Backpage Personals Alternatives: Where the Dating Side Went

People who search for a Backpage alternative usually mean one of two things, and it matters a lot which one. Backpage had an adult section, and that section is why the government took the site down. It also had a regular dating and personals section, women seeking men, men seeking women, the usual columns, used by ordinary people who mostly tried not to think about what was happening one click over. I used the dating side on and off for years after Craigslist closed its adult services. This is about that side: what Backpage personals actually were, what happened to Backpage, why most of the sites that claim to replace it are a mess, and where I'd look instead.

What Backpage looked like, for anyone who missed it

Backpage launched in 2004. It came out of the alt-weekly newspaper world, the free papers you'd grab from a red box outside a bar, run by the same people behind a chain of those papers, Michael Lacey and James Larkin. The idea was to take the classifieds from the back pages of their papers and put them online. Hence the name. Not subtle.

It looked like somebody had photocopied Craigslist and then spilled a little color on it. A list of cities, then a page of categories. Buy, sell, trade. Automotive. Rentals. Jobs. Services. Community. And then the two sections everybody actually came for: an adult section and a dating section. Under dating you had the columns any Craigslist user would recognize. Women seeking men, men seeking women, men seeking men, women seeking women, couples, and a missed connections board that almost nobody used.

Ads were plain. A title, a city, sometimes a photo, a block of text. A lot of all caps. A lot of exclamation points. Posting in the adult section cost money, which matters for the rest of the story. Posting in the dating section was cheap or free depending on the year and the city, and I honestly don't remember exactly when that changed.

How Backpage became the place everyone went

For most of the 2000s, Backpage was the also-ran. Craigslist was the default for everything, including the adult stuff, which lived in a section Craigslist called erotic services and later adult services.

In September 2010, under heavy pressure from state attorneys general, Craigslist shut down its adult services section in the US. That traffic didn't vanish. It went to Backpage, nearly overnight. Within a short while Backpage was the dominant site in the country for adult ads, and the adult section became the core of its business.

I wasn't paying close attention to that side. I was a divorced guy in my early thirties who'd gotten used to Craigslist w4m and wanted to see if Backpage's women seeking men section was any better. Short answer: it was busier for a while, and worse in a way that took me a few months to understand.

Backpage women seeking men, what it was really like

The Backpage women seeking men column had a problem from day one, which was that it sat right next to a much bigger, much better-funded adult section. The ads bled over. People who didn't want to pay for an adult listing, or who'd been bumped from it, posted in dating instead. A lot of what looked like a regular w4m post was a paid arrangement with the price written in code. "Roses" meant dollars. "Donations" meant what you think. You learned the vocabulary fast or you wasted a lot of evenings.

Mixed in with those were spammers, guys posting as women to collect numbers, and the early versions of scams that are still running today. Then, every so often, a real ad from a real woman who just wanted to meet someone. Usually short. Usually a little nervous-sounding. Something like:

"Recently single, 38, not looking for anything serious, drinks first - w4m"

Those were the good ones and they got buried. A real post like that would sit on the page for maybe an hour before twenty reposts from the same three sellers pushed it to page two. The women who posted those usually got flooded with garbage replies and deleted the ad within a day. A couple of them told me as much when I did get to talk to them.

I met two women through Backpage dating in about four years. One was great, we saw each other for most of a summer. The other was fine. I answered, conservatively, a few hundred ads to get there. I'm not proud of that ratio. I'm just telling you what it was.

What happened to Backpage

In January 2017 the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report on Backpage. The headline finding was that the site had been editing adult ads, stripping out words that would have made it obvious what was being sold, rather than rejecting the ads. That was a big deal, because it went to the heart of the site's defense that it was just a neutral platform hosting whatever users posted. The same month, Backpage shut down its US adult section and replaced it with a banner saying it had been censored. The traffic and the ads mostly slid over into the dating section, which made that part of the site even less usable than before.

