Quick Summary:

Value: 4/5 Design: 4/5 Quality: 5/5

• About 25,000 performers on the site, with about 500-1000 available at any given time
• Nice, straightforward, and relatively clean design and layout
• Some of the models get stroppy when you ask them to do unusual stuff!
• Unless you’re spending a LOT of time and money on the site, the upgrade features (premium membership and joining fanclubs) aren’t worth it.

The Full Story:

One thing I’ve noticed with the adult dating sites I’ve been reviewing lately is that the most popular upsell on such sites are webcams. Makes sense, right? You have a membership largely consisting of horny single guys desperate for female attention and you try to sell them cyberhookers.

Reflecting on this, I thought it’d be a good idea to do a review of a cam site, to give you guys some idea of what you can expect should you sign up to one. I decided to start with cams.com as we get a discount there on credits (it’s one of the 12983491764 sites AFF own) but I have some plans lined up to review a few other non-AFF camsites later on, too.

Anyhoo, rocking on. Here’s what the home page of the cams.com looks like. As you can see, the design is a lot cleaner than some of AFF’s other sites. That’s at least partially reflective of the more straightforward nature of the site’s offerings, which are:

1) Camgirls doing and saying stuff that you ask them to for money
2) Watching prerecorded camgirl shows
3) That’s it? Am I missing anything?

Like most similar sites, cams.com offers a free “teaser” camgirl chat to people. You just have to supply them with your email address and confirm it (expect to receive some follow-up marketing emails). Also be aware when you’re chatting to models that the girls can see how much credit you have in your account and whether or not you belong to her “fan club” (it costs extra to join a girl’s fan club, but you receive a discount on her private shows – full details in this image.) Additionally, if you buy more than 30 minutes worth of private shows over the course of a month, you get free access to a girl’s fan club, or an extra month on one you already belong to.

Cams.com also has a “premiere” account–basically a “gold member” type deal that provides further discounts on shows and allows you to have email contact with the models. You can see a screenshot of the signup page for that listing the features and benefits here. My call would be that unless you get REALLY hooked on cams in general or a particular camgirl specifically, the upsell options aren’t worth the cash you’d save.

Well, enough about the options and mechanics. Time to answer the questions you’re really asking.

Are the girls hot?

Well, yeah. I mean, for any definition of “hot” you might subscribe to, with 25,000 models on the site and about 500-1000 available at any given time, if you can’t find one you think is attractive the problem is probably not with the site.

Are the prerecorded shows any good?

I had a look at the top-rated video show at the time of the review, this one here. This is what it looked like in full-screen resolution. The girl was certainly very attractive (face and body), as well as being, uh, eager to please (she accidentally the whole dildo!) I did find the sound a bit jerky, but that may just have been my connection, as the video was streaming (Flash).

I noticed that her accent was Eastern European, something you’ll find with a lot of the camgirls for reasons beyond the scope of this review. Which brings me to a point that might be worth making – a lot of the models will have limited English, even if they SAY they speak it. If this matters to you (and keeping it real – it probably doesn’t) be sure to check out their profiles before paying for a show; they’ll usually give you an idea of where the model is from, which should inform your expectations.

Another thing about the prerecorded shows is that there’s no option to save them, and paying to see one only gives you a single streamed viewing. If you want to record them yourself to re-watch at your leisure you’ll have to find a 3rd party solution–perhaps a browser plugin or standalone session-recording application.

When you ask them to jump, do they say “how high?

Some of the models are picky about what they’ll do or not do on camera. It’s pretty common for them to refuse anal, DP, watersports, etcetera, or to charge a premium for such services. For example, the girl in the prerecorded show mentioned above states that there’s certain acts she’ll only perform for guys who join her fan club. To get a feel for how generally complicit the models are on the site, I thought I’d masquerade as a guy with a slightly unusual fetish and see how many of them I could get to go along with it.

I figured I wouldn’t choose anything too bizarre or disgusting. I settled on just asking to see the performer place a shoe on her head. At $2 a minute, it doesn’t seem like some big huge thing to ask for, right? WRONG. I got turned down by FOUR girls consecutively until this BBW angel gave me what I was asking for. Very disappointing. And what reasons did they give for turning down my entirely reasonable request?

