I'm on two dating sites right now. I set up my profile on both to be similar, to try and attract the type of person I'm looking for. I've had a several dates from both, and I can say that I've had closer matches to my type from the paid site (eharmony), than the unpaid (plentyoffish). That's my experience.

I did the online dating thing for a while, and was kinda disappointed. It's so easy for people to misrepresent themselves. I did meet a couple of fairly cool people, but I ended up with someone I knew from high school, and I haven't looked back. If anything happens to this relationship, I doubt very much I'll do the internet dating thing again. It just wasn't, I dunno, right for me. Of course, YMMV.

Seems to me you get what you pay for, and quality costs money.

I went through a lot of matchmaking programs when I was single. I looked a LOT! A review:

Lunchdates: Expensive (I think it was about $1,000). They set me up with nice people, but not a particularly good fit.

Goodgenes: This SUCKS! The inscription fee is high, and then they make you pay more to see other people's profiles. No luck with this one, waste of money. It also took them almost a year to finally send me my orientation packet. Huge rip-off.

MIT Match-up: This ROCKS! It is free. I met my former boyfriend on it, and we ended up living together a year and a half. If you live in Boston and have an email address from one of the schools on the list, I recommend it.

Match.com: Like lunchdates, the people I met were nice, but not a match.

Salon.com Personals: Sucked. Teams up with other matchmaking sites such as JDate so I got lots of Jews looking for a Jewish girl emailing me, thinking I was Jewish. It also partners with a frat-boy rag, so I got angry responses to my profile which mentioned I didn't like beer.

MFA First Fridays: While it is fun to hang out at the Museum at night, didn't meet anyone. Turns out my husband also went there... we could have met there. But we didn't.

Set-Up by a mutual acquaintance: Free, and it worked! I am now married.

In my experience the expensive places were actually not as good as the free ones. MIT matchup was good because everyone on it was local and college-educated. (It was for students, grad students, staff and alums of several Boston-area schools)

While I usually think that quality costs money, I don't think it is true of matchmaking sites.

I know I'm probably the exception, not the rule...but I met my boyfriend on Craigslist. I was feeling wacky one day and posted an ad. We're madly in love and I couldn't imagine my life without him now. We've been together 2 years and bought a house already! :) I don't think you have to go to a pay site to find someone. I think it's more about being honest about who you are and what you want and don't want out of a relationship. I wouldn't say I wasn't serious about fincing a relationship, but I wasn't serious enough to pay for a dating site. I didn't want to feel obligated to date a guy just because a web site matched me up with him.

In the days before Internet dating, I went to one of those video-dating services. The cost was outrageous, but it did serve one purpose: it screened out the non-serious people. (And the people who couldn't pass a credit check, which there is something to be said for.) I met my now-wife of 16 years there, but I think it was more luck than anything else -- she was the only woman there who ever accepted a date from me.

Amy is absolutely correct in that people devalue that which they get for free.

I met my current boyfriend of almost 9 years on matchmaker.com. FREE. However, I blew off anyone who didn't actually do the work and fill out the essay questions as well as the multiple choice ones. Seemed to me if they were serious they'd do the work, yanno?

These days I'd probably pony up the money to weed out the lookie-loos. Of course, I don't plan to cast off my current beau anytime soon, so hopefully I'll never have to deal with it again.

I have tried online dating and the biggest advice I got was to NEVER post a profile on this one particular site because all of the men were looking for "honey." I know several people who have met individuals there and it always seems to be true. It was a free site and so I have always taken the time to pay for it.

eHarmony - A scam. You fill out an elaborate questionnaire that's almost as detailed as the Meyers Briggs test. Then they claim to match you only with compatible people. Their matches weren't any better than average fit. I did have one 2-month relationship out of it.

eHarmony has a structured method of interaction with new matches that some people prefer, but which I found tedious after the first week or so. I really have to hear someone's voice on the phone and then meet them for coffee to know whether there's a spark.

eHarmony also did the following bad things:

- They matched me with a lot of great people who weren't active, and may not even have been paying members. When I quit the service, I had to write and specifically instruct them to remove MY profile, because otherwise they were selling something they couldn't actually deliver.

- Every email I sent them for assistance got a canned response that opened with a long paragraph about how 239 people a day got married from eHarmony.

It wasn't clear to me what the matching algorithm actually was, since the people they matched me with weren't discernibly more compatible than average.

eHarmony also matched me with people far away, even though I'd said 60 mile radius. Buried underneath their web site was a little setting called "flexible matching" that they don't tell you about, which basically lets them match you up with less compatible people just to keep your "matches" page looking nice and full.

