Match Group Buys PlentyOfFish for $575M
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Although, people like us on HN, won't feel excited about making a little websites and earning through Adsense income; a good business / startup seems more worthwhile but sometimes, I do get tempted to enter that territory again seeing people making thousands of dollars a day with just re-hashed content and a little effort but I feel it won't be something to be proud of in the future.
I dunno, I'm pretty excited about that sort of effort-to-income ratio. That's the equivalent of never having to pay for groceries again.
If you were willing to spend some time in curating the homepage then you could do even better.
Edit: When I say I have done this, I mean for two years, almost three. I saw from my Clicky stream the companies that would visit the site, and they included several of the brands whose content I was republishing.
Speak for yourself - I run several content sites covering a variety of topics that I enjoy writing about and I love every second of it.
Also if you think it's actually little effort to make these sites successful, I've got a beach house in Idaho to sell you.
I wasn't pointing at people who put an effort in making original content but there are lots of websites which just build upon memes, gifs, simple tips, and tutorials and do quite well with it.
Further - what's wrong with gifs and memes? There is a market for it people will go ahead and supply it. It's definitely not easy to do.
I don't fancy Buzzfeed top 10 lists much, but someone out there finds it valuable.
The way I see it is that you have a choice (if the opportunity knocks).
1) Create a product (that you don't like) that a mass audience likes. Reap the benefits, and then start something that you do like.
2) Create a product (your life's work) that an audience may like and see what happens.
There are more options than that of course, but I hope my idea does come across clear.
If you believe that agreements are only reached when there is mutual benefit you are benefitting your customers by rehashing the content.
It's like an encyclopedia there's nothing new in it, however, there is great value in having all that information in one place.
This seems like a strange thing to believe. Why couldn't someone agree to something that never benefits them?
And in that case... I'd like to trade you $1 million dollars, for $1 a year for the rest of your life.
http://www.wizzed.com is a website started by a kid (I think he's 16 now). Check out the Alexa and SimilarWeb rankings. I know, vanity metrics, still. Not that far behind ViralNova, that just sold for $100MM.
Now, if you would be proud running this kind of website is another topic.
If you never got traffic - why did Google adsense pay you $300 in a month? I get ~600 visits per day and I barely get $0.10/day - usually ~$1 if someone clicks on an ad.
I have thought about dumping google adsense and trying something else.
I think the startup crowd tries to make every weekend project into something big. But it doesn't have to be - small, but original work, when targeted to niche audiences, is easy to monetize ethically by giving very targeted ads in which they have a legitimate interest.
I won't get rich with my work of this nature - but my tools pay for their own infrastructure, with small/tiny (3 digit!) profits, so they are in the black. It is more than many startups can claim.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.math/AZD_CalO7as
I am not an expert, but it seems he wrote some highly optimized code to do it:
> The search was conducted over 10 days on a AMD 1800XP and checked > about 20,667,931,547 Potential AP 22's per Second.
Since RAM follows Moore's law you could always keep the users in RAM if you wrote effective queries because user growth didn't outpace Moore's law. All you had to do was build a server big enough.
C# definitely helped vs ruby, the real kicker was stored procs, everything was a highly tuned stored proc. The huge insights I got was latency, by keeping everything close together you could run some really abysmal synchronous code with out cratering everything.
Also, he really cared about the ant hill more than the ants. He would do horrible things to the ants that would encourage them to build a bigger ant hill. (Ants are users, employees were treated very well)
As a fictional example, lets say the site was skewing too heavily male by 20%, just add a line in the stored proc that gave a male user a 20% chance of their registration not being written to disk. Voila, site has the proper mix, onto the next problem. He was the most brutally effective person I've ever worked with.
But seriously, go to a club... same thing...
The architecture post on high scalability is truly inspirational.
I'd love a reason to stop disparaging my father's mega-millions dreams and the dozens of people that frequent my local 7-11 for countless scratch-offs everyday.
