
Okcupid Acquisition was 50 Million + 40 Million earn out.  - peter123
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/okcupid-acquistion-was-50-million-40-million-earn-out/
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staunch
I think OkCupid has been doing to POF what Facebook did to MySpace. Mediocre
products that serve a real need will survive for a while, but long-term people
gravitate towards quality.

That may all end now that they've been acquired by a mega corp though.

Look at this trend:
[http://trends.google.com/trends?q=okcupid%2C+plentyoffish...](http://trends.google.com/trends?q=okcupid%2C+plentyoffish&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0)

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nostromo
I also wonder if there are just limited lifespans for these types of sites.
Dating, community (slashdot->kuro5hin->digg->reddit->hn), social networks
(friendster->myspace->fb), etc. These sites seem to move in waves like fashion
or gentrification.

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staunch
Friendster dropped the ball technically, at one point they had 10 minute page
load times.

Kuro5hin was never as popular as Slashdot.

Slashdot didn't evolve their submission model and was left in the dust.

Digg screwed up their product and pissed off their community.

MySpace sacrificed user experience for in the name of short term profit from
pageviews/ads.

HN hasn't replaced Reddit except for a tiny minority of startup/hacker people
(many of whom continue to use Reddit).

I think it only _appears_ that users are fad driven, when in reality they're
just smart enough to move on to better options.

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esrauch
Even if it wasn't fad driven, there seems to be a significant trend of the
number one site getting eclipsed by new up and comers. Whether that trend is
coming to a halt with Facebook or not is debatable (they seem to be staying on
the leading edge and more than willing to adapt and take in the ideas any
competitors would push, along with the most extreme network effect possible).

On the other hand, I doubt that reddit isn't going to suffer the same fate
that slashdot and digg did when something better comes along, though I doubt
they are going to make as drastic a mistake as digg did.

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tansey
Seems naive to think they bought OKCupid just for the revenue. The OKCupid
guys were awesome at data mining, visualization, and viral marketing. Their
ability to enhance the value of Match.com's existing client base is huge.

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rriepe
There's a way to cover your competitors and this isn't it.

This just comes off as juvenile. "They didn't buy us even though we make more
money!"

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wisty
Well, PoF just isn't going to get bought. OKC has a special algorithm. PoF is
a cheap free copy of dating website ("select users with X miles of Y where
gender = Z").

Which one would you want to acquire?

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ajays
A dating site is more than just an algorithm; its main asset are the users.
Match, PoF, etc. have no fancy algorithm, but they are still among the top
because of their users. It's the "network effect".

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akkartik
It's curious. Lots of people I know use okcupid; nobody I know uses PoF. The
one time I tried joining several years ago, my account was repeatedly deleted.
PoF has a target audience, but I have no idea what or where it is. Does
anybody?

~~~
adriano_f
I was not aware that nobody uses PoF, seems pretty popular to me. I am in
Canada (Montreal) though, and this is the first time I've heard that Canada is
a PoF niche, so I guess that explains it.

For those who say PoF is an inferior product: with dating sites, it all boils
down to 1) number of local users, 2) easy results filtering, 3) easy
communication. For me PoF had all three.

I met my wife on PoF, by the way, so: Thanks!

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ajays
OKCupid is already going downhill post acquisition. Friends that are on
OKCupid (exes) who were ~70% match earlier, are now ~90% match. It's a shame
that OKC tweaked their algorithm just to make a few bucks. Based on their
general demeanor, I had assumed they would be above such shenanigans; but it
turns out to have been a flawed assumption.

