PlentyOfFish Starts Charging Premium Membership Fees | Hacker News Reader

PlentyOfFish Starts Charging Premium Membership Fees

onlinedatingpost.com

18 pointsjwesley20 comments

Thank you, Markus.

If just a handful of users are stupid enough to pay the fee to put a badge on their profile that effectively says "I'm really desperate" it will have the opposite of the intended effect, and maybe improve my chances. And at the same time they'll be paying for my share of the bandwidth.

Actually, back when I used to frequent dating sites (10 years ago or so), I met most people when I had a paid membership.

OTOH, I met my wife on Yahoo Personals when it was free. In fact, if it was only for pay we'd never have met since she wouldn't have bothered with a paysite.

"There will be no addtional features and functionality for users, this upgrade will be strictly to signal intent to the community."

So basically, all you get for your $20 a month is a badge saying that you're cooler than people who didn't pay. And for your premium membership, you still get the same crap service that freeloaders get.

Are people really that stupid? Asking people to pay something for nothing reeks of arrogance. I'm starting to think Frind got lucky with PoF.

Well luck definitely had a huge component of it. Speaking of his new subscription model, I wouldn't exactly call it "stupid," (nor would I call it especially smart) I just think he didn't explain it correctly.

That's the psychology that the luxury goods market exploits. A $30,000 watch won't tell time any more accurately than a $30 watch, nor will it look much better than, say, a $500 watch, but some people who can spring for luxury items do simply as a token of wealth. Just look at the stereotypical nouveau riche spending habits.

Indeed, usually the $30 watch is more accurate than the $30,000 watch. After all your cheap quartz watch is 99.999% accurate, while your $30K watch is only 99.997% accurate.

Paid users will probably get their profiles pushed out a lot more so they will get more matches. Paying for faster matching.

Paying for something makes (many) people value it more/be more serious about it. In that sense paying for "signaling intent" makes sense. Eharmony, for example, has always charged high rates and branded itself for more serious relationships. Of course it's dubitable whether this mechanism works in a larger community that is free.

On the ludicrousness spectrum it's slightly less ludicrous than virtual gifts, I'd say.

As for POF/Markus making more money that way, I guess it's like a game to him, figuring out what works and getting a kick out of beating (up) the big guys.

Actually I think he's pretty smart. It's Price As Signal. Having the free level of service may not say that you're not serious about meeting someone, but having the paid level definitely indicates that you are. In a world with a lot of people who sign up on a lark, this gives other users a tool to indicate who not to waste their time with.

Are people really that stupid?

Have you been living in a cave for all of humanity's history?

Has anybody ever seen this website before?

It feels like if you hired a "webmaster" from the mid 1990s to build you a domain parking page.

It is AWFUL.

This comment reminds me of people who complain about the design of Hacker News, and miss the point entirely.

Plenty of fish has a large and growing user community. I know of more people (personally) who have met dates on POF than any other site (though I am in Canada, where his community is strongest).

From the Inc. article I read he really believes in the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

He doesn't know how a design change will effect the users or how changing the badly-cropped user images will effect click-throughs etc.

A/B testing?

Yet it's incredibly successful...

PoF is quite famous because it is essentially a one-man business, making millions a year: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...

It is also a scalability success-story: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture

So yes, the CEO (Markus Frind) is quite famous around here.

The worst part of the design is that it squashes the photographs and makes people look awful. The photos are too small as well which makes them almost useless in some cases. The userbase is pretty bad, but that's my personal experience for my area.

The owner said that is one of the parameters leading to success: such tiny little things that have unsuspected effects.

For example, the deformed images encourage clicking them to see the profile. If the image was fine, that click and potential consequences may have never happened.

Did he have an explaination as to why the images are so small on the actual profile?

I contacted someone with a serious member badge and she says it was given to her for free and she never asked for it.

Interesting typo in the text quoted from Markus: "funcationality".

I'd like to speculate it reveals usage of a famous language, but PoF has been described as a Redmond-only shop in the past.

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