On April 6, 2018, federal authorities seized the entire site. Not just the adult part. The whole domain, every city, every category, replaced with a seizure notice. CEO Carl Ferrer pleaded guilty within days. The founders were charged too, and their federal case dragged on for years after that. I'm not going to pretend I followed every turn of it, and I'd rather not state the details wrong.

The timing is what people get confused about. The Senate had passed FOSTA-SESTA 97 to 2 on March 21, 2018. Craigslist pulled its US personals the next day, March 22. Backpage was seized April 6. The bill was signed into law April 11. So the Backpage seizure happened before FOSTA was even law, and it was based on an investigation that had been going on for a long time. A lot of articles online blur these together as if FOSTA shut down Backpage. It didn't, not directly. FOSTA is what killed Craigslist personals. Backpage was a criminal case.

One more fact I find interesting. In June 2021 the Government Accountability Office put out a report on how FOSTA had been used, and found that the new federal criminal charge the law created had been used exactly once. For a law that reshaped what you can find online, that's a strange number. Draw your own conclusions. I go into more of the fallout in what happened to Craigslist personals.

The week everything went dark

I remember that spring pretty clearly. Within about two weeks the two biggest places to find a w4m ad in the US were just gone. Craigslist personals one day, Backpage a couple of weeks later. Guys I knew were genuinely rattled. Not because they were doing anything shady, most of them were just regular single guys who'd used Craigslist w4m since college, but because nobody had any idea where to go next.

And the internet did what it always does. Within weeks there were dozens of sites trying to catch the traffic. Some looked like Backpage. Some looked like Craigslist. Some looked like both. A lot of them used the word "backpage" right in their name or page title, because people were searching for it.

Sites like Backpage personals, and why I'm wary of most of them

I'm going to talk about the clones generally rather than naming them, partly because they come and go so fast that any list would be out of date by the time you read it, and partly because quality varies a lot even within the same site from one city to the next.

Most sites like Backpage personals share a few traits. They copy the old layout closely, sometimes down to the colors. They've got a city list, a category page, and a dating section with women seeking men at the top. Posting is free or cheap. And there's very little standing between anyone with an email address and a live ad.

That last part is the whole problem. When posting costs nothing and nobody checks who's posting, the people with the most reason to post a lot will post a lot. That's sellers, scammers, and bots, in roughly that order. A real woman posting once on a Tuesday night is outnumbered before she hits submit.

Some of the clones are better run than others. A few actually moderate, and in some cities they're active enough that you'll find a genuine post now and then. But every one I've used for any length of time has had the same basic texture as late-era Backpage dating: mostly noise, an occasional signal, and a lot of effort spent telling them apart.

I wrote up the broader field of replacements in my Craigslist personals alternatives comparison, and the general classifieds ones get their own treatment, like this Locanto personals review where I went through listings city by city. Locanto isn't a Backpage clone exactly, it's a general classifieds site, but it runs into a lot of the same problems.

The scams that came out of the Backpage era

Some of these started on Backpage and just moved house when it closed. Worth knowing them by sight.

The verification fee. You answer an ad, she replies fast and friendly, and then says she needs you to "verify" you're not a cop or not dangerous by signing up at some site or sending a gift card. Real women don't ask strangers for money to prove they're safe. Ever. This is the single most common one I've seen.

The angry boyfriend or fake cop. You trade a few messages, maybe a photo, and then a different person texts you claiming to be her pimp, her dad, or a police officer, saying she's underage or that you're in trouble, and you can make it go away for a fee. It's extortion and it's fake. Don't pay, don't keep talking, block the number. If you're truly worried, talk to a lawyer, not the guy texting you.

The number harvester. An ad that exists only to collect phone numbers, which then get sold or spammed. Usually it's a super generic post that replies to everybody within seconds with the exact same message.

The off-site redirect. She wants to move to a specific webcam site or "her page," always with a link. That's an affiliate marketer pretending to be a woman, and she gets paid when you sign up.

