Contributed by: Editor on Tuesday, February 09 2010 @ 11:26 am
Last modified on
Kelli Grant, a consumer reporter and the author of an online dating article[*1] that appeared on SmartMoney.com (part of the Wall Street Journal) took a look at a couple of strategies which could help online daters. She also appeared on CBS News summarizing the information she found about dating online, which you can watch below.
Kelli's straight forward approach to how to succeed with online dating is refreshing but I do have to question her on a few of her facts. One of the things she mentions in the video and the article is to check the dating sites traffic (unique visitors per month). This is a good approach but probably something most users will not know how to do. If you are new to online dating (and are not really sure about finding traffic stats) I always suggest checking out the following 3 popular dating sites eHarmony, Match.com and PlentyofFish.com. All of these dating sites receive well over a couple of million unique visitors each every month. Keli Grant also mentions that a dating site with less than 10,000 unique visitors a month is probably not worth getting a paid subscription for. I agree with her on this but I do think she vastly under estimated this number. I would say any dating site that doesn't have at least 50,000 unique visitors per month is not worth joining. This is true, unless the dating site is a real small niche or is specifically for your home city. With a dating site that has 10,000 visitors a month, the chances of finding someone close to you to date is relatively small.
One of the other things she suggests is to read site reviews. This is important as well but her suggestion of using Yelp.com to find dating site reviews is not very good. I like Yelp.com but they concentrate more on reviews for restaurants, shopping, and other locations in the real world. I also have to ask, where is the mention of DatingSitesReviews.com? 😉
She also suggests looking up the dating site in the Better Business Bureau (BBB). This is a good point as well but people need to know how the BBB works. First of all it can be hard to find businesses on the BBB website, I know I did a article on dating sites and the BBB (see Story). Plus, a lot of dating sites do not belong to the BBB, take for example, the mostly free dating site Plenty Of Fish. They are not in the BBB but this doesn't mean they are a bad dating service. The second thing is the Better Business Bureau is for customers who wish to make complaints and to show if and how these complaints were handled by the company. You will not find much positive information on a BBB report since that is not its purpose. The other thing you need to know about a BBB report is a company with few complaints doesn't necessarily mean it is a good company. You need to look at how the complaints were handled plus how large the company is. For example, Microsoft and Apple have many more complaints than the leading dating services Match.com and eHarmony. Does this mean Apple and Microsoft have bad products and poor customer service? Not really. They just have a much larger customer base, so naturally they will receive more complaints.
To find out more information about the dating sites mention in this article, read our eHarmony review, our Match.com review and our PlentyofFish.com review.