Online Dating Sites - Lovesites

Finding the best online dating website to become a member of can be a confusing process. We have been involved in the online dating industry since 1996 and have seen many dating services come and go in the past 10 years. I have put together a few pointers to consider when picking a dating service to join:

1. Quality over Quantity – Some dating services will tell you that they have over 11 million singles to choose from and this means nothing in the end. The most important factors that you should think about are how many people in their databases are active and from the age and area of your interest. I usually recommend that you write your personal ad ahead of time and to join a handful of the top tier sites and use their services and search tools to find the one that you are most comfortable with before you commit to a paid membership.

2. Casual Dating vs. Serious Relationships – In the past 5 years there has been a clear distinction between casual online dating services where you post your own personal ad and get matches based on age and location preferences versus serious relationship services where the focus is mostly on scientific matching or personality test matching. You will typically pay a little more for a monthly membership on a serious relationship website since the technology powering these types of services are more demanding and they usually have personalized services and relationship advice to go along with them.

3. Age Demographics – This is a factor that is often overlooked but that plays a major role in the consideration set when selecting a dating service to become a member of. Look around when you are surfing online and visiting various websites and when you see an advertisement for a dating site look at the website that you see them advertising on and that is usually a good indicator as to what type of audience they are attracting. With the introduction of popular social networking websites like myspace and friendster in the past few years, many of the younger online daters have migrated to those online communities. There are a few websites that focus on the seniors market and everyone else usually falls between that on mainstream dating services.

4. Religious Preferences – Dating sites that focus on a particular religious belief or religon have become popular among the Jewish, Indian, Catholic/Christian, and Muslim communities. These communities are the walled gardens of online dating where they have focused in on one particular religon and cater to the single people that want to meet other singles that share their religious beliefs.

5. Sexual Preferences – While mainstream dating services also cater to the gay, lesbian and bisexual communities, there are a few quality gay dating websites that are very focused on this market segment.

6. Ethnic Dating – This is an interesting market segment that is mostly focused on African American dating, Asian dating, and Hispanic dating. A new niche is also gaining popularity which is interracial dating services.

7. Paid vs. Free Dating Sites – You get what you pay for is usually the case with free dating services although there are a few that have equivalent features as paid membership based dating sites. I have found that typically free dating services attract a lower quality of users and tons of escorts and adult listings. The paid services are very careful to weed out spammers and fraudulent profiles. Free dating services are usually run by a small shop with limited customer service resources to filter bad listings and inactive profiles.

While there are hundreds of dating sites online to choose from, here are my top dating site picks:

1. Personals.com – (editors pick) It is powered by Match.com and offers a 3-day free trial offer.

2. Yahoo! Personals – Yahoo has been operating personals on their portal for over 10+ years and have a great reputation and technology.

3. Perfectmatch.com – Perfect Match focuses on singles looking for serious relationships and has an excellent personality profile matching technology.

4. True.com – They go after a younger demographic and claim to not have married people on their site by doing public record background checking.

5. Jdate.com – This is hands down the best service for Jewish singles and is owned and operated by Matchnet which operates the AmericanSingles.com service.

6. Friendfinder.com – Friendfinder has an entire network of dating services catered to different interests like AsiaFriendfinder.com, and others.

7. Gay.com – This is the largest gay dating services and communities online.

8. Chemistry.com – Owned and operated by Interactive Corp., Chemistry uses the scientific method to find your soulmate online.

Good luck with your online adventure and be sure to check back to get notified of other special dating offers and websites.