Visit Alt.com

Initial review: 5/6/2011

Alt.com seems to attract a good number of visitors to its pages. Now as you can see by some of our surfers' comments, there's some positive and some negative feedback. First, I'd say most online dating sites have issues when it comes to whether all profiles are genuine. I also think that as far as the alternative side of things, I'm sure that someone who is merely curious about fetish sex and BDSM probably feels that a site like this one is a place merely to dabble in fantasy.

Now my advice would be similar to what some of readers who felt less misled by Alt.com have said. You can't have the ideal kinky relationship blossom like a perfect rose without pulling some weeds and risking the possibility of getting pricked by a thorn. However with chat rooms, blogs, an online magazine with user-submitted articles and groups you can join to help you get to know people better.

You can also check out your local area for how many activity members there are by creating a free profile and doing searches by zip code in the U.S. or by a dropdown of select cities if you live in the U.K. Now for other countries, like Canada for example, you can't search by city until you upgrade to have access to advanced searches.

The other issue is that you can't see many full profiles if you're a free member. Some premium subscribers pay extra allowing all members to view their complete details (excluding free views of any additional pics). Alternatively, if you own profile proves very popular, you may earn the ability temporarily to view additional profiles beyond the small standard limit.

For me though, if I was joining only to feed my voyeuristic tendencies then the explicit live member cams would be the real pull. On my visit, there were definitely more men and crossdressers than there were women online, but it was the middle of the day. I also saw some male with female couples.

Definitely from a dating standpoint, I think that you're going to see the most success if you pay for your membership. I'm not sure that I'd bother springing for the extra fee that allows all members to contact you, because these special profiles aren't marked in any way to let people know that anyone can contact you.

I’d probably just go with the cheaper of the two premium memberships, because it allows whomever you contact to reply back regardless of whether they've paid or not (the number of replies is limited on a daily basis for free members). In the end, Alt.com is worth checking out for free, especially for the naughty amateur hotties on cam.