With a marketing budget that makes it one of the most visible sites for its target market, BlackPeopleMeet.com has a user base of over 200,000 active members. We’d like to share our experience on the site in this in-depth Black People Meet review.

— Pros and Cons of BlackPeopleMeet —

Pros

• Operated by a reputable company in the online dating industry
• Paid version priced affordably
• Easy and intuitive to use

Cons

• High turnover in active members
• Free version does not allow for communication between members
• The search and matching features are not as accurate as other sites

— Full BlackPeopleMeet.com Review —

BlackPeopleMeet.com is an online dating site that has been in existence since 2002. It caters predominately to an African-American client base. It markets itself as the “largest subscription dating site for black singles” in the U.S.

Owned by People Media, itself a subsidiary of Match.com, BlackPeopleMeet is, as of 2017, among the top 50 dating and personal websites in the U.S.

While there is no doubt that it is a well-established and sound company, we wanted to probe into its functionality and get an idea of what the actual user experience with BlackPeopleMeet is actually like. This is our BlackPeopleMeet.com review.

— Registration —

The registration process is identical to other dating sites that are part of the People Media Group. For those of you unfamiliar with that template, the homepage of BlackPeopleMeet is designed as a landing page. The design is minimalistic but very visual. It gives the visitor the option to begin the registration process by clicking on an orange “search now” button.

When you click on this button, you are sent to a page where you enter your personal information, such as name, chosen username, password, age, gender and some basic physical attributes — height, body type, etc. Once this basic information has been submitted, you will receive an email requiring you to click on the link attached to verify your registration. For our BlackPeopleMeet.com review, the whole process took less than ten minutes on average for each account, with the bulk of that time consisting of waiting for the verification email to arrive.

— First Impression —

When you log on to BlackPeopleMeet for the first time you will be greeted by your member homepage. Generic in its appearance, it will be very familiar to those who have used other online dating sites. For those new to online dating, no need to fear — the look, feel and navigation of the site will be intuitive and easy to use even for newbies. The fact that BlackPeopleMeet does not offer a very robust set of features also makes finding what you want to do on the site pretty straightforward.

— Features —

The features offered by BlackPeopleMeet are identical to those found on other People Media operated sites. You are able to send messages to other members via their internal messaging system; you can upload images, audio and video clips to your own profile; and you can engage in instant messaging conversations.

Additional features include being able to send “flirts,” these are digital signals that indicate to another member that you like them. Also, you can bookmark profiles that you are interested into your “favorites” list.

The search feature on BlackPeopleMeet is acceptable but not as robust as sites that use personality matching algorithms. The site relies on the data submitted by its members on their profiles to create a matching matrix. You can customize and fine tune your search for matching members to meet your specific set of profile criteria.

The “four question” feature is also present to help you vet potential matches. The way this feature works is by allowing you to permanently post four questions that other members may choose to answer when they want to send a message to your profile. You may choose from a list of prepared questions or write your own.

BlackPeopleMeet also allows its members to promote their profiles so that they get more visibility. The “promote me” feature works by allowing users to purchase tokens. These tokens cost $0.99 for a set of 25 tokens. Then, for 20 tokens, users can have BlackPeopleMeet highlight their profile for increased visibility when other users are scanning other members. It also places your profile higher in the listings. This privileged positioning lasts for 24 hours per 20 tokens used.

BlackPeopleMeet can be accessed via their website on any browser. There are also iPhone and Android mobile apps available for download in their respective stores. These apps emulate the same functionality as the website.

— BlackPeopleMeet Cost —

The free version of BlackPeopleMeet allows you to start a profile, conduct searches and send flirts. In order to use the other features of the site, such as those for communication with other members, a paid membership is required.

A monthly membership has a cost of $16.75 per month. The average monthly cost can be brought down to as low as $11.95 per month if you pay for a six-month subscription in advance.

One thing that we found annoying during our BlackPeopleMeet.com review, was that having a paid membership still required payment of additional fees to use some of the site’s premium features. The highlighted profile required a one-time payment of $4.95 to use the feature. It should be noted that if a user allows their subscription to lapse and renews it later, this “one-time” fee will be requested again in order to use the highlight service.  You may also spend “coins” to use extra features.

Another point of contention on our part is that auto-renewal is activated by default. Users have to manually disable the auto-renew feature by navigating to their “Account Status” page. Otherwise, their subscription will be automatically renewed and billed to the credit card used in the original registration.

— High Membership Turnover —

BlackPeopleMeet has over 1 million member profiles in its database, but of these, only 200,000 can be identified as being active. When you add to these figures the purported 1,000 new memberships that are added every day — that indicates that most members on BlackPeopleMeet remain active on the site for LESS than a year.

This could be taken one of two ways. Either the site is so successful that it makes a lot of matches; or that the user experience is disappointing causing members to leave the site for good.