Swinging Heaven Magazine

Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm not a fan of Swinging Heaven so I sat down to read the new Swinging Heaven Magazine with very low expectations.

However, I was pleasantly surprised. It's a really good magazine about sex, very well written and with high production values. It reminded me of Desire Magazine. It's not in any way a porn magazine, it's actually a very sex positive, women-friendly, guide to sex in the UK.

Thankfully there is almost nothing about the Swinging Heaven website, the only major mention is a few pages of adverts where they've printed some ads from the site (but minus the photos). I can't really see much point in this.

The other major omission is of course any discussion about what's happening online; and nowadays there are such a huge number of websites and online resources. I guess that they're unable to mention any of them due to the Swinging Heaven link which is a pity.

Overall though it's a great read and I'd thoroughly recommend it.

Swinging Heaven

I got some details emailed to me about Swinging Heaven. One of the things I never really understood was why the suddenly changed from being such a popular community site to being completely money-grabbing.

The answer is that the founder of Swinging Heaven, Mark, sold out to Symbios Solutions Ltd, a ring tone company, who bought the site in November 2005. According to their website they have "an aggressive web real estate programme" which I guess translates to "charge as much as possible on Swinging Heaven". This has resulted in more than half the users leaving the site since the takeover.

The founder of Swinging Heaven along with some of the users who'd been driven away from the site by Symbios then decided to create a new free site called Swingers Cave. When Symbios found out they took legal action to close it down (I'm told by my source).

So if you want to become part of a "competitive product portfolio" I would suggest you join the most expensive "free" swingers site in the UK!

Swinging Heaven

Swinging Heaven is still the most popular UK-only swingers website although its traffic has fallen by more half over the past year because they made the switch from being a free to site to a site with quite an expensive subscription. If you were lucky enough to have an account with them before they made the switch then you can use the site for free but all new users have to pay.

I'm not very sure why they made the change, normally this sort of thing happens after the site is bought by a company that has no idea how swingers sites work or maybe the owners just decided they wanted to make some cash. Either way the loss of Swinging Heaven is quite sad and I'm sure it will lose its number one position in 2007.

At Fab Swingers there's another article on Swinging Heaven.