1) Aliciasforms figured she could do better out of one of the other guys pestering her (reasonable?)
2) The inappropriately-named MistressKinks decided playing with her hair and ignoring me was way more awesome than getting paid.
3) Morticia decided she was too much of a big bad dominatrix to do anything so demeaning as putting a shoe on her head. Though she at least had the good grace to laugh hysterically when I asked her if she would.
4) Oxygen thought she could do better out of one of the other guys (reasonable redux?)

Parting shots

So what was my overall impression of cams.com? You get what you pay for. And make no mistake: you will pay. Cams aren’t cheap, and it’s easy to blow a lot of cash very quickly. But if you’re responsible with your spending it’s certainly a cut or seven above the usual “jerking it to a porn movie” Friday night finger-shuffle.

Even if some of the performers are less than accommodating of poor, beleaguered, shoe-on-head-loving fools.

Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 3/5 Features: 5/5 Design: 3/5 Content: 4/5

• An active and engaged community of fetish-lovers
• Slightly more tailored and attractive design and features than AFF
• Exercise more caution about meeting members than you would for a “vanilla” adult dating site

The Full Story:

ALT.com is AFF’s kink/fetish “adult dating” site. Despite being owned by AFF and representing a subset of their database they do seem to have made a reasonable effort with ALT to tailor the website to the targeted demographic. As the interface and features are largely the same as AFF’s, I’ll try to concentrate this review on the points of difference. (If you want to read the AFF review to learn more about the generic shared features, it’s over here.)

I made my account a while ago, and finally got it upgraded it to GOLD status the other day. I logged in. This is what the home page looks like. Yes, another Christmas tree. However to my eyes it’s a Christmas tree with a slightly cooler color scheme than this one, though I obviously can’t speak to everybody’s aesthetic of web palette.

The first thing I noticed once my eyes adjusted to all the visual clutter was that there was a banner ad for Penthouse  staring me in the face (Penthouse? Really? On a FETISH site?) I think the site just rotates the banners through the various FF properties, but it was still a bit of a “lolwut?” moment.

ALT does have several offerings that distinguish it from the regular AFF site. For example, in your profile there’s an extensive list of fetishes that you can classify yourself using. Doing so will make it easier for other people into similar kinks to find you, and will advertise your kink/s to the other members. To see for yourself what I mean by “extensive”, look at the full list  here. The site also provides members with a “Fetish consent worksheet” and the ALT.com toolbar, which is an IE plugin that lets you know when you have mail in your alt.com account, when your ALT friends are online, etcetera.

Figuring at this point that the best way to find out about the site is to chat to some of the people who use it, I logged into the “newbie” chat room. You can see a list of the chatrooms here. I’m thinking that the “Topical” rooms’ relative popularity gives an indication as to the levels of the site’s patronage amongst the various fetish groups and subcultures.

The chat rooms seemed active and full of genuine and intelligent people. The half-dozen or so I spoke to told stories tinged with ambivalence. Most had met people from the site, some had had good experiences, some had not. Those who had experienced both regarded the ALT.com “culture” as quite different to AFF’s. For one thing, they said, people on ALT.com tend to meet in public and socialize with others from the site first, before getting into anything sexual or kink-related. Because a lot of them enjoy inflicting or receiving pain of some sort, it’s important  for all parties to be confident that they haven’t just hooked up with a Patrick Bateman-style serial killer. This “feeling out” process can (and should) take longer in this sort of environment than in one that’s just about the quickie “vanilla” sex hook-ups.

Some of the women also talked to me about having been lied to and misled by men masquerading as women, doms masquerading as subs, unemployed bums masquerading as high-flying corporate executives, etc. As elsewhere on the Internet, people on the site are sometimes less than honest about their desires, appearances, financial statuses, etc. It does seem to be the case from what I was told, however, that it’s a site with a real community and one through which you will have no great difficulty meeting and interacting with people in the real world.

Overall I decided that I’d rate this site a little higher than the main Adult Friend Finder one due to its superior design and stronger community feel-though it’s obviously only going to work for you if you actually have some fetish or kink in the first place to explore.

