Singles Net Review

Costs:

FREE for basic members.
Upgrades are available for Premium memberships and are priced as follows:
- 1 Month: $24.95
- 3 Months: $59.85 ($19.95 per month)
- 12 Months: $89.95 ($7.49 per month)

Features:

Create your own profile and upload pictures.
See match results for other members within your local area.
Send flirt messages, like 'winks' and 'hey there', chosen from their prepared list.
E-mail other members using Singles Net's internal e-mail system (either the sender or the receiver must have a Premium membership)
Instant message other members
Access the public and private chat rooms. Private message other members in the chat rooms.
Save your "interested ins" of members you like.
See who's "interested in" you.
See who's online.
Become a Featured Member with those benefits (premium membership required)
Block individual members from contacting you.

Performing a Search:

All searches are performed automatically by the site. (Details in the Editors Verdict).

Editor's Verdict:

SinglesNet.com claim to the "#1 visited online dating site in the U.S.A. More than Match, more than eHarmony." This is based on Hitwise results for October to December 2008. However, according to Alexa (another web analytics company) Match.com outranks SinglesNet.com by a very large margin. It may be that SinglesNet were running a focused advertising campaign and/or offering incentives to join, during that two month period back in 2008.

SinglesNet gives very liberal access to free members (with the only meaningful restriction being that you can't e-mail between two free members). Other than that, you can send flirts, enjoy open access to chat rooms and the IM feature (which you have to download from an external source). The chat rooms are busy enough to keep you hopping. There's a national chat room and rooms for any particular state. That's a nice touch and we can see the potential for making friends and having an active on-line experience. All member photos are of great quality, fully accessible with enlargements too, as are full profiles. More than 75% of members have photos which tells us they're serious about their dating (unfortunately there is no last log-in info for checking stale members). You have the tools to work with and a significant enough dating membership that you will get results if you stay determined and diligently check profiles.

Registration is relatively simple. The profile information is collected in the normal ways. However, the emphasis is to get you on the site, seeing members listings, rather than holding up the process while they collect information. Presumably, SinglesNet are of the view that posting photos and completing one's profile is something that a member can do later, when they have a feeling that the site is going to be worthwhile investing their time in. This is in contrast to many dating sites which restrict access until a lot of information is collected. Some sites won't grant access without an approved posted photo.

There is obviously a downside to making the registration process too quick and easy: if members' inputs are left relatively blank and the matching process defaults to just age range and location (which is how it appeared to us when we signed up), the "matches" are no more than a poorly filtered initial search. So with the system used by SinglesNet, you and other members may skate through the initial registration process but in the end you have to get serious reading lots and lots of profiles to get to the "keepers". The problem is that you have no way of knowing if the listed member was thorough in the early stages, or went back to fill in the blanks. SinglesNet's approach seems to be good for business, but potentially troublesome for daters.

SinglesNet's structure is decidedly different from most mainstream dating sites because it is not built around members inputting preferences and parameters and using these to perform searches. At SinglesNet.com, that kind of exploration is completely out of your hands as a member. SinglesNet operate on a proprietary matching system. This makes being on-site a snap, as all you have to do is peruse the generated listings to find some suitable candidates. You can use the time saved to return to your profile and fill in the blanks or complete some essays The listings are inclusive of every member in your area or state (depending how you direct it), with the highest degree of matching parameters leading the groups.

While many websites have a Featured Member facet, it is particularly powerful at SinglesNet because the auto-matching approach greatly benefits Featured Members. (To achieve this privileged status you must join as a Premium Member). As you can't perform searches manually on SinglesNet.com, match results are delivered to your screen with Featured Members always appearing first in the listings. This means that as a basic (free) member, you could be at or near the bottom of a stack of over 1,000 members. SinglesNet's standard operating procedure (of doing the matching for the members and placing Featured Members at the top of the listings) must encourage more members to join as premium members. If all members had the search controls in their hands, there wouldn't be such an impetus to become a Premium Member. SinglesNet clearly has smart business sense.

Another thing SinglesNet does is provide what they refer to as "One On One Match" notifications. It's a message that's left on your homepage to inform you of any particularly close matches. Our experience with this is that it drops the newest members on lots of existing members screens, and vice-versa, if they are anywhere close to being related by age and location.

If you're wondering how we arrived at our previously stated opinion that the matches appeared to be nothing but age and location related, here's what we did. We opened our membership with very little inputted information - just the barest necessities. Then we checked our matches (and our One On One Match notifications). Then we immediately went back in and revised our profile information with lots of specifics and rechecked our matches (and our One On One Match notifications). To our surprise and incredulity, the results didn't change! This implied that the site was using a (not too selective) filtering system and that potential dating results are determined by your willingness to read profiles and keep tabs on your findings. That approach will be fine for some people, but we think that the vast majority of people using online dating services won't like it. SinglesNet is fundamentally different from other mainstreams online dating sites in this respect.

We think that doing your homework as a free member offers a good way to get a feel for whether you want to pursue your matches with e-mail (if they are free members too) by getting a premium membership (which allows you full email access to all members). If you stay patient while a free member and find your matches through accessing the profiles of those you have initial interest in, then the premium monthly membership seems worthwhile. That is the basis we would recommend for exploring SinglesNet.

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Singles Net Reviews