I have a gut feeling that a study of the odds/payout ratio of being apart of any given startup acquisition is better than what you'd get from any given lottery/scratch off... though I'm not taking into account the associated costs. How many tickets/scratch-offs is an 80 hour week for a full stack engineer worth?
So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
This is the study I'm interested in performing.
> So, here's me hoping you weren't being facetious.
Not at all! I'd rather buy X lottery tickets on the most advantageous schedule, enjoy working 32-35 hours a week, and spend the rest of my time with family, on hobbies, or traveling.
I'm not going to fault someone for working 80-100 hours a week if that's what they enjoy doing, but if they're doing it to get rich, let's see if the data supports those odds.
When you consider reward/(risk*effort) rather than just risk/reward it wouldn't surprise me if lotteries came out on top.
But... the thing you don't get from a lottery is a statement like this: my life-partner and I met through PoF almost ten years ago, and I will be forever grateful to Marcus for building the site that made that possible.
We had both been on other sites previously, and we had actually seen each other's profiles on other sites in the year or two before we met while we were both in a post-divorce dating phase, but PoF had the right mix of features that it happened to be where we actually connected with each other.
As I recall, I saved her profile for later consideration at one point, and the site (unbeknownst to me) notified users when that happened, so she looked at my profile and contacted me with something along the lines of, "Don't hesitate, I won't be here long!" I didn't, and she wasn't.
Now, I agree that accolades from strangers doesn't necessarily balance off time not spent with your family, but it is another factor in the overall equation, knowing you've made the world a better place for a lot of people.
Do what you enjoy, ensure someone is getting value out of it, but don't spend too much of your life on any one thing. Everything in moderation.
We really need to drop the facade that working a startup will always be beneficial to you, or lead you to wealth and/or success. Sometimes, its going to tear your soul from you and you may not come back from it for a long time.
Then again, I'm not much of a gambler in general.
It's time we started charging them for those options.
A successful startup is not an accident, and a failed startup is not just a lack of luck. Make good business choices, product choices, and infrastructure choices and you can make the startup a success. On the other hand make poor product choices, and poor business choices and your startup will fail.
On the other hand there is very little strategy or way to improve your odds of success when gambling.
Think of it as a really large poker game where you didn't have to put any money in the pot and can play a random hand for $2 and win the entire pot. Personally, once it's in the 100M+ range I'll grab a ticket while getting gas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
Kazemi is more of an programmer-artist or -comedian, but he releases dozens of side projects a year, all relatively low effort. He uses himself as a test case and also examines KickStarters and how unpredictable their success is.
It's just that the feels like work part of his job only lasts 15 minutes, signing cheques, etc. He just doesn't do the "I work 8 hours 5 days a week thing", if the site is fucked up he is there til it's fixed. If everything is on track, he might be there an hour or two.
When he does engage in conversation, Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." ...
EDIT: and Chemistry.com, Meetic, and PeopleMedia.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/digital-love-consol...
It wouldn't surprise me if IAC has over 50% of the US dating market at this point.
There's a blatant competition issue there, but the online dating market isn't likely to attract much anti-trust scrutiny at this point, for at least three reasons: there needs to be some evidence of consumer harm (I'm not aware of much in that regard); competitors would have to be getting Washington's attention; the dating market isn't considered to be very attention worthy, minus something egregious going on.
http://www.jessmeetken.com/ is based on introductions from women to other women, which eliminated the problem that women's inboxes are filled with lots of low-quality (and occasionally vulgar) messages.
He is right that there need to be some kind of filtering though - the problem is that the men women want to date are also the girls most likely to put up with the filters.
You don't know any women?
I think that this differs from your scenario in that Jess is vouching for a guy for basically anyone, vs. Ken asking all of his female friends if they know anyone they'd be a good match with.
That said, I don't think that matters for the site in question. I'm just not a part of their target audience. Doesn't mean their idea doesn't work for other people.
