Quick Summary:

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

• A great site if your idea of a date ends in you snatching that box of tissues beside your bed.
• The design is OK. Nothing fantastic, nothing out of the ordinary. Just OK.
• The dating component of this site seems to just mask what it’s really trying to sell – that is, the premium pay-per-minute online webcam chat.

The Full Story:

There is no fuss about Amateur Match, even when you’re not logged in as a member. You go there and you have more than a vague idea what you’ll find in the site. This definitely isn’t the place to go look for women or men who like long walks, engaging conversations, a romantic dinner, and maybe just for coffee. This site is about sex and how to get it – where, when, and, apparently, how much.

And no, this does not mean you need to pay to hook up with anyone on the site – that is, if you really do ever get to meet someone you’d like to hook up with. It just becomes very obvious after some time what the site is really about. On the Live Cam option of the site, there’s a list of premium cams, which cost a little bit of dough. And this is alright really, if that’s your thing. But then, the profiles of the women online are mixed with profiles of girls doing shows. It gets hard to figure out which of these women are real and would really want to find a sexmate online, and which ones are just looking for a guy who’d pay to watch them.

This is probably why they called this site Amateur Match. You don’t go looking for dates or sexual rendezvous here. You go here to look for amateur webcam sex playmates. And like all amateur webcams, this’ll end up costing you.

As for hooking up with a real person, I’ve set up an account and I have a couple of “buddies” in there. These women seem to be real and they have nice photos on their profile pages. Problem is that the only real way to “engage” with these women is by emailing them, even when you see the green “online” icon on. Email’s fine for starters but it can get very frustrating to see someone real, and someone you actually like online and not be able to talk to her. If the feeling’s mutual, you and your “match” need to chat (and whatever else) outside Amateur Match. So… what’s the point of doing Amateur Match when you can just go with Facebook, message someone there, and decide on something more?

Of course, there’s the “community” chat feature and it seems all right. If anyone annoys you, you can just block him or her and you’re all good.

As for the design, there’s nothing spectacular about it. No snazzy flash, no rollover galleries – nothing like that. What’s commendable though is your homepage when you log in. You go in there and everything’s neatly laid out for you – Your Stuff and the Community. Of course, this is pretty much it.

When you go to the inside pages, you’re left with the left column links. And, you may have everything in there, alright. There’s the Who’s Online, Mail, Search, Your Profile, and so on. But then, these just look like they’re lumped together, with no thought about organization, whatsoever. It would be better if the links that logically go together are placed together.

The profile tabs are nice though, very user friendly. Instead of getting a hodgepodge of photos and About Me text – like in a lot of social networking sites – you get tabs. There’s a tab for your basic profile information, with links to email, block users and more. There are tabs for Sexual Stuff, and a tab for buddies. Now, for me, this is pretty much all you need to know when looking for someone to play with.

One thing that really bugs me about the site is how much of its content belong to some other site. The live cam’s under WebCamClub. The videos are referral links to a bunch of other video sites. And the games are under another site, as well.

Now, is it just me or is this so-called dating site just a portal for all these other commercial sites? And yes, lucky you if you really end up finding someone here. You’re one in a million.