

HOTorNOT Reverses Course On "Reinventing" -- Back to Paid Accounts - staunch
http://mashable.com/2007/09/18/hot-or-not-3/


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staunch
The Full Email

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Dear loyal HOTorNOT star members,

Based on feedback we got from many of you, we have decided to start requiring
star memberships on HOTorNOT again. While many of you saw how going free would
be good, you also warned us that this would probably lead to more spammers and
fake profiles.

You were right, this is exactly what happened. The spammers got aggressive to
the point where they were screwing up the system, even causing the "someone
wants to meet you" emails to not be sent for periods as long as 5 days.

We don't really regret trying to make the site free so everybody can use it,
but it's clear that most of our users believe an inexpensive paid site works
better than a free site filled with spammers.

If you left the site after we went free, we hope you'll come back and join
again. If you are still here, we hope turning subscriptions back on has a
noticable impact for you, helping you meet more people without having your
time wasted by the spammers.

thanks, and have fun!

Your friends, Jim and James :)

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amitm
James Hong's Reply to Valleywag's post of this story

Tim, Instead of just making assumptions about what I was thinking, you could
have just asked. We don't keep anything we do at HOTorNOT a secret, in fact
we're tragically transparent. Were the assumptions I made 3 months ago wrong?
I'm not sure, they might be.. but even if they were wrong, I would have no
problem admitting it. Sometimes we are right from the get go.. sometimes we
are wrong and have to readjust.

The truth is that I still don't think an advertising model was the wrong thing
to pursue. The fact that revenue was already 1/3 of what subscription revenues
used to be was a promising sign, because that was all generated using
Adsense... selling direct would likely have landed us making more than before.
Of course, it would have required a lot of hardwork, but I think it would
ultimately have worked out.

No, this decision was not based on business models, it was based on us
realizing that worrying about your user experience is more important than how
you monetize. If we lost all our users because of the spammers, it wouldn't
really matter which business model we chose to apply, right?

As for other free sites being able to deal with the spammer problem while we
were not, I really can't say why. Maybe they're smarter than us, or in most
cases, still too small to attract the attention of spammers... or maybe they
do have a problem but it's just not apparent because they don't talk about it?

I don't know. I don't have insight into their systems, and it is always a
presumptuous and unintelligent thing to do to make conclusions about other
people's businesses without having any data. So was I wrong 3 months ago? I
don't know yet. For all I know, I might be wrong NOW, switching back. What I
do know is that until we are confident that we can effectively fight the
spammers off without having to charge, we have to keep charging.

But lets be honest.. I'm not going to feel too bad about that, either. Even
when I was in the 9th grade flipping burgers at Burger King for $3 an hour, I
wouldn't have complained about paying $6 a month for a service that connected
me with lots of hotties.. and we got a lot of feedback from women that any guy
too cheap to pay $6 was probably not the kind of guy they wanted to date
anyway (our system only requires 1 of 2 people to be a paid member for them to
communicate.. so even under a subscription model, our site remains effectively
free for most women) james

~~~
pg
What Valleywag has discovered is that they don't have to bother getting things
right in order to generate a lot of page views. They're like a troll in that
respect.

I wonder if they started out with this plan, or if they just discovered it by
being careless and noticing it didn't hurt their traffic.

~~~
paul
They certainly aren't the first "journalists" to use the trolling tactic.
Dvorak and Orlowski are two other examples that come to mind.

~~~
pg
Mm, yes, and Donna Bogatin. She was beating on us for a while, but she seems
to have stopped. What's distinctive about Valleywag is that it's a site and
not just an individual.

Maybe we should make up a name for them. Journotrolls?

~~~
brett
trollporters

~~~
pg
That's better. Trollporters it is.

~~~
greendestiny
It's really not. Trollporter - some big green dude who carries bags, or a
futuristic way for troll folk to travel instantly. I suggest Journatroll, it
rolls of the tongue a little better than Journotroll. As a plus its fairly
easy to work Journatrollism into a sentence where you would have said
Journalism.

~~~
pg
Hmm, maybe journatroll is better. A lot of these people aren't really
reporters, more editorial writers.

~~~
ivankirigin
reportroll

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kkim
Interesting. Sometimes you need charging as a design feature, not just as a
business model.

~~~
aston
That's not entirely true. Charging is an easy out for handling spam, but lots
of companies handle that sort of thing technically. There's one of two things
happening here:

1) Hot or Not doesn't have the technical chops to reign in the spam.

2) Hot or Not isn't comfortable with the free dating model anymore, but wants
to blame the switch back on something people might have sympathy for.

I actually would bet on the latter, but if it's the former (as they claim), I
might be more worried about their future.

~~~
Goladus
Is there any free dating site with the 'technical chops' to reign in spam? So
far as I can tell, none of them overcome spam directly via technology.

eHarmony - Subscription

Match.com - Subscription

Myspace - Gets spam; though it's less of an issue because it seems like
spammers haven't been able to figure out how to emulate a typical real
profile, and because many people use the site to connect with people they know
already. In other words it's not technology or effort from Myspace, it's that
the model is different.

Facebook - Pseudo-dating site, like myspace, plus it has additional
restrictions on creating an account.

Any other dating site I've seen has spam all over the place.

~~~
aston
OkCupid.com's pretty good about it. Maybe I'm biased.

Also, dating sites aren't the only sites susceptible to spam. Craigslist would
probably be a spammer's heaven if they didn't have such great community
filtering features.

~~~
Goladus
You're right, Craigslist is a good example. But even there there's enough
phishing going on that I'm not comfortable using the dating section. I've had
success finding apartments though.

The difference with dating sites, though, is that they only work when members
are active, aggressive, and open with their personal information. They work
best in a way that spammers will rush to exploit, at which point everyone gets
frustrated and stops using the service. This doesn't stop spammers, and pretty
soon the ratio of valid profiles to fake ones is ridiculously small.

~~~
sanj
More importantly, Craigslist uses pay to filter spam in other ways: real
estate and job listings.

In that case, it was "asked" for by the users.

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falsestprophet
Too bad they already hired a bunch of developers for the revolution and paid
them with a huge chunk of the company. When a leader raises an army, he had
better go to war.

