After sifting through a dozen or so online dating sites you will probably come across Match.com and Yahoo Personals which both seem to have very large databases of singles. Well, what is the real difference between the two websites? We have spent time on both sites and can tell you that they are two of the most respectable brands in online dating and that we have seen some members duplicated across the two properties. This duplication is pretty low though and I would estimate them to have about 5-6% overall duplicates on member profiles. Let’s take a look at where the users are coming from on each website. Yahoo Personals gets most of their member base from the Yahoo! portal and through limited search engine advertising they buy. Match.com has strategic partnerships with several ISPs like Comcast.net and they power the personals for Love@AOL and MSN Personals. Match.com has also been very aggressive in advertising with television commercials and magazine ads. Match.com has achieved great success with these partnerships as they fill up smaller dating pools of users in small cities and towns that other dating sites have a hard time doing. I have noticed that in some cities like San Fransisco and New York where Yahoo does billboard advertising that they have a healthier member base.
With this said, if you were to join and pay for a premium dating service I would highly recommend both of these services and it is not unusual for people to have memberships at both of them. As far as features go, I have found Match.com to have a better matching system and Yahoo Personals to have a very simple and easy to use search feature. If you are a woman using either service and are concerned with stalkers and members that won’t leave you alone then I would recommend you use the Match.com website as it has features that allow you to see who’s viewed your profile and photos and you can also remove people from search results and block members from contacting you. Yahoo is a little slower to release new features then most of the other top dating sites so you probably won’t see that many 2.0 type features on Yahoo anytime soon. High School Reunion sites like Reunion.com and Classmates.com adapted many features from dating sites in recent years and now the dating sites are looking to the social networks like Facebook and Twittr for new ideas on how to keep their users engaged and active.
On both dating services you are able to do a free profile search and can submit your own personal ad for free. They have monthly premium memberships that allow you to contact and receive email from other members. Once you are a premium member on Match.com, you can opt to receive and reply to messages from your personal inbox. I usually recommend to people to use an anonymous email like gmail or hotmail to manage any online dating correspondence just in case it doesn’t work out for you. It is pretty easy to link these accounts to your outlook in case you don’t check them regularly.
If you would like to give Match.com a try, we have a 3-day trial membership that we can offer you at: Personals.com. Personals.com is powered by Match.com.
