Unfortunately you won’t find too many quality FREE dating or social networking sites in the biggest reason is that they don’t have the potential of attracting huge[spin] numbers like the big catch-all sites like MySpace or Plenty-O-Fish, therefore they can’t earn enough revenues just through advertising to offset operating costs.

Whether a site’s membership is free or paid, the bills still [spin]have to be paid somehow. Free sites usually try to make their revenue from selling advertising space to businesses. Which most often means, their main priority and focus is primarily on their source of revenue which is their advertisers, rather than it’s members. Many free sites even resort to using or selling member’s personal info, or run mass-email ad campaigns. It’s important to understand that when you join a site that’s free, you’re not really a customer, technically you’re simply only a user and therefore you shouldn’t expect too much in the way ofsupport.

To create a topnotch 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 with 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 costs for such things as dedicated server leases, bandwidth, marketing and variety of other operational and service related fees.

There are undeniable benefits to joining one of the major well known free sites such as MySpace or Plenty-O-Fish, as they tend to have a large number of members, but they but they can be 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 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 and spammers who create factitious profiles for the purpose of either trying to sell you something or rip you off. Kids and undesirables are also attracted 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 own 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, kids, lowlifes or off-scourings of the Internet will rarely pay to join a site to perform their deviant practices.

On paid sites 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 for Country Singles, or those interested in the country lifestyle in general, 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 a greater of a chance of meeting people.

Whether you’re just wanting to make some new friends or find that special someone, for many of the reasons mentioned above, quality people tend to avoid free social networking and 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. One such site that’s a hybrid dating and social networking site for country folks is TheHitchingPost.net. The Hitching Post is a place for American and Canadian country people to meet.

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 sacrifice or pay.

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