How about the rest of you? Any experiences at ALT you’d like to share? Comment away!

I got quite a few email responses regarding the sexsearch.com review I did the other day. I thought I’d share my favorite one with you, sent to me by a (gasp!) genuine female user of their site:

I’ve been on this site maybe five months. Kinda a waste of time money and effort if you ask me. Most the people on here are one of three things. They are either:

1. creepy old men,
2. Too far away to play with in person, or
3. Treat you like shit. I’m here for sex,no strings. Not a bot, not a hooker. That’s hard for guys to understand.

The site’s easy enough to navigate and the gold room is kinda a cool bonus. Had some problems with the billing though. Maybe five months ago, I signed up for the 3 day trial and they tried to bill me for a month membership. I told them no, and that I don’t want a membership. They don’t listen, so I’ve had it ever since.

I’ve met ONE person off of here. I like fling.com I think it’s way better for meeting people. better quality of people too. that sounds bad, I know.

MUAH!

-Tessa (not her real name)

I thanked Tessa for her email and sent her back a link to our review. She responded:

You gotta be careful with fling. I LOVE it and it’s great for me. As a girl I get to send out 5 free messages a day without having to be a paying member, and I can reply to as many emails as I want. With guys, I have heard A LOT about people being able to hack into their accounts, steal their credit card info and whatnot. Last I checked, there was around 1 girl for every 20 guys on sites like that. There’s atleast a 1 in three chance that the girl ends up being fake, a bot or a hooker. Odds don’t look too good for guys, I know.

They have member posted porns and pictures …kinda cool. I checked out your review. you’re funny! Sounds pretty accurate too.

If you need me, you know where to find me. Have a beautiful day!

XOXO

-Tessa

I really found it hilarious that one of sexsearch.com‘s own paying members was recommending fling. Anyone else want to share their adult dating site experiences? Just hit us up using the “contact” link up the top of the page and send your story through. Take care!

Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 1/5    Features: 1/5    Design: 3/5    Content: 3/5

• It’s a pile of shit and a huge scam. Don’t use it. Stay away. Seriously.
  
• Most (all?) of the attractive female profiles are fake. “Real” females get hundreds of emails a day.
• All the sites seems designed to do is try to upsell cams and other porn sites, even to “gold” members

The Full Story:

Soooo… fire up my browser, punch sexsearch.com into the address bar, and look around for someplace to sign up for an account.  Odd that I am not presented with much of an option to sign up straight away as a gold member, rather than having to do a free signup and then upgrade, but I can’t find anywhere obvious that will let me, so I dutifully create my free profile and log in.

I am now presented with this screen. Welcome to 1999 much? Well, still better than AFF‘s, I guess. At least it’s relatively uncluttered and coherent. And it sorta looks like I can do some stuff now, right? Wrong. Pretty much anything I click on with this page takes me to this one. Yay for me, as I’m planning to upgrade so I can check the site out! Would kind of be annoying if I was expecting to do anything crazy with my free profile, like, oh, browse the site, right? Right!

On top of that I keep getting bugged by instant messages from fake profile chicks with names like “sexycute69″ and “hornyladyLA”. they want to meet me for sex SO BAD RIGHT NOW! They’re rubbing their little fishy stank places raw just thinking about me! Of course I’m blocking popups, so the site helpfully tells me how I can unblock them so I can MSG_TEH_HOT_CHIX_HOO_WANT_SEX0RZ. So I do! And suddenly every other window opens a popup trying to sell, you know, porn! Fancy! I try to message back all those hot chicks who wanted me a moment ago, and you guessed it: it’s PLZ UPGRD time again. Slicker than a pillowcase made of diarrhea!

Well, regardless. As I have been intending to all along, I upgrade to GOLD membership status, drooling at the thought of all the access to LIVE WEBCAMS and PRIVATE VIDEO CHAT I’m about to enjoy. Unfortunately (and as you’ve almost certainly already guessed) that’s not quite how it works out. First of all it takes AGES before my access is even granted – I’m not sure what kind of vetting process is involved, but I haven’t seen another site yet with one that takes as long. To add to the joy, while I wait I don’t have any more functionality than I did with the free profile.

