One of the major developments in the online dating industry in recent years has been the huge growth in the number of completely free dating sites. PlentyOfFish is the most well known of these sites, but there are several others that have huge traffic and large membership bases. While you can find some success with these big free dating sites, most of the other ones aren’t worth joining.
The main reason is that they just don’t have that many members. Being free to join and use they may be making a small profit from AdSense ads and affiliate programs, but they simply don’t have the revenue to advertise widely, so they tend to bring in new members at a very low rate.
If they are international – and many of them are – then the members who have joined are spread out all over the globe. That means that each city, town or region will only have a small number of acive members. Obviously, the chances of finding a good match in close proximity to yourself from such a small pool of people are very slim.
That said, some people aren’t constrained by geographic limits, and will happily make contact with other single people in other countries, or far-flung parts of their own. This might be fun for a while, but it’s unlikely that these distant online liaisons will ever turn into enduring relationships in the real world. The cost of travel, and the emotional upheaval involved in uprooting one’s whole life are pretty major disincentives, after all!
The other reason that small free dating sites are inferior to big paid ones is that they usually offer little or no customer service. Since they’re not pulling in subscription fees, they can’t afford to employ staff to answer e-mails and phone calls. A lot of free sites are built and managed part-time by people in their own homes, so they’re more like hobbies than real businesses. Usually, the site owner is just really glad that people are coming to the site and clicking on the ads, so he’s probably not going to do that much else to improve it. He’ll generally just promote it as cheaply as he possibly can and keep on cashing his Google checks.
And it’s not just the webmasters who don’t care that much about the quality of their free dating sites. The members who have joined tend to be less serious about using them because doing so costs nothing. If you pay for something it usually means that you expect – or at least hope for – something in return. When it comes to online dating, you’re hoping to get dates, of course! So, simply the fact that they have forked out some cash will make these members a bit more likely to log in repeatedly, search for new members, send out e-mails and reply to the ones they have received. Combined with the greater number of members in each city or region, this makes for a greatly increased likelihood of converting an online contact into an actual date in the real world.
Robert McGrath is a Sydneysider who blogs about dating and relationships. Aussies who would like to meet new people online and offline should check out these excellent paid dating sites. They all have great customer service, large and active membership bases and they also include community listings for Aussie singles.
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