2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US. | Hacker News Reader

2008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.

plentyoffish.wordpress.com

This is absolute nonsense.

Alexa doesn't place POF anywhere near the top 100 US websites (they have it at 466, actually). Now, I'm not claiming that Alexa is the gold-standard for accuracy, but if you're truly a top-20 site, you're going to be so immense that nobody would confuse you for a top-500 site. It's like confusing an aircraft carrier for a tugboat.

For whatever it's worth, here's the Alexa 10-20:

10. AOL 11. Amazon.com 12. craiglist.org 13. Blogger.com 14. Go.com 15. CNN.com 16. ESPN.com 17. Photobucket 18. Microsoft.com 19. Comcast.net 20. Flickr.com

Tell me again how plentyoffish is larger than Flickr, Microsoft and CNN -- I have a bridge to sell you. It's nice.

Read the fine print -- it's top sites by pageviews, which is a very different (and less meaningful) metric than top sites by unique visitors.

That same Alexa data you quote has POF at 168 in the US and 466 worldwide, with 21+ average pageviews/visit (Compete has them closer to 30). According to that same data, Flickr has ~9 PVs/visit, and CNN has ~3.5.

It's not inconceivable that with a few differences in the data between Hitwise and Alexa, you could come up with POF in the top 20. It just shows you how meaningless pageviews are as a metric of success or engagement.

Nice catch...didn't see that. He's definitely stretching to make the claim, if he's using percent of US page-views as his metic.

POF's page-view count per user is so absurdly high that you really have to wonder what he's doing to get it there. The other major dating sites (which have roughly the same modality of search-and-view) all have page-views/user of around 10-13. It's awfully suspicious that he's managed to double that number....

His site is so simple that if every action takes you to a new page it almost feels seamless. Most other sites make sure the convenience of taking you where you want in one click is accounted for, but for a site running off of AdSense, more pageviews = more potential clicks, so you can argue he's stretching it for the sake of chart rankings; I argue it's to maximize potential revenues.

Isn't it safe to say that Pageviews is a pretty terrible measure of engagement (especially when comparing sites)? Pageviews can be a measure of how ajaxy your site is as much as it's a metric of engagement.

I've always been intrigued as to how plentyoffish has done so well. It's one person with a (in my opinion) suboptimal site that doesn't offer anything special. There are plenty of free dating sites, and yet this one seems to have disproportionate success.

Why? Anybody know?

Because it's free as in beer, and it's not intimidating or filled with Flash like some of the others (the "good enough" design derided by web design snobs).

But it's still a dating site, and even the best, most functional dating sites aren't very good. A friend of mine signed up at plentyoffish, he lives in an urban area and is reasonably attractive.

What he found was a lot of women who like to chat and email, but don't want (or can't) go out on actual dates.

Dating is a lot like teaching. Those who can, do. Those who can't habituate dating sites.

There is a certain socioeconomic scale to the people that populate certain sites and plentyoffish is not at the top of that scale.

Tell your friend to try OKCupid, Craigslist, or one of those sites that cost actual money. He can probably afford the $20/month. It's cheaper than hip-hop dance class.

But the hip hop class is more fun, and eventually you've gained a new skill. Also, this never happens on the internet:

"Tough west African refugee with poor english and a great smile seeks geeky physics student. Lets go for a bike ride, listen to metallica and teach each other new recipes."

Ouch. Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.

Teaching is a skill on its own, it's orthogonal. I've read, and believe through my own intuition/experience, that being a "true expert" in most things is often such an intuitive place to be that it cannot be translated mechanically in that person's mind into steps for teaching it.

It's arrived at after years and years of "doing" and growing past internal boundaries and goals.

One thing you can be a "true expert" at is teaching itself.

Teaching relies on two things, primarily, beyond domain knowledge: making connections, and empathy. A great teacher understands not just the topic, but how it relates to other topics. Furthermore, a great teacher also has the ability to probe the person being taught to discover which connections are missing. Finally, of course, the connections have to be communicated, but communication skills are the least important. (If you don't have domain knowledge, if you can't make connections, and you can't get inside the head of the "student," you can't teach. If you can do all of those things, but you struggle with communication, you can eventually get your point across if you are determined).

It's the ability to make connections that we mostly associate with "understanding."

I'm suspicious of "true experts" who can't explain themselves. I think what a lot of people witness are people with deep domain knowledge ("experts") who just don't bother to make the connections. In my view, making the connections is a large part of being an expert.

Here's something just out--I doubt it would interest the community at large, but I thought you might enjoy it.

http://www.quickanded.com/2008/12/gladwell-kane-theory-of-te...

Early SEO (when it meant a lot more than it does now) + the network effect. An incredible success, and as strong an outlier as ever exists.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-a...

He also spammed the hell out of craigslist, iirc. There was a period of about a year where you couldn't go into a craigslist dating room without seeing fake posts that linked to POF profiles.

Yeah. I think there's a pretty dark side to the rise of POF that Markus has been less than forthcoming about.

how the hell is that dark? he's at number 13 or even 130, it's still a huge success. he didn't rip anyone off here. most startups in the consumer space that have a big rise have some form of what purists would call a "dark side".

Then call me a purist. I don't think you're right that "most" startups have a dark side. I'd guess that most don't. I'd rather be one of those.

Don't underestimate the power of one person with a passion and determination.

I think plentyoffish got some good press early on and that got it the momentum. Plentyoffish is the only free dating site I've heard of, so there's a big reason to go there instead of other free dating sites.

The site design is actually pretty good IMHO, and sort of suggests that you're going to quickly get what you want to see and not a ton of flashy useless stuff.

IIRC the two things that the plentyoffish story lacks is passion and determination.

edit: Or was it HotOrNot? I might have got my stories mixed up.

