...and yet the site is one of the most unusable, unfriendly, and unattractive dating sites out there.
Add to that a total bitch-fest, cliques, heavy-handed mods.
PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a worse is better case study.
Or an example of the network effect overriding other condsiderations. PoF got big before OKC did, so that's where the people are. Even with that factor though, I found PoF borderline unusable after a little experimentation and stopped using them in favour of OKC. I can't believe I'm the only one like that, or that there aren't some who simply dropped off PoF into nothing. If that crappy site can extract value at such…
Yes and no.
At the scale pof operates at you have to A/B test everything because some things are very counter-intuitive.
My favorite anecdote of his (tried to find it on his blog but google is failing me) was when he briefly fixed the problem I hated most about the site: the aspect ratio of the profile pic thumbnails being off.
What happened is that it cost him lots of money. And the explanation as to why makes sense too: when the aspect ratio is messed up people can't tell at a glance what the person looks like so they click through to people's profiles a lot more instead of just scanning the top bar/search page. When your business model is based on page impressions getting people to load more pages means you get more money.
So in that case at least it's better for his pocket to have something that's obviously broken (and easy to fix) on the site.
Re: PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
#63"POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day (500 - 600 pages per second)." I find this more interesting than the parent article; although it seems clear hiring more people helped them expand (and handle that expansion) a lot, a single employee/founder doing that much is crazy impressive. From: http://…
Also from that link:
No built in components from ASP are used. Everything is written from scratch. Nothing is more complex than a simple if then and for loops.
and...
In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write. If you are doing over a million page views a day just write out the code to spit it out to the screen.
I think this goes a long way to explaining how this is all running on IIS on a seemingly "small" hardware infrastructure. Last company I worked for reimplemented a "classic" ASP app which was mostly in-page SQL statements calling stored procedures, with Response.Writes building the HTML. The new implementation, in ASP.NET, used .NET components, an ORM, an elegantly abstracted object model, agile methodologies, etc. It was slower than sludge compared to the old app.
Re: PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
#64i dont know how he did it with a name like plentyoffish and to do it all by himself, let alone from canada. that man has skills.
Re: PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "NAO" mean?
It means "now" as in... please write the article NAO, I CAN'T WAIT ANY LONGER!!!
One thing that annoys me learning Portuguese is that every time I see this word I keep interpreting it as no.
http://www.wordreference.com/pten/nao
Yes the a tilde diacritic is missing but its close enough. I also remember reading die in German sentences at the start and getting very confused in my brain for a while. Maybe its just me. :)
Re: PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
#66"POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day (500 - 600 pages per second)." I find this more interesting than the parent article; although it seems clear hiring more people helped them expand (and handle that expansion) a lot, a single employee/founder doing that much is crazy impressive. From: http://…
Also from that link: No built in components from ASP are used. Everything is written from scratch. Nothing is more complex than a simple if then and for loops. and... In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write. If you are doing over a million page views a day just write out the code to spit it out to the screen. I think this goes a long way to explain…
Had the same experience.
You can get too carried away with abstractions in .NET. Where I work it was the norm to have multiple layers, abstractions, frameworks etc... A consequence of this was 30 minute build times etc... I think the people working on the stuff initially just wanted to play with every language feature under the sun.
I ditched it all for a few simple layers (mostly MVC with LINQ to SQL) and as a result the application takes 2 seconds to compile, is very fast at runtime, and has no magic going and is easy enough you could hand it over to a junior developer to maintain.
Re: PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
#67Re: PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or an example of the network effect overriding other condsiderations. PoF got big before OKC did, so that's where the people are. Even with that factor though, I found PoF borderline unusable after a little experimentation and stopped using them in favour of OKC. I can't believe I'm the only one like that, or that there aren't some who simply dropped off PoF into nothing. If that crappy site can extract value at such…
Yes and no. At the scale pof operates at you have to A/B test everything because some things are very counter-intuitive. My favorite anecdote of his (tried to find it on his blog but google is failing me) was when he briefly fixed the problem I hated most about the site: the aspect ratio of the profile pic thumbnails being off. What happened is that it cost him lots of money. And the explanation as to why makes sense…
If your business model is dependent on being just awkward enough to use that you generate extra page impressions but not awkward enough that you drive away traffic, to borrow an aviation term you're flying awfully close to coffin corner. Particularly when you're dependent on network effects; if enough people start discovering something that's less awkward for them (such as OKC), the network effect will start working against you and you're suddenly so 2004 with a database of inactive users and a reputation for being awkward to use. Plus, if you're dependenet on awkward usability inherently generating more pageviews, surely by definition those pageviews are also more rapid so the time each ad is being displayed to each user is lower, so the savvy ad buyer would also be paying less.
Now, I could make the case that PoF has ridden the wave for long enough to build Markus enough money that if it all fails tomorrow he's still made for life and only really lost pride, but....
Re: PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another point in function over design, just like Craigslist.
Not really. Contrast the cluttered mess that is PoF to OkCupid, which has decent usability and reasonable information architecture. OkC's design is also better at extracting the right information from more users more consistently, meaning the resulting corpus of data is more complete. Which makes for a better product, since it's easier to find the sort of people you'd be into. PoF is successful in spite of its questi…
>PoF is successful in spite of its questionable design, not because of it.
Wasn't that what I said?