One of the ways I find new, interesting things/information online is by doing serendipitous surfing. This site: Online Personals Watch has a ranking in the sidebar of the top personals sites for March 2005 according to Hitwise:

1. Yahoo! Personals
2. Match.com
3. eHarmony
4. American Singles
5. Friendster
6. WebDate
7. PerfectMatch
8. True.com
9. Black Planet
10. HotorNot

I recognized all of these except for Black Planet (wow, they report having over 14 million members), American Singles (millions of members and thousands joining every day) and PerfectMatch, which doesn’t show any membership numbers but seems more geared to longer questionaires and studies like eHarmony. Webdate has the trademark for: The Web’s Only Free Personals ™. So what’s the business model for them? (advertising only?)

What is HotorNot doing in this list? That’s more of a put the picture up and see what others think of it than personals/dating site, isn’t it? Match.com is everywhere and actually I was surprised this wasn’t #1. Check out #5, the social networking site: Friendster! So maybe these social network sites aren’t a complete bust after all. True.com I wrote about recently as being the dating site that will go for the throat if somebody married tries to sneak their way in.

I don’t own or operate a dating website, but I’ve written custom dating site software for clients in the past. I keep reading how popular dating / personals sites are on the web these days.

tags: dating, personals