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May 03, 2013

Bang with Friends Seeks Investment for On-Bed Encounters

By Peter B. Counter, TMCnet Contributing Writer

Sex and the Internet are just inseparable. The same goes for money if you subscribe to the old advertising adage of “sex sells.” There’s an old Internet meme that goes by the name of Rule 34 which states that if you can think of it then there is pornography involving it. Despite the laws and stigmas surrounding easy and/or paid for sex and hook-ups, Internet classified services like Craigslist still offer areas of the Web where anonymous users can arrange for escort services or work out plans for random encounters. It’s all thanks to sex, money, and the Internet: the threesome that gives rise to the success of Bang With Friends.



Bang With Friends, a crude play on the social network based Scrabble app Words With Friends, is exactly what you are thinking, and capitalizing on this demand for Internet facilitated sex in a new way. A less classy version of the relationship app TrintMe, users download the app and can quickly browse through contacts that are looking to hook up for some no-strings attached, friends with benefits-style, real life smooching-and-more.

The site’s how-to section implies that it’s as easy as applying a prophylactic, with line drawings of safe sex instructions accompanying the four steps of using the site: sign in with Facebook (News - Alert), pick the friends you want to have sex with, start a conversation, and finally “B-A-N-G.”

At first glance this might look like a weapon of mass relationship destruction, but Bang With Friends assures anonymity during step two, ensuring that only users who have shown a shared digital interest in getting to step four will be able to see that they are the object of future one-time affection. And despite a wide swath of negative user reviews, the site is raising a ~$1 million seed round and experiencing a surprising amount of success.

The prospect of on-bed physical encounters with Facebook contacts seems to be able to sell itself. Without spending any money on marketing Bang With Friends has been able to accrue 820,000 users and facilitate 200,000 instances of knocking boots. Business Insider reports that there are already investors on board.

Crude and possibly lucrative, the interface of Bang With Friends is shockingly blunt, but the target audience for such a lewd app is probably looking for just that. One thing's for sure, those parents worried about the potential off brand usage of apps like Snapchat might just lose their minds over something like this.




Edited by Rich Steeves
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