I believe the incarnation came from something along the lines of "I wanted to learn ASP, so I made a dating site". Not sure where that plots on the graph of passion and determination.

you never heard of craigslist?

IMO Plentyoffish is very good design site, it's simple and direct. And the best thing is I always look better in the real world than my photo at the Plentyoffish:)

Because it provides a straight-forward way to let you find local people interested in dating. It's ugly (at least it was when I was using it two years back -- before I happily found my s.o. through the site) but it's fast, simple and works.

For those of you using dating sites who only find people interested in e-mailing, here's an unsolicited tip: Ask the person you're interested in out for drinks right after receiving a response to your initial 'Hi'.

Just cut through the crap and get to the point. You'll easily weed out the flirts and chatters and meet many more people in the process. That's why you're on the site in the first place, right?

PoF was essentially the firstest with the mostest. One of the first free dating sites started by an obsessive, incessantly self-promoting founder. It was started at a time that was just right to take advantage of the huge online dating boom that occurred ~late 03-04 and became a media darling because of its 'story'.

The PoF 'Story': A one man operation started in his apartment, with the aim of providing a free alternative to the complicated, expensive pay sites. And then out of nowhere, overnight people started showing up in droves! Millions of them.

... or at least thats the story. Everyone loves the Cinderella, wild success against all odds kind of stories.

PoF (and most all online dating sites) are a testament to what people are willing to endure in their quest to find 'love'. Dating sites have been taking advantage of lonely people for far too long.

I started FlowMingle ( http://flowmingle.com ) because I felt that it was time for a major shift in how things are done. Things are going to change.

Because most of the free dating sites are worse. They came in early, have a low barrier to entry (signup is trivial) and benefit from network effect.

Maybe it's the memorable name?

The point of it all is that POF is the number one dating site in the U.S and last time I checked he was making over $10 million a year ...obviously he is doing something right . The reason why a lot of people fail is because they don't want to acknowledge a formular that works and instead spend "plenty of time" trying to discredit any news that looks too good .

Thats a formular thats working - He has few servers 1 or 2 employees and he makes millions ... just learn from what he is doing and hope that you can be as successful . Dont spend time saying that the number one dating site sucks because that sounds silly because it is number 1 for a reason and that reason is not luck .

You have to change the way you think by studying the way other successful people think . If they way you think is not bringing you success then maybe you should consider thinking like people that are successful think .

Goooooooooood Luuuuuuuuuuuck

To people who wonder how a company like this might happen, here's my take.

A developer constantly talks about his company (that also happens to cater to software developers/hackers) under the pretenses of how well a small software company is growing, which attracts software developers/hackers to read about it from blogs and hear speeches mentioning it at startup conferences, causing them to join the site to see how the site actually works, play around, and report how well they liked the site on their own blogs. This increases the userbase, which of course increases growth, which leads to more blog posts and speeches about how fast the company is growing (same content, but different and much more impressive numbers every month, so the story only continues to get more and more interesting.) Eventually, word grows about it and regular folks start caring after hearing about the user numbers. Mainstream media becomes interested, causing more growth, and so on.

The approach for creating something for fellow hackers, growing the user base, and telling fellow hackers information about how well it's doing for marketing purposes is the approach taken by 37Signals, FogCreek (JoelOnSoftware), and some less known but up and coming startups. Creating something for fellow hackers has been described by Paul in his essays. One young company that I can think of right now that is good at this cycle is GitHub.

The key is to be the one who starts something, not the one who keeps reading and reading about others'.

interesting but this didn't apply to plentyoffish, which didn't come up with new technology or new marketing hacks.

it was just the only free dating website at the time, and also with the right design (read=no design) to be trusted by its users

I didn't say anything about new technology or marketing hacks, but about publicizing itself to other developers, which are also either the target market or a big part of the initial target market. Plenty of fish used the strategy of blogging about its growth, which was picked up by none other than other developers and posted about in developer and indie forums on a regular basis over the past few years. This is exactly what I described--a developer talking about how successful their app is, which causes developers to sign up for it. Remember, the 20-30 year old software developer demographic who would hear about the site is most likely single and with money, making them the perfect target market to seed. This is exactly the same as creating a project management site for developers that grows in popularity to the point most users are no longer developers, or a social news site like reddit.

AOL mail #14? Sweet mercy.

And nobody has mentioned it but PoF is written in .NET. I don't normally see startups using ASP.NET around here so I thought it was worth mentioning.

He's done unbelievably well, apparently in 2006 he was making $10k a day from adsense, you can only wonder what that is now.

I assume it's less. AdSense was roaring more so back in 06' but has settled and matured now. A lot of publishers who minted earlier on are now looking for better alternatives once more.

This is an atrocity.

MySpace being #1 is worse.

MySpace isn't nearly as bad.

You need to get over whatever that emotion you want to call it that is causing you to react like this, and come to the realization that regardless of what you think of the design or even genre as a whole it is one person operation doing what he's doing.

Reading the comments, I'm confused by the apparent hate. When I saw the article, I thought, "Hey, isn't this a mostly-solo operation? That's impressive."

Am I missing something? Is it just that people think the site is low class?

I agree. This site's story is pretty inspiring to me. I don't know all the details but it really seems to be as simple as: one guy decides to create a website from his home, it becomes very successful and he makes millions.

I think the hate is mostly jealousy coming from the fact that this guy didn't seem to know what he was doing (he admits it himself), and that the design is pretty plain (now. A few years ago, it was actually terrible) but still made it huge.

I'm thinking that the story sounds actually similar to Craigslist but Craig Newmark is royalty: I suppose one difference is that the PoF guy talks about how much money he makes a lot more. People never likes that...

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