On the plus side, the fact that eHarmony is a paying site meant that there was a higher caliber of person generally. Not the "I just wanna get laid tonight" type stuff that you see on Craigs List, and these weren't in the quick-fling section, either.

JDate - Better, but not great. Higher caliber than eHarmony. Not all Jewish, but more educated professionals and more thoughtful intellectuals.

CraigsList - Good for an ego boost, as long as you don't mind that half the responses to your thoughtfully written ad will be something like, "I HAVE A BIG DICK" in all caps. Any ad written by a woman that includes an attractive photo will get these responses.

All these sites have a hazard for men, which is women who post 10 year old photos from back when they were slender. As a female I haven't had the same truth-in-advertising problem, and the dates I met did resemble their photos.

Apparently on CraigsList there's a term called "dinner whore" which is a woman who posts repeated ads so that she'll get free dinner dates. Apparently - this is from only one person, so could have been just his hangup - some of the guys on CraigsList actually trade notes on who's a dinner whore.

OTOH this same CL guy who told me about the dinner whores called me "paranoid" and "insecure" because I wouldn't take him home and fuck him, after I paid for our first and only dinner together.

Again, boy am I glad I'm already married. Dating today seems like more of a hassle than it's worth!

eHarmony totally worked for me. While my fiance isn't perfect, neither am I, but we are compatible. To me, this service worked exactly as advertised.
Vi is right that it is similar to a Meyers Briggs test but that's because they are matching you by personality-therefore you take a psych profile test.
I tried other sites/ways of meeting men prior to eHarmony, met some decent people but not someone I clicked with like my fiance. I was divorced since I was 28 and am now 48 and getting remarried in May.
I think joining eHarmony was the best $200 I ever spent and the single best thing I ever did for myself. i never would have met him otherwise as we lived 60 miles apart. Mr. or Ms. Right may not live around the corner and even if they did, would you meet them and have the chance to click or not by chance? I think not. It was too important for me to leave to chance for another 20 years!(17 yrs actually as we met 3 yrs ago)

Plentyoffish is ok if you are just looking around and want to find a bed partner really quick. I would not use it to find anyone serious though. Most of the women totally lie about their body size, and I don't really like bigger women. Does that make me shallow??? Too bad, its my choice. Most of the pics are years old, so expect to be surprised and shocked!

Most of the women have kids and have absolutely no education (looking for sugar daddy). Who besides a complete idiot would post pics of their children on the internet?

I went on approximately 16 dates with various women. Two stalked me and one said off the bat she wanted to have my baby. I still get stalked two years later.

There has been some very desperate women who will do about anything for a roll in the hay. So, from that angle it might serve some folks well.

Now I tell people: just do it the old fashioned way and find someone by CHANCE!!!! I did...I found my beautiful latina girlfriend at my local McDonald's!!!

My current husband and I met on Yahoo, ten years ago when the Yahoo Personals service was still free.

IMNSHO, Internet socializing is SO not about "the quality of the site" -- paid OR unpaid -- it's about the quality of your own BRAIN, stupid!

Please, Amy, reinforce to your Loyal Readers that if THEY really wanna get serious about Internet dating, "Spidey Senses" are utterly essential. Cultivate nerve endings/"BS-detector" six feet out past your skin. Otherwise "Mr./Ms. Right" just might turn into your worst nightmare. And hey, if interpersonal empathy has never been your strong suit, take a class! These days there are plenty out there at low-/no-cost!

Please also always remember that it takes HUNDREDS to find ONE.

Be safe, but be brave!

3 years ago, I tried out Yahoo Personals (the free version was quite limited - premium members could send their own messages to you but if you were a free acount you could only send them a canned invitation or response from a drop-down menu).

I went on several dates. I was about to just cancel the free account, but one guy stuck out to me and I actually got a premium account just to be able to write my own words back to him, since his premium-account words really drew me in.

3 years later, I am still with him and we are very happy. When we talk about how our relationship started, he always tells me that it was the way I described myself and the words I used to say exactly what I was and was not looking for...and the I'm a big horror movie fan, especially. I'll tell him, he came off as laid-back and funny in his original messages to me and someone I'd really like to get to know.

So, I do think the thing with us was honesty: we were both very forthcoming about who we are and what type of person/relationship we were looking for.

HOWEVER, if he hadn't been a premium account member, he never could have sent me any of "in his own words" messages and wouldn't have been drawn in.

That's my 2 cents. I don't know if it makes a difference to anyone.