Monthly revenue breakdown of PlentyOfFish's early days
plentyoffish.wordpress.com
plentyoffish.wordpress.com
Another highlight, showing how POF early on was all about surprising and obvious innovations (presumably at the expense of polish, as noted elsewhere in the thread). If you're bootstrapping, polish is not your friend. Risky innovations are.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/10-years-since-...
I particularly love that the blog is still using the default Wordpress theme from years ago. :)
Marcus, you shared a great talk a few months ago at Launch Academy and it really helped me get through a difficult period in starting my company, thank you. I had just bootstrapped my company for 20 months (read: hadn't had a paycheque in 20 months), now we're month 24 and things are rolling quite nicely (read: paid myself in April!!!!).
POF is the Google of dating sites, it came in to fill a need already being filled by "big money" and simply did it better, and gave it away free with revenue from advertising.
Personally I love seeing something like that work.
So many great new ideas come out, and then they slap ads on them to make money. It'd be nice to see some other experiments on how to extract cash from a business.
12 clicks->ca$7.60 [1]
15,000 downloads->us$4.20 [2]
_______________
[1] June 2003
So, I sell my own ads directly now. I can get some of the biggest names in the tech industry excited about running ad campaigns on my site for $10k a week, but apparently that wasn't good enough for BuySellAds. Their loss, they're not going to get my business at this point.
Relying on ad revenue is a moral failing.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product[1]. The rationalization that allowing ads allows you to give your product free to users is a self-serving shame-allaying delusion[2].
[1] Even an ad that tells no outright lie is lying if it is selectively tells a partial truth. The moral test is whether you sell that product with the same pitch to a friend who does not have money to blow. Would you leave out the cons of your product and the pros of a competing one? Would you use psychological tricks to convince your friend she needs it, even though in honesty you know she doesn't?
Another way of looking at it is: ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages.
Let's say you invent a shoe that makes back pain go away. How do you get information out about it?
- you can tell everyone you know and hope they tell others (word of mouth)
- you can pursue PR stories
Or
- you can advertise
Let's assume these are the greatest shoes in the world and that everyone who tries them loves them. Word of mouth will work eventually, but it'll take 5-50 years for everyone who wants the shoes to hear about them.
The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims.
Remember that government programs to provide health insurance to poor children spend a significant amount of money on advertising to make sure people who are benefited by the program know it exists. I drive past CHIP billboards all the time.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2014/0512/Fiv...
"Ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages" when honest, but when dishonest they are a mechanism for inferior products to overcome good products and unnecessary products to manipulate people into buying what they don't need.
So what proportion of ads do you think are the former, and what proportion the latter? Maybe you're being honest about your shoes (which still doesn't mean you're right), but what about all the others? What about the big established shoe-makers? So easy for them to claim the same thing, and you won't be able to compete with their large marketing budgets. That's fixed by word-of-mouth? No, you already dismissed that mechanism.
I think most people will agree with me that at least 90% of ads are dishonest on some level. Even if it were only 70%, ads simply replace the information shortage problem with an overwhelming misinformation problem.
The only reason the government needed to spend so much money on advertising the health programs for children is because we've become a society inundated with misinformation (Obama Care is evil!) and news programs that focus on celebrity gossip and missing jetliners instead of truly useful public information (because ratings drive ad revenue). If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. If it weren't for the ad-driven information ecology we have today, there would be much better ways for the government to get that out. For one, it's what the news is supposed to do (as a journalistic duty, not to increase Nielsen ratings/page views to increase ad revenue).
> The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims.
If you in your experience (I'm assuming you're not young) don't see that at least 90% of ads (be it for products or political candidates) are misleading at best, then it's unlikely anything I say will convince you.
I don't expect a company to pay for air time to tell me why I wouldn't want to buy their product.
If you're going to hold ads to the standard of complete and total disclosure about a product, without even omissions or the possibility for misunderstanding, then 99.99% of all human communication is misleading.
And as much as I like parallelism, your assertion that I'm missing the forest is baseless. I've talked only about the general terms. It's fine to disagree with me, just get your facts tight so we can have a productive discussion. If anything you seem to be arguing that I'm missing the forest for discussing the theoretical biosphere.
My most effective ad incoming, prepare for the perfidy.
Make Bingo Cards Quickly
Create word bingo to fit any theme.
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www.BingoCardCreator.com
Can you suggest how the ad is deceptive and/or manipulative? If it helps, I'll supply context: it is almost guaranteed to show on pages which talk about making bingo games in an elementary school (or similar) setting.
