I came across a blog post written some months ago in which somebody has analysed the subscriber base and subscription rate of paid dating sites. The post is here: “New Report: Online Dating in 2006.”

The main thrust of the article is that paying subscribers to dating sites account for approximately 5% of their membership, down from 6% in 2005. If this is the case, then people really are wasting a great deal of time and money 95% of the time on paid dating sites that require both members to be subscribers before two-way communication can be established. Most paid sites fall into this category.

You are lucky, because you have a choice. You may not have been aware of free dating sites before now. They do exist, and you can find out a lot about them by browsing through the articles here. If you use these sites, the subscriber base can easily email each other for free, so you won’t be wasting 95% of your time emailing people who won’t reply.

In fairness, there are also some paid dating services that allow the receiver of any message to reply to you at any time. If you do use a paid dating service, I recommend that you use one of these. If it costs extra money for that subscription option, I believe it’s likely to be money well spent.

The following article presents a good list of free online dating sites, and I thought that it was certainly of interest to my readership:

Online Dating 2.0: Thirteen Sites to Find Love. The article is by Michael Arrington.

Michael’s obviously taken some time to pass his opinions of many free dating sites in his article. Of course, my own Cheeky Monkey Dating service is too young to be listed, having come to life later than the article was published. I can see that I’ve got my work cut out for me with that site. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The list of comments shows that many other dating services are out there. I think it’s worth spending time registering with all of the appropriate free dating services if you’re going to register with any.

I hope Michael won’t mind if I copy out the list of free online dating sites that are included in his article and the comments. I’ve excluded all sites where I am aware that the site charges for basic services such as contacting the other person, but for the most part, bear in mind that I haven’t checked the services that are listed here:

Consumating, Engage, GreatBoyFriends, MatchActivity, MatchTag, MingleNow, PlentyofFish (see our PlentyOfFish review here), PodDater, Prescription4Love, RateOrDate, VerbDate, Wikia Personals, OkCupid (see our OkCupid review here), Beautiful People, The Impersonals, Live Date Match, Life Knot and, of course, my own site, Cheeky Monkey Dating.

Google Base was listed, but when I followed the link on the article, it took me to a search that contained pages and pages of “Meet me on hotornot.com.” I don’t personally think that Google qualifies as a free dating site, although I am certain that if they wished to start one, they would clean up in the area, and provide serious competition for the likes of match.com and Yahoo! Personals.