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Free dating services or paid dating sites?
Everyone of us is ultimately looking for someone to love. In this day and age, it's getting almost impossible to overlook the internet as a way of finding that special someone. When it comes to online dating, the one of the most hotly debated topics that arise is the free dating services versus paid dating sites. In the past, if you were looking for a place to meet singles online, you had to shell out at least a few dollars every month for the dating site membership. But now, with the rise of the ubiquitously popular social networking sites, it's becoming harder and harder to justify paying several hundred dollars every year for a paid dating site membership. Are paid dating sites dead, and have free dating services become the norm?
Free dating services have the advantage of having much larger user base. People are much more likely to sign up for a free dating service than a paid one, since there's no entry fee to speak off. This can sometimes result in a much larger online dating community than you might find on a paid dating portal. Also, you need to keep in mind that not everyone has a credit card or wants to share their payment information with an online site.
On the other hand, since free dating services require little more than an user name and email account, there might be a lot of incomplete profiles, or inactive users on them, so you need to sift through the thousands and thousands of inactive profiles to find the ones who are open to meeting new people online. Some paid dating sites also provide additional features and options that might not be present on free dating services, like VoIP (Voice over IP - essentially internet telephone), and video chat and conferencing.
If these options are important to you, you might want to consider signing up for a paid, or premium internet dating service. Just be aware that these "premium" services also carry a "premium" fee, and it's not unlikely for these sites to charge 20 to 30 US dollars per month. But, these steep fees also have a secondary advantage of keeping the casual users who are not really committed to finding their true love online out.
Whichever you ultimately choose - free dating services or a paid site, good luck and have fun!
Free dating services have the advantage of having much larger user base. People are much more likely to sign up for a free dating service than a paid one, since there's no entry fee to speak off. This can sometimes result in a much larger online dating community than you might find on a paid dating portal. Also, you need to keep in mind that not everyone has a credit card or wants to share their payment information with an online site. On the other hand, since free dating services require little more than an user name and email account, there might be a lot of incomplete profiles, or inactive users on them, so you need to sift through the thousands and thousands of inactive profiles to find the ones who are open to meeting new people online. Some paid dating sites also provide additional features and options that might not be present on free dating services, like VoIP (Voice over IP - essentially internet telephone), and video chat and conferencing.
If these options are important to you, you might want to consider signing up for a paid, or premium internet dating service. Just be aware that these "premium" services also carry a "premium" fee, and it's not unlikely for these sites to charge 20 to 30 US dollars per month. But, these steep fees also have a secondary advantage of keeping the casual users who are not really committed to finding their true love online out. Whichever you ultimately choose - free dating services or a paid site, good luck and have fun!