*drum fingers*

*scratch nuts*

When my account finally is approved, things don’t improve much. Every “Member Feature” link is an upsell. Every “Chat” link takes me to this page, which is just a  bunch of live.jasmin.com webcam feeds. It’s a page I’d have access to for free, anyway! So all I’m really getting for my “exclusive, premium, gold” membership and the $35/month I’m pissing into it is the basic ability to contact people (the few real people who exist) with profiles, and access to some (stale, pedestrian) porn through the “gold room”–a subsection with HORRIBLE “twitchy” navigation, by the way, which is CONSTANTLY trying to upsell me to whatever, in a distracting “blinking neon billboard” sort of way.

Fighting back mounting feelings of disgust and disappointment, I turn to the last feature left: searching for sex. After making a few contacts with some of the site’s “women” (reasons for using the word reservedly will be forthcoming) I find that, predictably, they fall into the same old tired categories. Those categories being:

1. Bots/Scripts/Programs/Shills/UNPEOPLE PEOPLE, PEOPLE.
2. Fatties/chubbies/fuglies/oldies.
3. Shopworn 30s-middleaged swinger chicks with mental issues. Spend any time on adult dating sites and you’ll get to know the type.
4. That’s it. That’s all.

The proportion of fake profiles to real seems to be even higher than on uLust, which is saying something. Some of the group 2 and 3 girls I communicated with tell me that they are buried by emails, messages, etc from male site members–some of them getting hundreds a day.

So… yeah. Nothing very much positive to say about this scummy toilet bowl of a website at all, really. Even the porn content’s not that great; certainly not worth the price of admission. I guess if you’re one of the group 2 or 3 females mentioned, you’ll find no shortage of guys here willing to sort you out on short notice? Cold comfort?

The cancellation link (which you’ll be wanting it fairly quickly if you’re masochistic enough to join this site) is sort of hard to find, but at least it wasn’t difficult to unsubscribe once I located it.

Account options-> Account Options main->help Desk->Customer Service->Billing Information->Click the Billing company.

Avoid.

Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 2/5    Features: 3/5    Design: 4/5    Content: 4/5

• Clean-looking site with a tight, integrated design and interface.
• Fake profiles galore.
• Chatroom shills.
• Lots of XXX content, but more of a porn site, really?

The Full Story:

This was going to be a review of fling.com, but they decided they were going to have some big problem with our credit card, so we’ve postponed it until we can figure that crap out. Instead, this will be a review of uLust.com.

So I kicked it off by landing here, signing up and logging in. Here’s a screenshot of the members’ area.

Well, first impressions: it’s a clean, white, uncluttered, and attractive site with a lot of Ajax-y Web 2.0 bells and whistles. The upsell advertising (cams and penis pills while I was on the site) isn’t so in-your face and ubiquitous as it is with AFF.

The membership database, however, is considerably smaller than AFF ‘s–clocking in at around 5.5 million, but while I was logged in there seemed to be a proportionately larger number of active members; namely, 57-115k active/5.5 million for uLust.com compared to 132k active/32 million on AFF. My later interaction with the site ended up leaving me with some serious reservations about the accuracy of that figure, though. For which read on.

So I finished filling in my profile details, fired up the search function, and went trawling for tail. Now what you should probably know about mainstream adult dating sites is that a sizable percentage of them create fake profiles, usually of women, to attract and retain the interest of paying male members. The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot of suspicious profiles, even by industry standards. Like “the overwhelming majority” a lot.

Some, like this one, is just too “Penthouse Pet” to be real, while others, like this one, were real-but-c’mon-guys-it’s-a- freaking-hooker. Genuine profiles like this one, this one, and this one were in the decided minority plus, uh, you know. Look at them. “Hoorah?”

It wasn’t too long before the whole site started to give me a serious “porn” vibe. It seemed to be far more about the fake profiles and shilling for camwhores than it was about anything else. Like, for example, “adult dating”. Or “getting laid.” There was also an annoying bug in the picture viewing code, which kept distorting the picture dimensions in the thumbnail view when I was reviewing profiles.

