What a week, spring reared it’s head, we hit the 70’s, and now is going to rain all weekend.
Markus at Plenty of Fish Rickrolled me on April Fools day, nice one Markus. Read his post so you have a context for my response.
Many niche sites make plenty of money, several make as much or more than PlentyOfFish. You disregard them because you are the Wal-Mart of online dating. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a great place to be today, but there are plenty of smaller sites with a much higher satisfaction rating than PoF, but it’s all about the money, right?
Zoosk is a smart and interesting company. The service is very similar to several other competitors, but it’s early days, they are just getting started. Most companies don’t get it 100% right the first time.
People are experimenting with Facebook and MySpace and I wholeheartedly applaud these efforts. Spending a few weeks to build an app that draw 200-800k daily users is an amazing achievement. how much did you spend to get to those numbers?
Sure Facebook suffers from fads, and the majority of the applications are lame with no users. That how the ecosystem works there. Over time, as developers learn how to leverage the viral nature of social networking, the applications will get more interactive, leverage more data and grow even faster, and hopefully continue that growth.
A good analogy are gaming consoles. It takes developers several years to wring the most performance out of a new Playstation or XBox. The first round of games are good but a few years later the really amazing stuff comes out because they have learned how to manipulate the system.
Same thing applies to social dating.
Throwing sheep is ridiculous to most people, but then again, Facebook makes over $100,000 a day selling virtual goods.
It would be great to know how much of your $1 million in monthly revenue is paid out for the traffic you acquire to get your numbers, or at least what percentage of your rev you spend on marketing. If you’re spending $700k, then things aren’t as rosy as one would think.
I don’t think patents are going to be much of an issue for Facebook. Their major concern right now is dealing with the legal situation surrounding the origins of Facebook, which is in the news this week.
You pride yourself in saying that your success is because you do the opposite of what I’ve talked about for years. Every industry needs a non-traditional success story, and PlentyOfFish is it. No argument there.
Any argument over the merits of PlentyOfFish is lost the minute revenue enters the conversation. It’s too easy to respond to any criticism with “but the site is making a lot of money.”
I’ve worked with scores of companies in the dating and social networking space. for the most part, these are smaller sites pulling in $200k to a few million a year. None of them would have responded well to me saying “design doesn’t matter, advertise anything that will pay, drive traffic to your competitors and forget customer service.”
I wouldn’t want to work with them if they did. That’s not the type of client or conversation I’m interested in, for better or worse.