I spent about $8k last year showing this to ~4 million teachers, homemakers, event planners, and other people interested in topics like Halloween bingo. (A particular thing that it does.) This resulted roughly 80,000 of them visiting a landing page which offered them free bingo cards for their email address. Roughly 20,000 of them took me up on that. Somewhere around 500 of those 20k decided they liked their free bingo cards so much they wanted to pay for the product which I sell.
I have a pretty good idea of where that $8k ended up. Approximately $3k of it subsidizes operations at Google, a company which you may have heard of. The other $5k subsidizes content creation at a few thousand sites across the Internet. Some of them are honestly not net value providers. Many of them are.
One of my most successful ad placements, for example, is on a hobbyist site created by a teacher and her husband. It offers many free printable activities and is ad supported. It's been lovingly maintained since the late 90s or so. My rough approximation of their annual ad revenue is "it would make for a pretty nice teacher's pension in any state."
It is very not obvious for me that anyone would be better off if that team decided to take down their site to avoid the moral impurity of advertising. Their users would lose access to many useful, free printable activities. I'd lose access to a large group of great prospects for my product. Many teachers would fail at their goal of playing classroom bingo with their students tomorrow. Their kids would be sad.
But, ignoring the issue whether most ads are like this or hyper-tuned to psychologically trick you into consuming goods you can't afford, there seems to be another issue here, separate from the parent.
The advertising industry seems to be the biggest pushers of big-data collect-all-you-can-because-you-may-need-it-someday. This automatically erodes privacy for everyone.
For you to have reached that many teachers on such a budget, I assume all this collected data helped immensely, but at what cost?
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
What I worry about is Ethyl Smith's emails / chats / SMSs (via hangout) / location and map searches &c. all being collected for the sole purpose of showing her the perfect targeted ad.
But I do get pissed off that the NSA can tell Google to give them that data without my permission and with no benefit to me (I don't live in the US so there's no security benefit to me even if the NSA was increasing US security).
Advertising industry erodes the privacy of Ethyl Smith.
Bingo Card Creator supports and is supported by the advertising industry (and, in particular, corporations which encourage the erosion of privacy).
Every individual can easily excuse themselves from this process by saying there is no direct link between their own commercial effort and privacy erosion, and it's very easy to ethically justify what you individually are doing. After all, no single person or entity is literally saying or thinking "let's screw Ethyl Smith".
Personally speaking, I no longer find this a very good excuse.
The study, published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology, found that 60 percent of people had lied at least once during the 10-minute conversation, saying an average of 2.92 inaccurate things.
I assume you do not find yourself very excusable.
Whenever advertising is lying, there is no question I am against advertising.
This thread has been characterised with the opinion from people like yourself that advertising is immoral, akin to lying, manipulative, deceiving etc etc <insert descriptor>.
My point stands - advertising is just an extension of social interaction. If you hate advertising, you essentially hate yourself since you advertise continually.
Anyway, to respond to your point:
I do not welcome advertising as an extension of social interaction, no more than I welcome someone shouting at me in the street as an extension of social interaction.
You have somehow compared this to shouting at you. Whether you welcome advertising or not you do do it. Arguing against advertising is like arguing against breathing.
Carry on downvoting me; I care a little above 0 about my karma score. It just shows me that advertising detractors cannot form a coherent justification for their views.
Seriously, that is a truly excellent PPC ad. I'm assuming it's the result of considerable split-testing.
- I did not say 100% of ads are lies
- You don't prove that you could have done better through product reviews and word of mouth (which is now web-scale via social media), especially in a world where you didn't have to compete with other products that make false claims through advertising.
- You didn't refute my claim (via the footnote link) that if people paid up front for Google, the other content creation sites you mention, as well as the hobbyist site, that it would actually be cheaper for everyone, both on a monetary and social cost-basis.
And wow, over 50% of the cost of your product went to advertising! In a world where people discover things via web-scale word-of-mouth (e.g. social networks, product review sites, recommendations from field- or topic-specific authoritative websites), your product would be 50% cheaper, and even cheaper than that considering people would not waste money buying products due to dishonest ads.
Yes, we are in a sort of catch-22. Because people are so used to getting their web for free (even though as I point out that is an illusion), a huge majority of us would have to boycott ads to change the system to where non-ad-supported business models could thrive. But those of us who dare to do it first, before that critical mass is achieved, are likely not to survive.
