Personals Ads

So an old friend from college called tonight. We spent an hour on the phone catching up on the last few years. I figured that the last time I saw him in person was on Halloween a few years ago in New Orleans. But that’s a story for another time. Tonight I want to talk about personals ads.

Friday night before going out to the Sanctuary, M. and I took a look at some of the personals ad sites online. I had three sites to show her: personals.salon.com, personals.yahoo.com, and match.com. M. is much more involved in conversations over the internet than I am. She’s a chat room regular and uses instant messaging a lot. But the personals ad scene was kind of new to both of us.

I’m a regular reader of Salon so I’ve come to notice their “catch of the day” over in the right column on the front page. They feature some young, fresh face everyday and if you click on it you can see that person’s personal ad or search for ones in your area. Overall, I really like the format of the Salon personals ads because they involve a lot of input from the person — most of the ad is in that person’s words. That’s a big plus in my book. So of the three I mentioned, Salon takes the cake as being the best — it weeds out some of the riff-raff and offers more of the person’s personality. It allows for the most creativity. I should note that Salon’s service is run by a third-party and the ads appear on other sites as well, such as the Onion.

Compare that with personals.yahoo.com. While I think the quality of the people on Salon is generally high, Yahoo is a little broader, which offers the advantage of offering more selection. The problem, as I see it, with Yahoo’s service is that the ads have almost no input from the person. There’s only a tiny little box at the bottom of the ad for them to add a statement in their own words. I’d think the Yahoo ads would be popular with baseball fanatics because they basically read like a stat sheet on the person — age, height, religion, and so on. The person checks a few multiple choice boxes and if those stats match up with your stats in some way, you have a match. I’m pretty analytical, but looking at a stat chart about somebody is an unappealing way to search for a potential date. It’s like asking a woman her measurements and then deciding whether you’re willing to go out with her.

At the far, far bottom of the heap was Match. Match is the exact opposite of Salon. Where Salon solicits the words and personality of the person, Match instead puts words in people’s mouths. It’s only after looking at a few ads that you realize that the multiple choice boxes that people select in their ads fill in stats about them but also Match’s description of that stat. At first glance, it looks like people are writing short descriptions of themselves on various questions, but on close examination it’s actually the words of whoever wrote the multiple choice question. M. and I both noticed that the quality of the ads on Match were decidedly lower. And I suppose people would let Match put words in their mouths about who they are, are not the kind of people we’d want to attract. If I would take out a personals ad, I’d want my own words in there, not the words of some copy writer out in Silicon Valley or wherever.

So that’s my take on three online personals services. Has anyone out there actually posted an ad on one of these or somewhere else? I’m interested in what your experience was like. You can write to me via the contact page.