Is Singaporean-born online dating mogul Brandon Wey's new dating site WhatsYourPrice.com open-source prostitution, or a new way of leveling the romantic playing field?

If you wanna ride, just name your price

Don't play cheap with your heart, don't make a bet

If you can't write the check for me, for me

'Cause I can be bought, but you'll pay the cost

If you can afford me

-- "If You Can Afford Me," Katy Perry

Depending on your perspective, Brandon Wey is either digital dating's Prince of Darkness, or the most honest -- and innovative -- guy in online matchmaking.

The Singaporean-born, MIT-educated entrepreneur has spent the last half decade building lucrative businesses at the seething intersection of cupid and cupidity. His company Infostream operates such sites as SeekingArrangement.com, a marketplace where affluent older gentlemen (Sugar Daddies) can connect with fresh-faced proteges (Sugar Babies) for "mutually beneficial relationships" -- not to mention its platinum-plated spinoff, the bluntly named SeekingMillionaire.com, which offers "Indecent Proposal"-class interactions for the legitimately wealthy looking to turn cold cash into, er, hot assets.

Both businesses were instant successes -- SeekingArrangement.com now has more than 800,000 members, 90 percent of them sugar-seeking young honeys -- but they also were fundamentally focused on a niche audience: The large but fixed number of rich but unattractive people -- I'm looking at you, Donald -- willing to spring big bucks for head-turning arm candy.

Last month, Wey took a step that promises to democratize pay-for-play dating, launching WhatsYourPrice.com, a site that lets "generous" members bid cold hard cash -- $20, $100, even $1,000 a pop -- for dates with "attractive" ones. It's a concept he calls "eBay for dating."

"Look, we knew this was going to cause an uproar -- in fact, we counted on it. That's why we chose the name we did and the slogan, 'Everybody Has a Price'; controversy's the cheapest form of advertising you could possibly ask for," laughs Wey.

It's worked so far: The site has drawn outrage and press attention from mainstream news sources ranging from Time, Forbes, The Atlantic, to ABC News, MSNBC and Fox News Channel. In its first few weeks, it's also registered 30,000 members who have already paid (and been paid) for more than 5,000 dates. Wey predicts WhatsYourPrice.com will hit one million members by year's end, and 10 million in 2012.

But is the site, as snarkblog Gawker would have it, "indistinguishable from prostitution," or does it actually represent something different -- in Wey's eyes, a way to bring accountability, transparency and ultimately, equality to the murky world of dating?

The price of entry

Brandon Wey's motivation for launching WhatsYourPrice isn't just profit. He admits having a personal stake in "leveling the playing field" for guys who, at first glance, get overlooked in the dating rat race -- guys like him, he says with breathtaking candor.

"I was raised in Singapore, and came here when I was 19 to go to MIT," he says. "And even before I came to the U.S., I was always rather shy -- I never had a girlfriend back home. But once I got here and became immersed in American society, I faced a huge culture shock. I ran into girl after girl who said, 'Oh, I don't date Asian guys' -- not just white girls, but Asian girls as well. I felt like even before they had the chance to get to know me they were seeing me through the lens of ingrained expectations. If I got to talk to them, to show that I had a sense of humor and personality, that I wasn't just the 'Asian stereotype,' that made all the difference. But most of the time, I wasn't even able to get that first date."

Things didn't improve much even after Wey had graduated and gone on to a successful career -- working first as a management consultant, then in key executive roles at GE and Microsoft, and then founding a high-profile tech startup during the heyday of the dot-com era.

It was during that period that Wey came across a Craigslist forum post by a woman expressing her disgust with the dating rat race. "She basically said that at that point, all she was looking for was a guy who would pamper her and take care of her and treat her well," he says. "And I realized that, given the huge crowd of potential suitors for the attention of females, having financial means and a generous personality offers a huge edge on the competition."

But the traditional means of arranging relationships between pamperers and the pampered, classified ads, was slow, inefficient and suffered from a troubling lack of transparency. An online marketplace was the obvious answer -- a kind of open wealth/beauty exchange, where such social transactions could be conducted in private with minimal friction. Wey promptly locked himself into a room for a month and coded SeekingArrangement.com, which proved instantly successful.

Even as that business grew, however, Wey still found himself pondering his original conundrum: How might one give guys who don't have the advantage of outstanding looks -- or, for that matter, extraordinarily deep pockets -- a way to get their foot in the dating door?

