

How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009) - danso
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html

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kposehn
I met Frind several years ago at a party he put on at Affiliate Summit with
some others. We ended up chatting for a bit and his perspective on things was
quite fascinating.

This was also just after he'd established the PoF ads platform and had hired
several people to work on it. I've not looked at PoF since 2013 and have been
curious how it has held up vs. apps like Tinder.

~~~
SN76477
I have dabbled in their self serve platform some, it is just so slow. But I
dig the company and their approach.

Does tinder have much marketshare? I should do my research :(

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JohnTHaller
Tinder has around 40m profiles. PoF has around 90m. Tinder interaction is much
more superficial than PoF, of course, due to the nature of each platform and
the amount of user information captured by each. Tinder has far more "swipes"
(how they measure activity) than PoF has page views (how all websites measure
activity) - to the point that Tinder has about a billion swipes per day and
PoF has around 2 billion page views per month - also by their nature different
measurements.

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puranjay
Isn't Tinder just far better poised to capture future dating traffic seeing
its dominance on mobile? I can't see a long-term future for web based dating
platforms. PoF's mobile audience is tiny compared to Tinder

~~~
holon
Tried Tinder as an experiment. Hated it. I would prefer to base my approach to
online dating on personality rather than a single profile picture. The entire
Tinder experience is incredibly superficial and facilitates hookups rather
than actually meeting interesting people.

I see web-based dating platforms as something that will always have a
userbase.

~~~
jordsmi
Tinder is more for hooking up than dating, which is the big difference between
the two.

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timdorr
It's no longer just a one man shop, though:
[http://www.pof.com/careers/default.aspx](http://www.pof.com/careers/default.aspx)

LinkedIn tracks 74 employees currently.

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heldtogether
I still cite this article when discussing A/B testing with clients. They often
want to bypass the testing process because "it's an obvious change".

"There's no point in making trivial adjustments, ... on a site this big and
this complex, it is impossible to predict how even the smallest changes might
affect the bottom line. Fixing the wonky images, for instance, might actually
hurt Plenty of Fish. Right now, users are compelled to click on people's
profiles in order to get to the next screen and view proper headshots."

This isn't to say that everything must be A/B tested, but it's very easy to
overlook the fact you can negatively affect the site by making an apparently
positive change.

~~~
sytelus
This guy is essentially saying that providing better customer experience would
reduce number of clicks and his pageviews and thus his income. I think almost
nothing should prevent providing better customer experience. This is also a
problem with A/B testing. If your test is optimizing page views or ad revenue
as opposed to customer satisfaction, you are probably doing it wrong. Better
matrix might be increase in number of unique users or return rate or user
churn rate or session abandonments rate etc.

~~~
darkmighty
You're being too dogmatic about "user experience". If users find more matches
on the site, I'd say their experience improved.

Design principles such as 'the user shouldn't find anything difficult',
'things should be as visually pleasing as possible', etc. can be inconsistent
sometimes. A better principle is just looking at whether the user goals are
being achieved as effectively as possible.

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curiously
I remember I was blowing money on the self serve ads, felt like a huge scam,
week after week. still have some money left there but quit altogether because
it was so hard to make money off CPM ads, and especially you didn't know if
you were bidding the right amount.

POF was attractive because it was free but now they started to monetize more
and the quality overall has gone down.

