunt is interviewing job candidates who speak Hindi to host events and market the site there. Their goal is to establish 100,000 accounts in a year or two. With a population of 1.2 billion, the opportunities seem endless.

Jonathan's work with Manhunt has been an ongoing adventure as he's learned to maneuver through different cultures and technologies.

"There's a lot of things you don't know about other countries until you go," he said.

One thing he learned early on was to set an affordable membership rate for each country. For example, a monthly membership that costs $12 in the U.S. is 60 pesos, about $5, in Mexico.

A third of all paying members are international and more than half of all traffic, including limited free access, is international, Jonathan said.

For Jonathan, who's in a 12-year relationship with his boyfriend Jason, the widespread appeal of Manhunt.net shows that gay men just about everywhere support his belief that "there's someone for everyone."