Markus at Plentyoffish let me know about his post today, Worlds top dating sites for August from comscore.
I’ve stopped using paid dating sites for a few months to gauge firsthand how effective free dating sites are. Basically I’ve been on Facebook dating apps, Plentyoffish and OKCupid. Someone asked me about mobile apps recently. I personaly don’t use mobile apps for the most part. Why squint at the screen when I can go home and view on a 24″ monitor. I’m not in that much of a rush to get a date. I know, thats just me, but mobile clones of the desktop just aren’t interesting anymore.
Based on a few months on Plentyoffish, here are a few personal observations, some of which go against what I’ve been saying for years, but things change as the online dating industry evolves.
I wouldn’t date 98% of the women on Plentyoffish, but the 2% I would date is getting to be a huge number and I can’t avoid this anymore. There seems to be a lot more attractive women on the site compared to a few years ago. Some people are going to hate me for saying that but it’s true.
Match says you are paying for customer service. Sure Markus has lots of complaints in the forums but if you don’t get in trouble and act accordingly, who needs customer service? How much customer service is related to billing at a site like Match or eHarmony? Can a free site with no paid help deliver results like a free site? I used to think not, and the fact is that people pay for assistance. Would you buy a free car if there wasn’t a dealership to take it to?
Plentyoffish is like crack, the whole site is built to keep you clicking on faces through a variety of means. The embarrassing “people who haven’t gotten email in 24 hours” display and the constant barrage of photos on every page keeps me clicking like crazy.
The more you click the more likely you are to come across someone you want to meet. This is what kills eHarmony. I’m hearing of people getting 7 matches a month, which is ridiculous.
I end up clicking on a lot of Plentyoffish profiles because so many women (men too) have terrible photos or one blurry photo and that has me moving on without a glance. If a photo isn’t up to par, it should be removed. I don’t know how that would be measured but it sure would help. I would also outlaw people who hold camera in front of themselves in bathroom mirror photos, personal pet peeve. Women, go ahead and continue to show too much cleavage on Plentyoffish. That’s why many men consider it a pickup site. If I could filter on women in suggestive poses I would, because they are 99.999% of the time not my type.
So what if the freemium model at Plentyoffish isn’t compelling? Does it really matter? I’m the first to admit that I sometimes need to get off my high horse when it comes to the perceived quality of dating sites. Most people just want a date and could care less what a site looks like or functions. They just want to be discovered.
A few constructive criticisms that no doubt Markus can refute. I am completely aware that on many sites, things that don’t make sense to me, or seem broken, are actually designed that way on purpose. This is why having access to dating site statistics is so incredibly important and why it’s unfortunate that generic dating sites never do anything with the wealth of information at their fingertips.
Fix the photo system, the display doesn’t work very well, I’m always mousing over the photos and having to readjust to view the profile. Go browse a few people and you’ll see what I mean.
The profile layout needs to be redone. Put everything above the fold, don’t make me scroll down on each and every profile. Match is brilliant, you see everything you need to see immediately. On Plentyoffish I have to focus, scan, scroll and interpret the text, which is a pain and takes too much time. Markus can afford a designer now, change the serious member logo, it’s awful. This is why I am not a designer and I outsource all client User Experience and UI stuff to Thought-Rocket. If it was up to me everything would have lots of whitespace around it and look like it was designed in Europe.
I despise the big-boobed ads for human pheromones next to every single woman’s photos. That’s tacky and crass. The crap-tastic ads for the competition are getting stale as well. Then again, I’ve been looking at the site for five years inside my little bubble. People will put up with a lot of junk if something is free.
I’m amazed at the amount of traffic Plentyoffish is getting, north of 100 million visits a month I believe. And the visits per month kicks everyone else off the chart. These numbers are so much higher than Compete reports it’s ridiculous, although Quantcast seems to peg them at 200 million monthly visitors.
The exact numbers don’t matter, what matters is that Plentyoffish is destroying the free dating competition and paid dating will now always be a smaller market than free. This doesn’t mean that free is better, just, free, which is enough of a value proposition for millions of singles to join free dating sites. There will always be those who will gladly pay for the privilege of meeting online for many other reasons. Do you want to go to a KOA Campground or a boutique hotel? The choice is yours to make.
Food for thought: anyone can go buy a boatload of traffic like Singlesnet and True and get into the top ten dating site list. How can we as an industry gauge how good a dating site is when not taking traffic into account as the sole metric by which success is measured?
