Yahoo! Personals Dating Service Review
Yahoo! Personals earns 94 points and a 4.5-star rating:
1. Privacy/Safety – 19 points
2. Age 30+ singles related content – 20 points
3. Website Speed – 16 points
4. Search Selection – 20 points
5. Search Options – 19 points
Click here for more details on Our Five Star Rating System for Ranking Online Dating Services
Estimates: [Sorry, no statistical estimates available for Yahoo! Personals.]
Yahoo! Personals offers an easy-to-use dating community ideal for meeting age 30+ singles.
Having the huge Yahoo! Portal site to draw strong Internet traffic from, Yahoo! Personals has grown rapidly, since around 1998, to over 11 million members. You are fairly certain of finding a good selection of singles over age 30 at Yahoo! Personals, and what’s more, you’ll find a fun online singles community where you can truly say, “I belong” and feel welcome. Unlike some online dating services, where it feels like “they just want your money”, there is not a whole lot of pressure to become a PAID member at Yahoo! Personals. Join for free, but after you actually find some singles who you want to contact, you’ll need to pay or at least give your credit card details to get a FREE 7-days trial regular or premium membership; which is more than enough time to try out all the cool dating tools and features of regular PAID or premium PAID memberships.
And what’s cool is, unlike some other dating services, with free service at Yahoo! Personals you get to search and actually send and receive one “Icebreaker” message before having to upgrade your membership status in order to communicate further with a person that has peaked your interest. Whereas regular PAID or premium PAID members get to send and receive unlimited email and instant messages.
But all members, free and paid, can do unlimited searching to find singles; create a fairly detailed dating profile with up to five photos, plus a voice and/or video message; and take various relationship tests and surveys to improve your chances of online dating success.
Packed with easy to use and effective dating service tools, Yahoo! Personals is sure to please both new as well as experienced online daters.
With thousands of programmers and engineers working for Yahoo! you can bet they keep Yahoo! Personals tuned up and ready for you to search the singles database with ease and accuracy. You can search the dating profiles using standard factors like: location within a specified radius of your zip code, age, body type, ethnicity, education, religion, etc.; or sit back, relax, and let the system do a bit of the work for you with “One-Click Matches” which include:
- “We Match” to find people who strongly match your profile and criteria, and for whom you match theirs.
- “I Match” to find people who are looking for someone with your qualities, based on information in your profile and their profiles.
In addition to state of the art, innovative searching tools, you get fairly detailed “Help” pages and of course excellent customer service help. We deducted 2 points off the privacy/safety rating even though Yahoo! Personals has an excellent safety program. They lost 1 point for slowness to respond to a complaint. They lost another point because FREE members can view one profile before being required to sign up for membership. But hey, that ain’t bad. Paid members can always make their profiles private, block selected members from contacting them, and permanently exclude members from their new searches. So there are fairly good features or tools in the hands of members who want to avoid troublemaker or just unwanted attention. Customer Care does eventually deactivate/ban troublemakers, so overall Yahoo! Personals is a fairly safe online dating community. Well worth joining. Plus, everyone does have to create and post a profile before being allowed to search, contact, interact with other singles.
Yahoo! Personals has a very useful matchmaker search tool for really detailed searching based on your unique preferences and areas of interest. One tool that we have not found anywhere else except at Yahoo! Personals is the Matches-by-Email feature. With it you can actually sift through a number of possible online daters without ever having to log in.
If you are living or looking somewhere other than the United States or Canada, Yahoo! Personals has a truly international presence and community that may serve you very well.
Plus they offer advice and surveys to help make you a more successful online dater, yet, without getting too pushy about using their dating advice and surveys. They are there if you need or want them. Other sites really push their personality tests, and some, like eHarmony, make them a requirement.
The best way to use everything Yahoo! Personals has to offer:
Pretty simple, join as a free member, and look around. Then as always, get all your dating ducks lined up in a row before signing up for your 7-day free trial membership by typing up a detailed profile in a word processing program like MSWord that lets you check spelling and grammar. Get some quality photos lined up and saved as .jpg files ready to upload. And finally, start your free 7-day trial on a Friday or Saturday, or before a long, 3 or 4 day weekend where you will be able to devote full time to creating your dating profile, and searching hundreds of other profiles, saving them to your “Favorites” list. If after 7 days you are sufficiently impressed with the quality and quantity of singles you have in your “Favorites” list, by all means pay to join and email them, use Instant Messenger, or maybe just start out by sending them a FLIRT.
Regular Membership Costs:
At the time of this writing, 6 months regular membership costs $95.94 total ($15.99/mo.) and is billed every six months. 3 months regular membership costs $59.97 billed every 3 months, which comes to $19.99/mo.; and 1 month costs $29.99 billed monthly. To start with a 7-day FREE Trial regular membership you must give your credit card details.
We’ve been asked if Premium Membership is worth the extra cost?
Our answer can only be it is a matter of personal choice. It is an absolute fact that a Regular PAID membership is good enough to get you some dates. If you choose premium service over regular service keep in mind that so much of successful online dating depends on you, not what dating service technology you use. FYI, premium or premier membership is kind of like a private club, premier members get to use:
1. Relationship fit ratings to narrow or refine match results
2. Actually rate their matches to help improve search results
3. And here’s where the private club aspect comes in, only premium paid members can search the dating profiles of other premium paid members. Of course they can also search the profiles of FREE and regular PAID members as well.
Premium Membership Costs:
At the time of this writing, 6 months Premium membership costs $124.95 total ($20.83/mo.) and is billed every six months. 3 months Premium membership costs $82.95 billed every 3 months, which comes to $28.32/mo.; and 1 month costs $39.95 billed monthly. To start with a 7-day FREE Trial Premium membership you must give your credit card details.
One final online dating tip
Post at least one photo, and to stand out from the ocean of other online daters be sure to add a personal video or voice message to your dating profile.
No matter which online dating service you choose, we always advise singles to stick to a rule of never contacting someone who did not care enough to totally complete their online profile, including a recent/decent photo, and enough details describing a “real” person who you could find interesting and maybe even attractive.
The good thing about free service at Yahoo! Personals is that you actually get mutual match, video and voice greetings tools, etc. without having to first upgrade your status to regular PAID or premium PAID membership.