There is a dating site for just about anything you’re into…
On the one hand, you can find some of the niches you might expect, like JDate or BlackPeopleMeet.
On the other, you can peruse sites for people with highly specialized tastes.
Discovering niche dating sites is some of the best comedy you can find; here are some of my favorites:
- DateMyPet – A site where men and women are equally interested in finding a date for their pets as they are for themselves.
- 420Singles – The ideal place to meet that special someone, so long as smoking marijuana is your most important criteria…
- TrekDating – A place for hardcore Star Trek fans to get together, plus it's Starfleet's official dating service.
- AshleyMadison – A place were married couples can look for an affair.
- WomenBehindBars – Men can meet women currently convicted in prison (or you can give your buddy the blind date of the century!)
Online dating as a whole is increasing at an exponential rate, and as it continues to expand we will see more of these highly bizarre niches along with more traditional niche dating sites…
So this begs the question…
Are niche dating sites a good place to meet women?
Sometimes “yes”… but most of the time “no,” because there are better options.
Many niche dating sites have 2 common problems:
1. They’re not big enough.
Match.com has millions of members, while most niche sites have thousands. On a niche site, by the time you’ve finished eliminating all of the women who are too far away, too old, and not attractive enough, you’re left with only a few potential candidates.
That’s no better than showing up to your cousin’s Bar Mitzvah and finding that all the cute girls are your relatives and the only woman you’re qualified to date is at the buffet stuffing her face with cake…
2. Members of niche dating sites can be more like glorified fans than active online daters.
Can you imagine the mindset of a woman on a site like datemypet.com? She might be way more interested in playing into her pet’s romance fantasy than yours.
If you went to Atlasphere.com, the women might be more content analyzing Ayn Rand’s literature online than meeting you offline.
You can usually skip niche dating sites because…
You can identify people with your same interests, religion, etc. on a site like Match.com by ticking a box or using the Keyword Search function.
If you’re Jewish and only want to date Jewish people, for example, you could just check the Jewish religion box when you search for women. Because JDate happens to be an awesome site, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to deepen your database of attractive Jewish dates by joining that site too if you could budget the extra subscription cost.
As another example, if you are really into fitness and want the same in your partner, you could search for women with the word “triathalete” in their profiles. If you don’t get as many matches as you’d like with that or want to increase your exposure, then you could check out Fitness-Singles.com.
When Niche Sites Are Worth It…
Some niche interests could be so obscure that you wouldn’t be able to easily find other people with that interest unless you found a site built around that interest.
As an example, we had a client in NYC on GothicMatch.com.
If you are in a very big city like New York, Chicago or LA then you’ve actually got a shot of a niche site having a big enough database that it’s worth checking out (it was ‘barely’ worth it for our gothic-fetish client in NYC).
Whatever you do, always look around to see what’s there before you pay, and don’t mess with sites that won’t let you do that.
There are a lot of crappy niche sites, so this is what we do for our clients:
1. We always start with mainstream sites we know we can trust (i.e. Match.com, OkCupid) before looking at niche sites.
2. We only set up a profile on niche sites when we’ve confirmed that there are at least a few dozen active users there that meet the client’s criteria. We want to be sure that the time spent uploading profiles and filling in the writing sections will be time well spent.
If you're not sure which dating sites and apps are worth your time, check out this article. We've got them broken down for you by age group, so you can see which ones will work best for you.
