Personal Ads Are Back — And Everyone Is Noticing

Something happened in late 2024 that nobody in the dating industry was expecting. A small alternative weekly newspaper in Burlington, Vermont — one that most Americans had never heard of — became the subject of a front-page feature in the New York Times. The story was about its personals section. Not its journalism, not its politics coverage, not some investigative scoop. But its lonely hearts ads.

The Times piece led to a BBC inquiry. Then NBC's Today show sent a film crew to Burlington in January 2026. Then more outlets picked it up. The coverage kept coming because readers kept sharing it, because the story hit something that a lot of people had quietly been feeling for a while. That there's something wrong with how we currently go about finding each other, and that something older — something we thought we'd moved past — might actually have had something to teach us.

This is not a nostalgia piece. It's a look at why personal ads are genuinely back, who is bringing them back, and why it makes complete sense that they are. And why AseeksB might be for you.

The paper that never stopped

Seven Days is a free alternative weekly out of Burlington, Vermont. It has run personal ads since 1995, the year it was founded. While dozens of alt-weeklies across the country killed their personals sections in the early 2000s as dating sites took over, Seven Days kept theirs going. It never made a big announcement about it. It just kept like Vermont maple syrup running the ads.

The Times piece described how Jeff Baron, the paper's personals editor, vets each submission by hand, one at a time, from a standing desk in a Burlington warehouse (before they were cool). The first thing he checks? Whether the applicant actually lives in Vermont. People from Philadelphia are gently turned away (who can blame him? I kid, I kid). The Seattle Times picked up the story, and soon it was everywhere.

Brian and Brandi Littlefield met through the Seven Days personals in 2010. They got married a year later. They told NBC they probably would never have met any other way. Baron's editorial advice for ads that work: "The ones that get the most responses are ones where people say something really genuine and kind."

New York Magazine got there first

While Vermont was getting the mainstream press attention, New York Magazine's The Cut had quietly been running its own personal ads section for some time — a weekly newsletter called Personals, curated by senior editor Amy Rose Spiegel. Every morning, she opens her inbox to what she describes as "people's romantic hopes washing all over" her.

The Cut's personals are semi-anonymous. People write about who they are and what they're looking for in their own words. There are no profile photos driving the first impression. You read what someone wrote before you decide whether you're interested. It's the same logic that made newspaper personals work for a hundred years, updated for a publication that reaches millions of readers.

The telephone poles of San Francisco

Not everyone is going through a newsletter or a newspaper. In San Francisco in May 2024, something stranger started happening. People began posting physical flyers on telephone poles — not for lost cats or garage sales, but for their single friends.

The San Francisco Standard covered the trend under the headline: "The new dating app in SF is a singles ad flyer on a telephone pole." One poster campaign for a man named Matt Wheeler — described by his friends as single, employed, and a good listener — went viral on Instagram and culminated in a "50 First Dates"-themed party at Fort Mason, with a crowd of interested women showing up to meet him in person.

The flyers were handmade. They had tear-off tabs with phone numbers. They were, in every technical sense, the same format as a 1987 grocery store bulletin board ad. And they worked, at least as far as generating genuine human interest and conversation — which is more than most app matches manage.

Cincinnati brought it back for Valentine's Day

Across the country, local newspapers have been running their own experiments. CityBeat, Cincinnati's alternative weekly, brought back a personals section for Valentine's Day 2025, inviting readers to submit their own ads and missed connections. The paper's co-founder reflected on what made the original personals section work: "I think there was some authenticity to what it is that we did. I think people were very genuinely interested in using the platform for its intended purpose."

The Provincetown Independent, a Cape Cod weekly, published an editorial in December 2024 musing about whether to start its own personals section after the Seven Days story broke. The editor went so far as to write their own sample ad — and then publish it in the paper. The response from readers was warm enough that the conversation is ongoing.

The numbers behind the mood

All of this cultural activity has a statistical backdrop. The appetite for something different is not just anecdotal.

A 27-year-old named Isaac Reuben, who now uses personals, explained to NBC why he quit the apps: "I got tired of feeling like my personal life, and like one of the most important things in my life, is being mined for profit by a corporation that doesn't love or care about me."

Fast Company reported that this exhaustion is behavioral, not just attitudinal — app deletion rates have climbed every year since the pandemic peak. The apps are still generating revenue, mostly through premium subscriptions, but the users who actually want to meet people are leaving.

A brief, non-sentimental history

It is worth knowing where personal ads came from, because the history is more interesting than the nostalgia suggests. They were not invented by lonely people in trench coats. They were invented by pragmatic people who had something specific to say and a limited number of words to say it in.

The first personal ads appeared in newspapers in the early 1700s. By the early 20th century they were mainstream enough to be unremarkable. In the 1960s and 70s, the alternative weekly press — starting with The Village Voice in New York — turned the personals section into a cultural institution. The back pages of alt-weeklies became the place where people said things they couldn't say anywhere else: what they actually wanted, stated plainly, without apology.

The internet did not kill personal ads in one blow. Craigslist Personals — which ran from 1995 until its forced closure in 2018 — was a direct descendant of the alt-weekly format: text-first, direct, free, and free of pretense. At its peak it was one of the most-visited parts of the internet. When it closed, the gap it left was enormous, and nothing that replaced it quite replicated what made it work.

What is actually driving the return

The coverage frames this as nostalgia. It is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is longing for a past you remember fondly. Most of the people turning to personal ads right now are in their 20s. They have no personal memory of the Village Voice back pages. They are not romanticizing something they experienced. They are making a rational choice about what kind of communication actually works.

What personal ads offer that apps do not:

• You read what someone wants before deciding whether to respond
• The text comes first — not the photo, not the algorithm's assessment of your attractiveness
• There is no mutual match requirement that filters out anyone who didn't notice your profile on a Tuesday
• You set the terms of what you're looking for, in your own language
• The people who respond have read what you wrote and decided it resonated

These are not small differences. They change the entire character of who reaches out and why. A response to a personal ad begins with more shared context than almost any swipe match can.

The timeline of coverage

What comes next

The question is not whether personal ads are making a comeback. They clearly are, and the mainstream press has noticed. The question is what form the comeback takes.

The Seven Days model works because it is tied to a specific geography — Vermont — and to a specific community that has used the paper for thirty years. That depth of trust is hard to replicate at scale. The Cut's model works because New York Magazine has a massive, demographically specific readership that can sustain a niche inside a newsletter. The telephone pole model works because it is genuinely local and genuinely human and the stakes of misrepresentation are high in a way that anonymous online ads are not.

What all of these have in common is the text-first format: you say who you are and what you want before anything else happens. The mechanism differs. The principle is the same one that made personal ads work in 1724, in 1974, and in 2024.

If you find yourself drawn to the idea of describing what you want in your own words rather than swiping through photos — you are, it turns out, in very good company. The New York Times noticed. NBC noticed. New York Magazine noticed. Newspapers from Vermont to Cincinnati to the tip of Cape Cod noticed.

The format is not retro. It is just honest. And it turns out there is a significant appetite for that.

AseeksB: text-first personal ads, free on iOS and Android

Post what you’re looking for in your own words. Control who sees your ad and who can respond. All key features free.