After about half an hour searching profiles I wandered over to check the “Members’ Video Chat”. The girls here (and surprise, they were all girls) all seemed to be professional websluts doing “teaser” shows. They weren’t overly responsive to what was being typed, and one of the rooms was empty when I looked at it. Two others closed while I was viewing them, leading me to suspect the girls had received requests for private shows .

The main Cams link here goes to pages full of thumbnails. You can click on a thumbnail to talk to the associated girl if she’s available AND you join the ulustcams.com site. Joining this complementary site requires validation of your credit card, then presumably (I didn’t investigate much further) the payment of some per-minute charge to naked cam-to-cam with the googly-eyed slut of your choice.

Like I said, a glorified porn site. The “Movies” link takes you to a bunch of porn clips (yeah, I’m on an adult dating site because I only want porn, right?) These clips have some Firefox playability issues, which I couldn’t be bothered figuring out. The user videos are little better, though they suffer from the same issues as the profiles. Namely that a lot of them consist of generic porn content. i.e. “they’re fakes.”

uLust’s chatrooms were all dead when I looked in on them, except for one (the “Lounge”) which had a fake-profile “babe” chatting in it. This prosti-shill regaled the room with a banal chronicle of “her” daily routine (“Yeah, sorry I was just on the phone. Yeah, I’m feeling pretty tired now. Yeah, wonder what I’ll have for dinner tonight.”) The (old, unattractive, desperate, horny) men floating around the room were hanging on her every utterance, entranced. Some of them definitely seemed to be regulars. They had kind of a leering, wolfish demeanor and snippily informed me that if any REAL women turned up (keep dreaming, losers!) the “vetereins” would have first crack at them.

I scanned through the forums and groups. They have a reasonable number of posts, but they’re all moderated (there’s a general theme of heavy-handed moderation, presumably because the owners of the property don’t want people squawking publicly about how much the site, you know, sucks.) You can see that most of them are of the LADIES HERE I AM LET’S FUCK variety. Yeah. I hear that’s how the hardcore playaz really pull.

As you can probably tell by now, I was less than impressed by my uLust.com experience. There’s very little evidence of genuine community here and I’m skeptical about both the userbase size and participation level claims that they’re making. On the bright side, the site looks good, and there’s a ton of porn (movies and galleries) there, if that’s really what you’re after. But don’t expect to get laid, and don’t expect not to feel like you’ve been cheated, if you join expecting anything other than a boatload of porn.

C-. Must try harder.

Quick Summary:

Hookup potential: 3/5    Features: 5/5    Design: 2/5    Content: 4/5

• Interface is cluttered and ugly.
  
• Does have a lot of active members, even if they’re not all going to be the sex partner of your dreams.
• There’s a lot to do and see, if you can get past the initial christmas tree effect.
• Expect to encounter fake profiles and persistent (though ignorable) upsell advertising.

The Full Story:

Welcome to the first in a series of Casual Encounters Blog Paid Adult Dating site reviews.

You’ve probably already seen any number of advertisements online for paid “adult dating” websites; you’ll probably notice some on here, actually. Haven’t you ever thought it’d be great if someone else would pay the money, join them for you, check the site out, and come back with an honest, detailed appraisal of the service? So you could make your own mind up about whether the expense could be justified?

I thought so, too.

And after all, I figured, who better to review a paid dating site than someone who already has a hand in running free ones? Someone already in the business, who already has a set of baseline assumptions about the industry and what kinds of services you should be able to expect? NO ONE BETTER, THAT’S WHO. PICK JANAK. GO ON, PICK HIM. HE WANTS TO DO IT. LOOK AT HIM JUMPING UP AND DOWN. HE’S SO EXCITED. THIS IS HIS BIG BREAK.

Anyway. Having now convinced myself of the awesomeness of the idea by dint of theatrical emotional hysterics accompanied by capslock abuse, let’s get into the review.

First, some disclosure. Yes, our company does promote Adult Friend Finder on this website. However my commitment to you is that I won’t let myself be unduly swayed by this relationship; I’d urge you to read through this review and let me know in the comments if you think I’m going too easy on them. Honestly, I’m more worried about overcorrecting for bias and basically severing the hand which (indirectly?) feeds me.

