PlentyOfFish Changing Direction

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Hot on the heels of my comment that the bright spotlight focusing on PlentyOfFish won’t last forever, come word from Markus Frind that PlentyOfFish is changing direction.

Commenter Mike says:

If you can figure out how to remove the stigma of “if I join an online dating site, I’m gonna have to deal with all the creeps� that pretty much the majority of women STILL (legitimately) have, I think you would do pretty well growth wise.

Figure out how to keep women from spending 1min deleting the hundreds of “hey sexy� emails in their inbox and instead spend 15-30mins replying to a fraction of the decent ones, and your revenue/user should improve too.

Dating sites are full of creepy people, that will never change. Providing automated tools to filter them out is the only way to go. Simple matching on preferences is a good start, and other sites have implemented this functionality years ago. See FastCupid. I see FC has been redesigned. When did that happen? I miss the old SpringStreet, totally blew apart the silo’d date-warehouse model with a profile comprised of five questions.

If Markus tries to turn PoF into a serious dating site I think he’s going to lose a lot of people and revenue. He dismisses any sort of innovative online dating functionality as “only 10% of my users were interested in feature X.” Then again, maybe he gets enlightened and is able to hang on to some of the traffic and take PoF to the next level.

I’m not clear how social nets make 5x more revenue per person than dating sites as Markus says, thats a lot of advertising coin. Where did that number come from?

Social networks are in fact “sucking users out of the dating industry by the millions”, thats why Match has to grow by raising prices and acquiring international dating sites.

“Social Networks are nothing more than glorified dating sites that tried a different interface.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Comparing social nets with dating is like comparing apples to apples in terms of the user experience on the site.

Daters don’t update their profiles every day, with new photos, Twitter-like real-time updates, new videos, adding friends etc. How is that the least bit like online dating, which is traditionally about browsing static billboards?

Sidebar: I was going to write up something on Consumating. Instead, just go check out user Joelle. Read about the new Pocket feature and the ability to give, copy and receive icons. They’s kind of goofy but the idea of adding personalization to profiles is important. It keeps people entertained, engaged and coming back for more.

Can you imagine a Digg-style dating site? Voting for people is fun, and sure it pushes the hotties to the top of the list, the question is how can you embed audience voting in a way that benefits the majority of users? This hasn’t been figured out yet by a long shot.

Markus has hit the wall at 1 billion pageviews a month (Cue Dr. Evil). His current site format can’t grow past this. PoF is a dating site if your browse the profiles, but its more social if you view it from the context of the message boards. I’m trying to see the next version of both, but the magic 8-ball is murky. There is so much money to be made and cool stuff to do in the user-generated content arena these days. Building community around niches grows site traffic a lot cheaper and faster than Google Adwords or expensive traditional advertising campaigns. Dating sites seem unable to create the type of hybrid destinations that the social nets can create in short order. I saw KickApps present at the MIT Enterprise Forum last night. Add video, community, widgets and all sorts of social features in minutes? Why aren’t more dating sites taking advante of these community building tools?

Social nets keep growing because it’s new and exciting to people. This growth will level off and the second and third-tier sites will coalesce into a few Yahoos, Googles and Microsofts. Same as happened with online dating, which can’t grow much more in it’s current incarnation without adding features like dynamic profiles, background checks, and all the other stuff that will be de regur in 10 years.

Getting traffic to a site at the level PoF has is a huge accomplishment. Lots of hard work and trying out new ideas. I’ve always looked at that as the first step, necessary, expensive, and most sites can’t make it happen. What interests me is what to do with the people when they get there. That’s where things get exciting. Member communication on dating sites is still in the stone age, but nobody seems to care.

One one hand we have college students losing out on job opportunities because their Facebook profile has a photo of them doing a bong hit. Everything private is now personal. On the other hand, people on dating sites are afraid to use videocams, so this whole new category of “first dates” can’t happen. Me, I’ve been chatting with video for over a decade. I hate plain text chat, boring. How can we bring the personal transparency of social nets to dating? This is an incredibly important question that no one seems to be asking.

I would ask Markus, how many of those millions of daily emails go unanswered? Huge opportunity there to improve the user experience on the site.

We should all be paying close attention to Markus, lots to learn from him, by example and what to avoid. The great thing is we get to see this all happen in public. I hope Markus continues to be open about his goal of changing the format and creating an entirely new category at PoF in the coming months. Will PoF be revolutionary or evolutionary? I would argue it wasn’t revolutionary the first time around, more about better SEO and database code and being just good enough. Can a self-described dating site evolve into a new category? There is so much hype and interest in social networking, nobody is really looking too far into the futue, unless you start thinking about machine learning and AI, which is Dating 4.0. Leave a comment, this is going to be a great conversation.