Free dating sites had a good start in the year into 2012 but there’s still a bigger hill to climb. With so many contenders in this market the race is on to get up in the rankings and make their site more attractive and appealing to more users than ever before.

It has been said that the growing online dating community is projected to grow by another few percentage in this year alone. Although that figure may seem small but if you take into consideration the numbers involved, a few percentage can really have a big impact in the overall figures. Free dating sites will witness a boost in their registrations as a result of this increase and a majority who rely on Adsense will see an increase in their earnings.

The question is how to weather the highs and lows that can happen as a result of the traffic flow that comes to the dating sites including seasonal adjustments. It is not surprising that some websites opt for what is called the freemium model. What this entails is that the site in addition to offering most of the features free, also encourages users to sign up to a more ’sticky’ site that will yield them better results. For example, if you sign up for the fremium section which is effectively a paid section, you can expect to get more hits as a result of the additional ‘impressions’ your profiles will receive from other members. This maybe a good thing whereas the user can save quite a bit of money over the fully paid dating sites such as match.com or eharmony.com.

At the end of the day, there should be guarantee that users money has been well spent and they are getting the best value for money. It is a quantitative issue in that we cannot fully appreciate the results prior to taking out a subscription, for example, we know what we are going to get when we buy something off the shelf of a superstore.

Fortunately free dating sites do not fall prey to this as much as the fully paid subscriptions sites but one can argue that their model will not succeed for any length of time if there were more success stories than bad ones from the end-users. However, free dating sites have one good thing going for them and that is, what else do you have to lose, apart from a few minutes of your time in filling your profile and sending out messages. The results could be as good compared to other dating sites but without any monies involved in the transaction.