PlentyofFish members can now pimp their dating profiles with themes. Most of the themes have that distinctive early Myspace feel to them, when people figured out you could trick the layout into doing things Myspace never imagined (actually, it was a bug that turned into it’s biggest early feature).
Do daters at the worlds largest free dating site want generic clip art on their profiles? We’ll see. It may be worthwhile to note that these really aren’t themes, they’re background images, and I can’t even see mine unless my browser window is full-screen. I picked the musical notes background, although I might switch it to the roses theme and see how that works for me. What I really want is a pony or a unicorn. Twitter lets people upload their own backgrounds, why doesn’t PlentyofFish?
Bottom line: PlentyofFish continues to look more and more like Myspace, whereas OKCupid is moving in the direction of Facebook – not really but you know what I mean if you’ve been on both sites. There is nothing wrong with the direction POF is going, but talk about the tail wagging the dog. Markus is painted into a corner. The site gets a hell of a lot of traffic, but what to do with it?
You can only sell people badges and unicorn themes for only so long before they get tired and revolt. Myspace makes a lot more money than Facebook (at least until the Google money runs out next year) but look at the trend, Facebook finally overtook Myspace traffic recently and their monetization strategy, while nascent, is evolving.
PlentyofFish has done a stupendous job attracted people who refuse to pay for online dating. Now they have to deal with millions of people too cheap to pay for online dating. This is a markedly different approach than SinglesNet, which charges a subscription and has similar visitor traffic.
Another new feature at POF is the ability to signal that you want to go out on a date next Friday night. This is like OKCupid’s crazy blind date, without the crazy and the blind parts. I signed up, we’ll see what happens. I don’t understand why it has to be Friday night though.
More at the Paradigm Shift.
