To develop a quality full featured member based social networking or dating type site is an extremely challenging, demanding, laborious and often expensive endeavor. And it doesn't end there, once a site becomes operational it requires routine and daily management which includes site and server maintenance, upgrades, updates, responding to member support, etc. As in any venture that requires a vast amount of effort and expense to develop and maintain, there's aspirations for returns on the initial investment as well as needed capital required to pay ongoing bills and expenses for such things as dedicated server leases, bandwidth, marketing and variety of other operational and service related fees.
Whether a site's membership is free or paid, the bills still have to be paid somehow. Free sites usually try to make their revenue from the ads they push at their members. Which most often means, their main priority and focus is primarily on their source of revenue which is their advertising campaigns rather than community and it's members. Some free sites even resort to selling member's email addresses to mass-mailing companies, or run mass-mail ad campaigns themselves.
There are obvious advantages to joining one of the large well known free sites such as MySpace or Plenty-O-Fish, they tend to have a large number of members, but they are equivalent to going to a busy mall and running into endless streams of strangers, most of which you have nothing in common with and you really have no idea what their real purpose for being there is. Another disadvantage with sites that have a massive numbers of members, is that the most physically attractive ones seem to get all the attention! So for someone who keeps in shape or is just average, even with a great personality, may find it more difficult meeting someone.
Since there's no real investment or commitment to join free sites they attract all types of rubbish, such as Nigerian scammers, spammers, who create bogus profiles for the purpose of either trying to sell you something or rip you off. Teens and delinquents are also drawn to popular free sites who are often only there seeking a little fun or attention and will often annoy or string along other members just for their amusement. Yes, pay sites often get their share of undesirables as well, but it's far more rampant on free sites and pay sites tend to make more efforts in weeding them out. For starters, undesirables or off-scourings of the Internet will rarely pay to join a site to perform their deviant practices.
On a paid site people have invested something in the process, so they tend to be more serious, and if it happens to be a niche based site that caters to a specific genre, such as equestrian and country people, you're entering a playing field that primarily consists of people that you already have something in common with. With these types of folks, having common interests is often just as important as physical attraction, sometimes even more so. Therefore those with average looks or those who are of an older generation have more of a chance of meeting people.
Whether you're looking to meet quality people for friendship or you happen to be single seeking romance, for many of the reasons mentioned above, quality people tend to avoid free social networking or dating sites, their time is too valuable. If you want to meet quality people that you have something in common with, you are less likely to meet them on free sites.
The bottom line is, both pay and free sites have their advantages and disadvantages, but there are very few free lunches out there so it's up to you to weigh the pros and cons and decide what you're willing to risk, sacrifice or pay.
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