If you knew "a" girl, it doesn't necessarily mean she'd want to date you, or that you'd date her girlfriends (what if her friends were all guys?)
The idea is that you have a female to vouch for you, which is social proof.
However, I don't know how I'd feel about being introduced to a potential romantic interest by a female friend.
I don't claim to be an expert on dating, but I intuitively understand how social dynamics work.
There's a lot of situations in which this dynamic would work just fine.
IAC seems to be making a macro-bet: we don't know what online dating will look like in 5-10 years, but we want to control it.
Interestingly, they "incubated" Tinder via Hatch Labs (where I was an employee). Pretty impressive control of that vertical.
Yes, you need a critical mass of people, but what this means can be very different for different people. Some dating sites have a warm body approach where you probably need lots of people because the set of matches is terrible.
However if you had a dating site for swedish people living in miami who only wanted to date swedish people even having 40 people on there might be plenty.
OKCupid's clever bypass for this was to get people hooked answering all those little questions. Heck I knew early adopters that signed up just to answer those questions, not necessarily for dating, and then fell into using it.
Tinder's was the swipe right/left that has now become a term used outside of the app in other parts of life.
The thing is that Marcus has conveniently downplayed the required effort in playing this game. He has projected image that he just worked few hours a week to check servers and then going back to other things in his life. I would bet reality wasn't exactly like that. To ensure new customer acquisition, you must make sure your website constantly pops up high on Google for most popular dating queries. This means lot of SEO+marketing work. My guess is that Marcus purposely made his story very attractive for newspapers to report without paying for any PR which gave him links and boosted his ranking. His competitors are known to spend massive fortune and efforts on marketing just to stay relevant.
Now that deal is done, it would be good time for Marcus to actually disclose the true story :).
I think that was a part of the business model. A good chunk of the ads were for for-pay dating sites. At $30/month, which is effectively $30/month marginal revenue (since most costs are fixed), the for-pay sites will pay a fortune per customer acquisition.
Good call on the alleged PR move.
Monitors performance using task manager. When spikes show up he investigates. Problems were usually blocking in the database. It's always database issues. Rarely any problems in .net. Because POF doesn't use the .net library it's relatively easy to track down performance problems. When you are using many layers of frameworks finding out where problems are hiding is frustrating and hard.
Makes me blush a bit that we have 1000 - 1100 customer websites (which don't get many hits) spread across 6 CloudLinux servers and the performance is terrible... (not that I have anything to do with those servers!)
BWhen FB buy instagram or match.com buy everyone, it feels like an unfair avenue of competition. I'm not sure if "fair" or "competition" are the right words, but hopefully my point gets across.
Part of the issue is (ironically) well illustrated by OKcupid's blog post.^ In it, they basically said that paid dating sites work worse, because they are paid. It's a fun pick-a-fight blog, so read it if you're interested. Implied (IMO) is that a massive dating site can be run with much lower revenue and be better for users. Doesn't matter if they were right.
OKcupid had a working unique, effective model and their product was different. Then Tinder do it a totally different way and we have more diversity. The difference are cultural, not just a different feature-set. I think that's awesome. But, one business model generates way more money. The others are profitable too and can actually do their job perfectly well (OKcupid anyway) with less revenue. There's no inherent reason not to continue existing and letting a thousand (or like six) flower bloom.
The problem is that removing company A as a threat is worth more (in dollars) to company B than company A costs. So company B buys OKcupid, Tinder, POF and anything else. The wheels of the market are removing choice.
OKcupid still exists. It's fine, but it's doesn't have the same cultural uniqueness. They removed that blog post, for example.
^http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat...
By contrast, when we sold TheSpark.com to iTurf.com in 2000, we spent several man-months of company time making the parody AyeTurf.com, which pissed a lot of people off.
I don't think there's anything terrible about taking down the post to be polite.
