How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009) | Hacker News Reader

How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009)

inc.com

39 pointsdanso15 comments

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.

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 :(

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.

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

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.

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

Not sure if you have updated info but according to his blog he was at 2 billion page views per WEEK back in 2012.

https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/

Yeah Tinder has a huge market share. I'd guess at least ten times more than PoF. Maybe 100. That's in the UK though, I'd guess it varies a lot geographically.

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

LinkedIn tracks 74 employees currently.

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.

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.

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.

>This guy is essentially saying that providing better customer experience would reduce number of clicks and his pageviews and thus his income

The problem is that "better" is in the eye of the beholder. That is why split testing is favorable even if the proposed changes seem obviously "better". There is no legitimate reason to skip split testing, but there are a number of reasons to not skip it.

Knowing what you're optimizing for and what your product value is are important. I have seen some highly successful viral platforms destroy themselves with a redesign because they didn't seem to understand the importance of their UI/UX - they thought their idea on its own was great.

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.

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