But a seemingly insurmountable catch-22 doesn't mean it isn't messed up and not worthy of critique. Remember, history is replete with such situations. When we all lived under totalitarianism, a small number of people could rule over a vast majority only because to unite people into a rebellion, you have to speak up, but if you speak up, you're head gets cut off.
Change is hard.
All of which are ad-supported and if they were fee-based they wouldn't be that massive, which agian brings back to ads.
>> Relying on ad revenue is a moral failing.
If relying on ad revenue is a moral failing, so is using such a product/service. Have never used a such product/service?
Sure, we all agree that deceptive advertising is deceptive. That's wrong, but not all advertising is bad. I think you'll be surprised to find out that 95% of people (yay, making up numbers is fun!) actually don't mind that google tracks their activity so they can show more relevant ads. I typically don't click on them, but hey, more relevant ads still makes my overall experience better and I really don't care if we get there because some of my search history was (relatively anonymously) logged on some of google's servers.
Also yes, word of mouth leads a lot of people to discover new products, and may be cheaper than traditional advertising in dollar amounts, but it's likely a much greater time investment that may not even pay off in the end. Likewise, patio11 could pay the hobbyist site, and google, and any other "legitimate" advertising platform directly but I think the time commitment to find those valuable platforms, enter into an agreement with them, and deal with all the associated details may not be worth it for him.
In the end, it's about finding a cost-effective way to get your products in front of its audience. That may be "word of mouth" (and I don't want to get into that debate, but product review sites tend to be more misleading, biased and corrupt than a lot of ads), or it may be ads. To each his own, but you don't need to condemn everyone who doesn't share your overly idealistic views.
And your example about the hobbyist-site-gone-nice-pension is not a startup. It's also just an appeal to emotion, when the argument is just that we could do with less advertising in general, and that it would be nice if startups could find or have a different way to monetize.
A lot of ads are is deceptive (though IMO, 90% is a bit high estimate), but more importantly it takes a very real mental cost of constantly having to task-switch: when I'm merely looking for information (which is 99% of the time I'm on the Internet), there is an army of specifically crafted boxes of information strewn in sidebars across the web, doing their utmost best to get me out of that mindset and into the mindset of deciding-to-purchase.
If I actually were to have to suffer that I'd never get anything done. That may sound extreme, but there's more people like me that need their focus and it's fragile. Thankfully there's AdBlock and similar tools.
They choose to purchase from advertisers and ignore en masse most any product that isn't advertised in some way. It's fairly obvious that they want to buy things and they want a certain kind of advertising that leads them to buy those things. What you seem to be arguing for is a place where people just walk around and look for stuff they need/want and if they ask "Where can I buy this thing I need?" for the manufacturer to stare blankly and shrug.
Your argument requires one to believe that advertisement is immoral. One could easily make another argument that selling anything for money that could be given away for free with ads hurts the poor who then are denied access. It wouldn't be true, but it would be built on just as much of a foundation (read none) as yours.
Show me some strong statistical studies showing that "90 to 99% of ads" are deceitful. I've watched a lot of ads. I don't think that number's even close to correct. Slick? Sure. Deceitful is a strong word.
HN is subsidised by a pure market economy entrepreneurial construct- a construct in which advertising has a firm place at the table. It is very likely the antithesis of Tyler Durden.
Getting set up for payments and running a subscription business is very complicated and takes a lot of time people and money. Time better spent perfecting your product early on.
If paypal had a mechanism to pre-validate, to avoid having 10's of 1000's of dollars frozen, then they'd be fine.
They get hate because their approach to post-hoc fraud limiting has fucked over thousands of people. Don't dismiss the hate, they earned that hate one customer at a time.
Then I remind myself it's not just a little side project, it's meant to be a business and I think of an article[1] I read about how Markus built POF with just plain old ASP.NET - it's not ideal, but the important thing is it works and the business success speaks for itself.
Your link shows some things they decided to do to make it work; which of these problems would have been avoided using other tools? Which of these problems could not have been solved by using a more suitable architecture (using ASP.NET techniques)?
Thanks for any insight.
Quote:
9. Confidentiality
You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without our prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes: (a) all Google software, technology and documentation relating to the Services; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance as pertaining to the Services; (c) the existence of, and information about, beta features in a Service; and (d) any other information made available by Google that is marked confidential or would normally be considered confidential under the circumstances in which it is presented. Google Confidential Information does not include information that you already knew prior to your use of the Services, that becomes public through no fault of yours, that was independently developed by you, or that was lawfully given to you by a third party. Notwithstanding this Section 9, you may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments resulting from your use of the Services.