I also don't think that OKCupid (or match.com) are to blame. I'm just kind of musing about this sort of tiny-giant paradox generally. The internet lets people make great things on small budgets, which means big thing can exist with small business models. Magnitude of revenue does not necessarily equal magnitude of impact, but if the first is a lot smaller then the second, they're a target for these neutralising acquisitions.
I'd always supposed it was something more like "unprincipled".
Here is the post with the $900k(CAD) check from google (which bounced!) https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/07/small-companie...
He said the ETF (think wire transfer) bounced, not that the check bounced. I'm guessing this means that Google got the wrong account number.
I see a Business Opportunity
This is a big part of why it's SMART for most consumer startups to avoid earning revenue at all. Doing so will often cap their potential exit price, in practice.
Still, this at least was at the higher end, for purely revenue-based valuations.
I'd love to see more examples of successful bootstrapped and/or lifestyle businesses, but - unlike PoF - most of them they don't get the same PR as the mainstream startups, which makes them harder to find/follow.
Both of these effects are what a layman would think "shouldn't be real". From experience, both are extremely real.
Too bad that the TV shows present these as sort of jokes. That disappoints me. No joke, these are dead real.
What did I do this last decade?
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
I find it interesting to see that Match now really owns the space and that TechCrunch is suggesting that the purchase was for "a fresh pool of digitally active singles" vs. technology (OKCupid) or a different experience all together (Tinder).
Otherwise, the customer base of a dating site is doomed to collapse as it becomes successful: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
Is this a case where someone launched a product that conquered the non-USA users that USA companies ignore?
Thanks POF for making my faith more stronger and stronger!
How many of you have Adsense source of income?
"Myspace, Match, eHarmony, CL… they all suck for the elegantly simple reason that online there are too many indiscriminate horny men and too few cute girls. The dynamics are totally in the woman’s favor, ridiculously so in that it encourages massive self-assessment inflation that will carry over into real life social interactions, guaranteeing disappointment."
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/online-dating-is-f... is an interesting article on online dating.
A great youtube video on why online dating doesn't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe5_JK_LcEI
Then again, I don't know what I was expecting from a website that gives "Alpha assessments" regarding "women you are attempting to bed" and whose top post is "How to get a girl to send nudes of herself".
For example: "It’s no surprise that the virtual world warehouses sexual rejects who couldn’t cut it in public where their ugliness means they’re not even in the running. BBWs, BBBWs, BBBBBBBBBBBBWs… you’ll find them all online, beached like a herd of walrus." Or later, "Fatties – The internet is great for banging fatties."
The article discusses lopsidedness of online dating and how it disproportionately favors women.
Antisemitism, for instance, doesn't often hold that Jews are worthless, poor, and incompetent. It tends to hold that Jews are rich and powerful and can do whatever they want thanks to their worldwide conspiracy. The antisemite usually thinks that the world disproportionately favors Jews.
How is dating websites being lopsided in favor of women misogyny?
The systemic use of the blanket term of misogyny in these cases seems more like misandry, to be fair.
Why not stay on the point? You can't control of tone of Heartiste. He has the right to express his opinions, don't you think?
> How is dating websites being lopsided in favor of women misogyny?
I did not claim that.
> The systemic use of the blanket term of misogyny in these cases seems more like misandry, to be fair.
Why?
> Why not stay on the point?
What is the point? I thought you were implying that the author believing that women were favored by dating websites was a counter to the claim that the site was a torrent of misogynistic screed. If so, I refuted that. If not, you were unclear, but if you wish to be clear about your point, I am happy to stay on it.
> You can't control of tone of Heartiste. He has the right to express his opinions, don't you think?
Absolutely, and I have the right to express opinions about his expression of his opinions. Free speech is truly a wonderful thing!
See the subject of my thread for context.
> What is the point?
Lopsided proportions on dating websites.
I do find them a bit toxic because of the negativity. It's a phase many guys go through when they break the social conditioning of the feminine imperative.
Rollo Tomassi is far more gentle, for those who haven't heard of him (www.therationalmale.com)