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Meetic is a dating site that promises to be a casual place where you can chat and date internationally.
A quick look of the site is promising, the layout and design is clean and has a modern social media feel to it that easily recognizable. Once you start exploring, a different story begins to emerge. If you choose to do a quick Internet search on Meetic.com, you will quickly find out that there is a raft of complaints against the site. For something that looks so promising, it certainly does not deliver on much.
First Impressions
When you first land on Meetic the site looks promising. It also looks like it is designed by a hip, modern and savvy company. The design is clean, lots of white space and easily recognizable navigation that you would find on just about any other site. Signing up is free and easy too, just fill out your basic information, submit an email and confirm the account and you can begin building your profile. Before you do that, you might want to start taking a look around at the profiles that are already posted. This is when the issues start.
Meetic advertises itself as a casual way to meet people to chat with and date that are international. The only real country represented on the site, according to Alexa, is Italy. A quick browse through the profiles makes you wonder who exactly you are supposed to be meeting. The average viewer with basic intelligence is going to recognize that a lot of the profile pictures are stock photographs. The ones from real people either have profiles that don’t make sense, or profiles that haven’t been visited in a long time.
A quick check of the Alexa Rank of this site makes it even more confusing at first – it has a respectable rank of 13,090 and has even grown globally by 340 places in the past year. In Italy, the rank is at 1,486. A quick check of the traffic analysis shows a surprisingly steady stream of traffic and therein lies the clue. It is too steady. If you scroll down the Alexa report you will see that for all of that traffic, hardly anyone is spending significant time on the site.
Features
You can’t really browse anything before you join the site. You can click on a few profiles that are less than promising, and you can look at some of the groups too. Once you look at the groups, you start to get an idea of what is going on. The interests section is little more than a bucket list of the standard offerings. Each profile is ranked by “popularity,” but you can buy coins to increase your ranking. Searching and matching is minimal at best unless you pay for a membership. If you actually want to see someone’s full profile you have to be a member as well.
Once you do get a chance to see someone’s profile – if you find a real person – they are barely literate. There are also a lot of comments out on the web from users that detail the difficulties they have in getting any kind of technical support from the site. It is telling that there are few comments from anyone in the past few months. For all intents and purposes, this is an Adwords site that is hoping to rope in people brought to it by mistake and then cash in on subscription costs..
Price and membership
If you decide that you really do want to try this site there are a lot of options. Membership really isn’t free, just the registration is. If you want to purchase any gifts or see more information about people, then you have to upgrade to a paid account that starts around $19.95 a month. Note that the monthly price doesn’t include any coins to increase your popularity. There are no promo codes and the cancellation options are obscure. You have to look at the terms and conditions to get the phone number to call 30 days in advance of your next billing cycle. The problem is finding the terms and conditions to get the number.
Conclusion
Alexa gives this site a high ranking for a simple reason – the name. The name “Meetic” is a beautiful misspelling of “meeting” which means it is going to inherit a ton of traffic. There is little that the site has to offer, because it isn’t interested in offering anything. Meetic is interested in getting you to sign up and pay.