I've got a longer breakdown of the tells in spotting fake personals profiles. The short version is that anything involving money, a link, or urgency before you've met is almost certainly not a real woman who wants to meet you.

What I'd actually look for in a Backpage alternative

It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted, because for years I kept trying to find the same thing again. A big free board, lots of posts, Craigslist energy. That's not coming back, and honestly, the version of it that existed by 2017 wasn't that great anyway.

What I care about now is pretty short. I want to know the woman is real. I want to know she's actually in my area, not a stock photo with a city name typed on top. And I want it to be clear she's the one looking, that she put up the post herself because she wants to meet someone, not because someone's running a script.

Volume matters way less than I used to think. Ten real listings in your state beat two thousand junk ones, because you'll actually read the ten. I spent years scrolling through junk and the scrolling itself made me worse at this. You get cynical. You stop reading carefully. You start sending the same copy-paste opener to everyone, which is exactly what the bots do, and then you wonder why real women don't answer.

Where I ended up

These days I use W4M Maps, and since I've been critical of everything else here, I should be specific about why and about what it isn't.

It's a w4m directory. Women list themselves, and each one is verified with an ID check plus a live video call before her listing goes up. Men browse by state, then by city. That's the core of it. It isn't a free-for-all classifieds board where anyone can post anything, and it doesn't have an adult services section or anything resembling one. It's the dating side of Backpage, minus the stuff that made the dating side of Backpage hard to use.

The verification is the part that matters most to me. The live video call is something a bot can't fake, and a guy pretending to be a woman can't either. Scams that ran wild on the old boards depend on nobody checking who's on the other end.

Coverage depends on where you live, like anything. Big states like Florida and Texas have more going on than smaller ones, simply because more people live there. I spend a fair amount of time in Nevada for work and it's been decent. If you're in a rural part of somewhere like Montana, set your expectations accordingly and look at the nearest bigger city too. That was true on Backpage and it's true everywhere.

If you want to start looking, you can find women seeking men near you with a bit of guidance on how to read listings, or just go straight to the map and browse women seeking men by state.

Messaging after years of Backpage habits

This is the bit I wish someone had told me earlier. Years on Backpage and the clones trained me into bad habits, and I see the same habits in a lot of guys my age.

On the old boards, you answered fast and short because the post would be buried in an hour and she'd get a hundred replies. "Hey, saw your ad, interested, here's my number." That's what I sent for years. It worked about as well as you'd guess.

With a real, verified woman, that kind of message is the fastest way to get skipped. She's got time to read. She'll pick the guy who actually read her listing and said something about it. Mention something specific from what she wrote. Say a bit about yourself, where you are, what you're looking for. Keep it friendly and not explicit. Then wait. My longer advice is in how to message women online, and if you're over forty and coming back to this after a long break, casual dating for men over 40 was written with guys like me in mind.

And when it comes time to meet, do the boring sensible things. Public place first. Drive yourself. Let a friend know where you'll be. None of that is paranoid, it's just how grown-ups meet strangers from the internet. The basics are in staying safe meeting women online.

A few things people still get wrong about Backpage

"Backpage is coming back." I've seen this rumor every year since 2018. The original domain was seized by the government. Whatever is at a backpage-sounding address now is someone else using the name.

"Backpage was shut down by FOSTA." Covered above, but it comes up so much it bears repeating. The seizure came before the law was signed and grew out of a long federal investigation.

"The dating section was just a front." Not entirely. There were real people in there, and I met a couple of them. It was just swamped, especially in the last year after the adult section closed and everything flowed into dating.

"Any site with backpage in the name is the same thing." No. Some are fine, some are terrible, some are just ad farms. The name tells you nothing about who runs it or what's on it.

And the one I'd most like people to drop: that you need a giant free board to meet anyone. I believed that for a long time. The old Backpage personals felt busy, and busy felt like opportunity. Most of it was noise. If you're curious how the old Craigslist missed connections board fits into all this, it's a different kind of loss, a sweeter one, and I wrote about it separately because it deserved its own piece.