The advertisements for the paid internet dating sites would love to have you believe that every person who chooses the paid site will find a love match within the web page portals. The same promotional hype is found at the free internet dating sites that you will find online. In order to determine how successful the dating sites are, a survey of members and ex members for the various sites would be required. Not only is that information unlikely to be available, it may still be inaccurate or skewed because of the information gathering methods. Here are some of the ways to determine whether or not free internet dating web sites can be considered successful or not.

What constitutes success?

The first step in determining whether a particular web site devoted to free internet dating is successful or not is to define what is meant by success. Is the success of a web site measured by how many marriages are contracted amongst the web site users. Perhaps it should be considered successful if there is a face to face first date between a couple. Anecdotal evidence and testimonials obtained from members may hold the determination of what is considered a successful web site. Is the site only successful if there is one on one interaction between two people.

Are success results skewed?

There are several reasons why negative responses to the success questions about free internet dating sites may occur. The respondent may be ashamed to admit that there were not favorable responses to their profile or pictures. The person may have unrealistic expectations about success or failure definitions. For example, if a person feels the site has been a failure because there are no people responding to his or her profile, it may be because their statement of necessary qualifications was so stringent that no one could meet the high standards. So, both the positive responses and the negative responses may be ignoring reality.

Scientific methods

Since the successful matching up of couples is becoming more and more often done by a computer generated personality or attributes test, the use of validated testing methods for matching sites is more critical than it was ten years ago. Free internet dating matches are usually done by a computer match-up of various evaluation questions in some type of ranking or priority order. There is even a patent application dealing with matching for dating sites. Even though personality matching tests and questionnaires are important, there is still no way to predict a positive chemistry between two individuals.

Anecdotal evidence

A lot of people on singles forums state that they know someone who met their mate at a free internet dating site. Some even quote the length of time the internet based couple have been together. Others are very dubious about the possibilities of stumbling across just the right person at the right time on the forum with something that catches the attention of the looker. If it happens to someone else, it may happen in the same way to you--or not. So either way, whether the internet site is successful in general for others or totally unsuccessful doesn't mean that the same thing will be true of you when you find it.