How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009) • Hacker News Board

Re: How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009)

#11

Post by puranjay » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 7:51 PM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #6

SN76477 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have dabbled in their self serve platform some, it is just so slow. But I dig the company and their approach. Does tinder have much marketshare? I should do my research :(

Tinder has around 40m profiles. PoF has around 90m. Tinder interaction is much more superficial than PoF, of course, due to the nature of each platform and the amount of user information captured by each. Tinder has far more "swipes" (how they measure activity) than PoF has page views (how all websites measure activity) - to the point that Tinder has about a billion swipes per day and PoF has around 2 billion page vi…

Isn't Tinder just far better poised to capture future dating traffic seeing its dominance on mobile? I can't see a long-term future for web based dating platforms. PoF's mobile audience is tiny compared to Tinder

Re: How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009)

#12

Post by downandout » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #8

heldtogether wrote: post #7

I still cite this article when discussing A/B testing with clients. They often want to bypass the testing process because "it's an obvious change". "There's no point in making trivial adjustments, ... on a site this big and this complex, it is impossible to predict how even the smallest changes might affect the bottom line. Fixing the wonky images, for instance, might actually hurt Plenty of Fish. Right now, users ar…

This guy is essentially saying that providing better customer experience would reduce number of clicks and his pageviews and thus his income. I think almost nothing should prevent providing better customer experience. This is also a problem with A/B testing. If your test is optimizing page views or ad revenue as opposed to customer satisfaction, you are probably doing it wrong. Better matrix might be increase in numb…

>This guy is essentially saying that providing better customer experience would reduce number of clicks and his pageviews and thus his income

The problem is that "better" is in the eye of the beholder. That is why split testing is favorable even if the proposed changes seem obviously "better". There is no legitimate reason to skip split testing, but there are a number of reasons to not skip it.

Re: How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009)

#13

Post by curiously » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

I remember I was blowing money on the self serve ads, felt like a huge scam, week after week. still have some money left there but quit altogether because it was so hard to make money off CPM ads, and especially you didn't know if you were bidding the right amount.

POF was attractive because it was free but now they started to monetize more and the quality overall has gone down.

Re: How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009)

#14

Post by holon » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 8:23 PM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #11

JohnTHaller wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tinder has around 40m profiles. PoF has around 90m. Tinder interaction is much more superficial than PoF, of course, due to the nature of each platform and the amount of user information captured by each. Tinder has far more "swipes" (how they measure activity) than PoF has page views (how all websites measure activity) - to the point that Tinder has about a billion swipes per day and PoF has around 2 billion page vi…

Isn't Tinder just far better poised to capture future dating traffic seeing its dominance on mobile? I can't see a long-term future for web based dating platforms. PoF's mobile audience is tiny compared to Tinder

Tried Tinder as an experiment. Hated it. I would prefer to base my approach to online dating on personality rather than a single profile picture. The entire Tinder experience is incredibly superficial and facilitates hookups rather than actually meeting interesting people.

I see web-based dating platforms as something that will always have a userbase.

Re: How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009)

#15

Post by jordsmi » Sun, Mar 22, 2015, 10:40 PM UTC

holon wrote: post #14

puranjay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Tinder just far better poised to capture future dating traffic seeing its dominance on mobile? I can't see a long-term future for web based dating platforms. PoF's mobile audience is tiny compared to Tinder

Tried Tinder as an experiment. Hated it. I would prefer to base my approach to online dating on personality rather than a single profile picture. The entire Tinder experience is incredibly superficial and facilitates hookups rather than actually meeting interesting people. I see web-based dating platforms as something that will always have a userbase.

Tinder is more for hooking up than dating, which is the big difference between the two.

Re: How Plentyoffish Conquered Online Dating (2009)

#16

Post by us0r » Mon, Mar 23, 2015, 7:12 AM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #6

SN76477 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have dabbled in their self serve platform some, it is just so slow. But I dig the company and their approach. Does tinder have much marketshare? I should do my research :(

Tinder has around 40m profiles. PoF has around 90m. Tinder interaction is much more superficial than PoF, of course, due to the nature of each platform and the amount of user information captured by each. Tinder has far more "swipes" (how they measure activity) than PoF has page views (how all websites measure activity) - to the point that Tinder has about a billion swipes per day and PoF has around 2 billion page vi…

Not sure if you have updated info but according to his blog he was at 2 billion page views per WEEK back in 2012.

https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/