Looks like POF refused to post my comment on their blog announcing eVow, so I’m posting it here.
Why did POF start eVow?
Now i looked around the market and noticed that no one was actually catering to people that wanted to find relationships.
Jaw drops.
PlentyofFish is launched a paid dating site because they have hit the revenue ceiling on free dating. To continue to grow, they need to get subscription dollars. Serious daters don’t really factor into eVow at all. If they want to pay, they will take the money and not block them if they are not “serious daters.” I was able to join and say that I am not a serious dater, so where is the filter? If it’s self-selecting, they the subscription fee is the filter. Perhaps they kick people off who are not serious, but it should happen in the signup process, and it doesn’t, at least that I could see.
It feels like POF without the ads and a cleaner design, which has it’s positives. The first date feature needs a lot of work, asking how long people think a first date should be is useless. Make it a text field and let people expose some of their personality, something that POF never really understood, so it shouldn’t surprise us when they don’t get it on eVow.
Markus says over 100,000 people joined in the first week. That’s an incredible number, hard to comprehend that it happened organically.
Another new site that popped up is eHarmony’s Jazzed. It’s a competitor to Match, and it’s traffic barely registers. Everyone is copying everyone else, doing a poor job of it, and suffering the consequences, either changing direction, or simply, and more egregiously, letting the site limp along in life-support mode.
Writing this made me realize why I took the summer off from blogging. Remember the old adage “If you don’t have something good to say, you should keep your mouth shut?” Fat chance.