By the way almost no one believed he was earning that much even after Robert Scoble first interviewed him in 2006. (Link is now dead for whatever reason.)
http://adage.com/article/madisonvine-news/miracle-whip-plent...
If that is a true statistic then, regardless of what was paid to get that product placement, the return is quite phenomenal compared to the click through rates of online advertising.
If Markus is listening, it would be good to know more details on how that success came about and worked out.
Also, cheeky joke question, for all that effort put into a dating site and with all that money made, did you get any good dates out of it?
It takes a great combination of luck and skill to take the early success and sustain it.
In terms of running a company, I would prefer a style more like the guy who started MineCraft. Ie. Million dollar bonuses, really creating a corporate culture! Making employees live their dreams.
I don't think that's necessarily correct. I know people who have been working there for quite some time and enjoy it.
Obviously, users don't care for those kinds of details; what we'd like to know is: what do users actually care about? (in general, and specifically for a dating site)
In India there is a job site called naukri.com that has horrible user experience, but is still the number one job site. But it works and does the bare minimum without much issues. It would be tough for anyone to crack that market without non-trivial capital.
I had a feeling there was some sort of spammy element to it. Maybe something involving link stuffing or comment spamming.
Whatever it is, he doesn't seem too keen on revealing it.
It was a lesson I'll always remember - if you're going to build an ad-revenue-based site, then do so in a field where there are major players throwing around big money on adsense or similar. You get to effectively monetize their users by providing an advertising channel.
It is not field based. Every company has their own bidding budget. Take any field, you will be able to find clients who are ready to pay higher CPC than avg because they have money
Credit Cards and Insurance will always have higher CPC than florists. That's inherent, and that's what I mean by choosing the field carefully.
This is true of all ad networks in general--the amount of available inventory has exploded in recent years, reducing prices.
If you'd prefer that this not be made public please let me know.
His site from archive.org reveals some interesting things:
(from april 2003)
https://web.archive.org/web/20030422063613/http://plentyoffi...
At the top of the page are links to promotional systems. I'm guessing he basically used link exchanges, similar to how imgur used a traffic exchange (mgid.com) to dramatically bolster its early start.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030423171521/http://www.thefre...
and: https://web.archive.org/web/20030420035505/http://www.alovel...
and: https://web.archive.org/web/20030420102231/http://www.single...
That can't be replicated again in the dating market, it's hyper saturated now, but that concept holds true for most any market and for most any product or service: you have to conquer that first market.
Is the revenue in relation to visitors still as big today?
The rough cost of click seems to be fluctuating around 0.25-0.50c but gets stabilized to almost a dollar later. I guess people usually don't think about the fact that when you click on a ad, you just made someone pay a dollar to someone :).
Does anyone know how it's hosted to handle that kind of traffic? (I'm just curious)
Thanks!
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/ssd-image-serve...
2009 brought more upgrades, including move to HP ProLiant DL785 with 512 GB of ram and 32 CPUs and SQLServer 2008 and Windows 2008, and In the next week we will be upgrading our image serving, we are nearing 10,000 images served per second and existing stuff just isn’t cutting it. We will be moving our 200 million images over to RamSan
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/upgrades-themes...
"This month we will be building out our CUDA cluster to have 147,000 GPU cores to allow us to better predict who you will date."
From:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/pof-takes-67-of...
2. users used to get their own password sent back to them when they forgot it, rather than being forced make a new pass.
Although to be fair I don't think they do 2 anymore
You only have to google it to find other users saying the same thing.
You find very different people on PoF than on the pay dating sites. Or even than on OKC, which forces you to expose more of yourself to become visible.
The email itself is actually a call to action, it's telling you your new matches. And it's actually weekly. It looked like this before:
Hello yournamehere,
Thank you for signing up on MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS XM.
Remember your password is *****.
http://www.plentyoffish.com is larger than all other free dating sites combined.
View your latest matches here --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/viewmatches.aspx
1. You can now easily check your messages via a cell phone.
2. Latest signups -- > http://www.plentyoffish.com/lastsignup.aspx
3. Users online in your city -- > http://www.plentyoffish.com/lastonlinemycity.aspx
4. If you have found your match you can delete your account in the help menu.
5. Read your new emails here --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/inbox.aspx
6. Who checked out your profile? -->http://www.plentyoffish.com/whoviewedme.aspx
7. Compatibility Test to Measure Chemistry --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/poftest.aspx
http://www.plentyoffish.com
http://www.pof.com is larger than all other free dating sites combined.