Inspiration finally struck when he remembered friends of his talking about "booking clubs" in Korea -- lounges where men pay for the privilege of sitting at a table where they can direct waitstaff to "invite" women over to sit with them. "Women get into these clubs free, and men pay for tables, drinks and food," he says. "But there's a basic understanding that if you're a girl and in the club, you'll be willing to sit down and at least have a drink with anyone who wants you to join them. The guys, meanwhile, are paying outrageous prices to be there -- essentially, paying for these women's company. And I thought, why not take that one step further? Why not just eliminate the middleman?"

In short, instead of having men pay a club for the privilege of bringing attractive women guests over, why not have men pay the women directly? It's the kind of logical solution that a coder and engineer would find elegant -- Occam's Razor! But the danger, of course, is that the lack of such an intermediary opens the service up to charges of being nothing more than a portal for prostitution. Wey is quick to deny that charge.

"Look, it's fine for WhatsYourPrice members to hint that they want some kind of intimacy," he says. "Isn't that what every dating site ultimately promotes? So we allow hinting. But we don't allow people to post things like 'I can offer GFE,' or to refer to 'incall or outcall,' or any of the other codephrases that are a flag that the person in question is a professional escort. We don't want those kinds of people here -- in fact, if we end up with that segment of the population on the site, it's going to be really bad for business."

Wey notes that this reaction to the site is largely limited to American commentators. "Europeans find it puzzling that our nation is such an extreme capitalist society, yet suddenly people are up in arms at something like this," he says. "It just doesn't make sense. And as for Asians, this is completely acceptable. In fact, within the first couple of weeks of our launch, I already had offers from people wanting to license the site and launch it in Asia. There's just a fundamentally different mindset around relationships there."

The other side of the dating coin

Wey has a point. A site like WhatsYourPrice.com would barely raise eyebrows in Japan, where according to the Asian Women's Fund, as many as 20 percent of women report having engaged at some point in enjo-kosai, or "compensated dating," receiving gifts or money in exchange for companionship. (Despite the most lurid reports to the contrary, "enko" is not strictly between young girls and older men, and does not necessarily involve sex.) Many of these enko encounters are arranged via mobile dating sites like Asoboo.com and ImaHima, where strangers can connect anonymously and even be directed to one another via GPS.

And, as Wey points out, Korea's booking lounges represent another situation in which money plays an open (and legal) role in the securing of social connections. But so, too, does the practice of arranged marriage -- which still makes up the majority of marriages in India. A look at the copious "matrimonials" advertisements in a newspaper like the Times of India will reveal endless references to appearance, breeding and education -- but also, invariably, an explicit citation of the annual salary of the man placing the ad, underscoring the transactional nature of the marital arrangement.

Wey himself makes the connection, noting that arranged marriage, with all of its focus on fiscal security, "comes under fire from romance junkies who suspect any coupling not born of spontaneous love combustion," but that they've "been going on for so long that, if we open our minds, we may find our worldview broadened."

Is this to say that Asian cultures are more materialistic than Western ones, or more exploitative, or less inclined toward love? Wey suggests that on the contrary, it's Western ones that are inclined toward obfuscation -- or even self-delusion.

And he may have a point. It may be more crass to use cash to impress a girl you like than to wine, dine and gift her -- but it's arguably not any less moral.

"On WhatsYourPrice, you put money down to get a girl's attention, she gets the money to reduce her risk in wanting to meet you, and you get a guaranteed chance to prove yourself," he says. "If you go to Match.com, you pay a monthly fee, and maybe you never meet anyone at all. If you use Zoosk, you pay for credits that allow you to write messages to people, and maybe you never get a response. And if you go out for a night of speed-dating, you're paying $50 to meet 10 to 15 women. Only one or two might be anyone you're really interested in, and all of the money goes to the organizers. So you tell me, what system seems fairer?"

All I can say is, I'm glad I'm already married.

PopMail

Even those who find the concept behind WhatsYourPrice.com appalling can't deny being curious about what the invisible hand of supply and demand will produce on the site. That's why, as soon as the site hits certain internal growth milestones, Wey intends to release robust statistics about users and their interactions in the manner of competing dating site OKCupid. He gave me an early sneak peek at some select current data -- and what he shared with me suggested that, somewhere down the road, we'll be seeing some fascinating data out of this unique sociological laboratory. I turned the numbers into charts that won't fit here -- but you can see them in full on my personal blog, originalspin.posterous.com. Check it out!