Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Conspiracy Theory:The real story behind PlentyofFish

thisisgoingtobebig.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 24 posts

Re: Conspiracy Theory:The real story behind PlentyofFish

#2

Post by smoody »

"A scan of Twitter reveals a lot more people talking about actually using Match.com than Plentyoffish"

There's the biggest flaw in his theory. If you've scanned the people who have profiles on POF (or any other free dating service), you might draw the conclusion that the people using such services are not part of the tech elite. Yes, Twitter has a large user base but it is not mainstream.

Here's why it gets so many clicks: A lot of the ads on POF are for alternate online dating sites, so there's a 100% match between the people visiting the service and the people who might click on ads. By definition, if you're visiting POF, you're not in a relationship and thus POF isn't satisfying your need to be in a relationship. So what are you going to do? Search for a better dating site. And, coincidentally, POF has already done that work for you by surrounding every inch of unused space with dating site ads. It's both a dating site and a dating site search engine.

It's that simple in my opinion. But I do love a good conspiracy theory!

Re: Conspiracy Theory:The real story behind PlentyofFish

#3

Post by mechanical_fish »

This is so hilarious that it feels wrong to nitpick it. But in the interests of science, this survey technique:

A scan of Twitter reveals a lot more people talking about actually using Match.com than Plentyoffish...

... is like a freshman-class exercise in Spot The Sample Bias. Twitter users are hardly a representative sample of the online population, let alone the population at large.

Re: Conspiracy Theory:The real story behind PlentyofFish

#4

Post by markbao »

Interesting analysis, though it became a hit outrageous at the end. With the degree of fakeness he is proposing, how is it possible that the degradation of content quality went unnoticed? And A.viary?

I'm not one to hate on awesome and successful startupa, we should also consider this. POF doesn't have the members it says. POF had growth, decent size. Publicise startup story and millions in income, millions in members. Press written, and your numbers jump.

Just like the situation with a video on YouTube. It wasn't the video that made it have high view counts. It was the video being publicised as having a huge view counts because of an exploit - and people went on the page, and the view count increased.

Re: Conspiracy Theory:The real story behind PlentyofFish

#9

Post by jwesley »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #3

This is so hilarious that it feels wrong to nitpick it. But in the interests of science, this survey technique: A scan of Twitter reveals a lot more people talking about actually using Match.com than Plentyoffish... ... is like a freshman-class exercise in Spot The Sample Bias. Twitter users are hardly a representative sample of the online population, let alone the population at large.

Twitter users alone is a small sample, but I think there are other anecdotal samples that support (but can't prove) the author's hypothesis. I can't remember anyone talking about PlentyOfFish, and this includes people who have tried multiple dating sites. Compete, Alexa, Google Trends and other traffic estimators also show Match having higher traffic. The only statistics showing PlentyOfFish as bigger than Match are the comScore numbers quoted by Mashable.

It's also important to remember that Markus Frind was accused of overstating the PlentyOfFish traffic levels to generate buzz years ago when the site first became popular. Although the post went off into a satirical conspiracy, there could still be something fishy going on.

Post reply on HN