The only reason I’m reviewing AFF first is that I get a discount on their membership fee. Rest assured, when we get to the other reviews in this series you’ll see the same lack of fear and favor.

So. Having set up the account, I entered a few details  and logged in. This procedure was all pretty straightforward. However, once I logged in I was confronted by this.

My opinion? Looks like a fucking Christmas tree. What the hell are they thinking? I mean it’s obvious that there are a lot of features, but there’s a ton of stupid distracting crap on the page too, and they’re still trying to upsell me on their “VIP” program and to their other sites (ALT.com, Bondage.com, OutPersonals.com, Hotbox.com, etc, etc.)

Anyway, rocking on. I uploaded an appropriately studly picture of myself and clicked on one of the “Live Model Chat” links down the bottom. Why not, right? Basically (and unsurprisingly) what this amounts to is a few minutes typing at a fully-clothed model (along with a dozen other guys) while being spammed with ads to start paying her for a “private one-on-one chat”, which can be cam-to-cam. Presumably in this chat she’ll take her clothes off and stick stuff in herself for your amusement – I didn’t feel like paying $4.50 a minute to find out. You can also pay $3.50/minute to watch someone else’s private chat with her (uh, not really still “private” then, is it?) which I guess at least means you get to see her naked and what have you. But without having her screaming your name when she comes (or you know, pretends to.)

Well “Live Model Chat” is a bust. I decide to try the “Live Webcams” and “Hottest Member Videos” links.

I have to say, they were more like it. Turns out there’s no shortage of average-looking chicks who are quite happy to have you watch them surf naked or check out their home-made masturbation videos. And there are thousands of videos, with full ability to search for them by age range, what’s going on in the video, etc. Certainly the most impressive feature so far.

Next I checked out the chat rooms. I found one for people in my local area, seemed to be about 20 people in there. The first thing I noticed was that they all seemed to know each other quite well; from the references people were making there had obviously been a lot of real-life hooking up in this little group (which I can only assume to be typical).  The second thing I noticed after glancing at the bar on my left was the average age of the room was early 40s.

After making with some chitchat (revolving almost entirely around variations of OH LA LA), I moved on to have a look at the blogs. It looks like AFF allow members to create their own blogs on the site, which then are rated by users. Unsurprisingly, the top blogs are those written by women who enjoy uploading naked pictures of themselves. Don’t get your hopes up too high, though. Most of the women are 40+ and borderline attractive at best. Sort of seems to be a theme developing, doesn’t there?

At this point I sort of felt like I’d seen enough to break it down for you all. So here it is:

The site is HUGE. I mean really, REALLY big. Unfortunately the interface to this wonderland of perversion is hideous and poorly put-together, but I guess if you persist you’ll get comfortable with it. The couple of days trolling around that I spent there wasn’t enough time for me, but you know. I’m a bit slow and stuff.

Despite some implicit assertions to the contrary, AFF is not full of attractive, nubile 20-somethings hungry for action. Think more late-30s-or-older-averagely-attractive-and-possibly-with-kids-or-weight-issues.

Will you get laid through the site? Yeah, probably–but just be aware you’re likely to be looking at post-prime puss, and it might take a little work. The chicks who are giving it up are likely to have an inflated sense of self-worth too, on account of all the male attention they’re used to getting. Men pursuing them are also likely to experience a lot of competition from those selfsame snatchhounds.

Expect AFF to continue with the attempts to upsell even once you’ve bought a membership. Upsells, for example, for paid model cams, paid porn film downloads, a higher level of membership than you have, etc. The ads aren’t misleading and you won’t be tricked into clicking stuff, but you will see them on your screen plenty.

On balance? I’ll give them a soft A-.  I can’t complain about the size of their database (nearly 32 million people as of when I’m writing this), or with the fact that there ARE a boatload of people on there at any one time, looking for casual sex, or with the huge amount of what-amounts-to-amateur-porn available, but the design of the site is ass, and true site hotties are in short supply.

Stay tuned for our next adult dating site review, we’re thinking of either taking a look at Fling.com or uLust.com.