PlentyofFish Press

How A Computer Nerd Revolutionized Online Dating

VANCOUVER MAGAZINE - Nov 20 - Markus Frind, the founder, CEO, and sole owner of Plentyoffish.com, works as little as he desires. He’s been quoted as saying he works about 10 hours a week. Plentyoffish.com now has 16M users, earns tens of millions of dollars a year, and is growing 80% a year. Alexa ranks Plentyoffish.com the 35th most trafficked site in Canada and the 100th in the US. It serves up 2.4 billion page views/month.

Plentyoffish.com spends far less money than other sites do. Match.com and eHarmony.com each spend $100M a year on advertising. They run thousands of costly servers even though their traffic is smaller than that of Plentyoffish.com, which has only 11 machines.

The next level Frind aims to conquer is the world of “scientific” dating research. Companies like Chemistry.com, eHarmony.com and Genepartner.com hire psychologists and scientists to design questionnaires and even DNA tests to help people find mates. Frind did hire a relationship psychologist to create “compatibility matching tools” for Plentyoffish.com. Now he thinks he can do better with his own algorithms. “The science of dating,” Frind scoffs, “is all BS.” Those much-heralded matching tools are only 15 or 20% better than chance. And does Frind think he can optimize and tweak his way to beat that score? “I could double or triple it.”

Shoemoney’s Post.

THE PARADIGM SHIFT -- Nov 19 -- Here is shoemoney’s post.

I never invested a dime into blitzlocal.   I invested  a small amount of money in a company that was building websites for charities, including the guy who won the nobel peace prize.   The company went under,  and somehow  my shares transfered to blizlocal, although no one elses did.   I’ve never talked to anyone on the board of directors at blitzlocal or seen any business plan or spoken with any employees,  although “supposidly” i’m on the board.     After reading shoemoneys post i went and looked at the operating agreement.   Since I didn’t do anything required in the operating agreement I don’t see how I even could be an investor.   I don’t really care one way or the other.

I must say the pannel at affiliate summit  with me shoemoney dennis and others at affiliate summit west is going to be most interseting.

Plentyoffish Self Service Advertising Platform.

THE PARADIGM SHIFT -- Nov 17 -- In the next half hour we will start serving ads from our own self service advertising platform  located at  ads.pof.com   Our ads are in the same format as the facebook ads so it should be pretty easy for advertisers to use the same format.

We are different from nearly every other ad platform.    Instead of guessing at who your ads will reach you can target based on zip code, age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, profession,  if a user drinks, smokes   etc etc.

This first version of our system is meant for advanced users,   as we have many sophisticated advertisers spending 50k+ a month with us and we wanted to move them over as fast as possible and give them as many targeting options as possible.      Our next version will be more targeted towards local advertisers  who don’t need a million and one targeting options and just want to reach people within a 5-10 mile radius of their business.     You can advertise locally now,  but if you have never used online advertising it will seem alien.

US Congress Investigates True.com And Eharmony For Scamming ?

THE PARADIGM SHIFT -- Nov 17 -- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/17/ecommerce-scams-hundreds_n_361140.html

This is a bit of a surprise…  Why would dating sites put up interstitials?

PlentyofFish.com Teams Up With Lady Gaga

PRESS RELEASE -- Nov 11 -- PlentyofFish.com, the world's largest free dating site with more than 17 million members, has partnered with Iconic recording artist, Lady Gaga. The site is sponsoring a contest for single fans to win a “date of a lifetime” with Lady Gaga during her upcoming North American concert tour, “The Monster Ball.” Two lucky winners will be selected per concert stop. PlentyofFish.com will also be giving away tickets and backstage passes for each stop. Visit www.plentyoffish.com/gaga for complete details. FULL ARTICLE @ EIN NEWS

PlentyofFish.com Demographic Tool Provides Interesting Insight

PLENTYOFFISH DATING TIPS BLOG - Nov 10 – PlentyofFish.com offers a demographic breakdown of members based on the interests they provide in a tool in their advertising section. This offering can prove both useful and fun, as one user recounts: A large majority of vegetarians are female, vegetarians often have higher levels of education, and they are less likely to drink. FULL ARTICLE @ POF DATING TIPS BLOG

Mobile Scams & Yahoo…

THE PARADIGM SHIFT -- Nov 3 -- It looks like sites are quickly taking down the mobile scams thanks to techcrunch.  Hopefully datehookup will be the next one to stop scamming users with mobile offers.

These offers also run through rightmedia on yahoo,  and its one of the reasons I could never use their network.   The problem was that there were networks running several banners promoting these mobile offers that would say you have new messages,  or  check your inbox etc and it would blend into my site perfectly.   The CTR was well over 2 or 3% and my total daily pageviews would decline by 3 or 4%.    It would hurt my site in a big way when those offers got through.

As a side note,  Yahoo told me a few weeks ago that all dating sites were banned from advertising on yahoo and the only way dating sites could now advertise was by buying traffic via right media  no more direct sales.    Is this true or is it just restricted to free dating sites?

Plentyoffish Date Of A Lifetime With A Superstar

THE PARADIGM SHIFT -- Nov 2 -- Plentyoffish is sending 42 lucky singles on a blind date of a lifetime.  Enter our contest and we will send you on a date with another single were you will have backstage/VIP passes to lady gagas  concert in your city.  This is really a once in a lifetime experience so signup now!

Virtual Currency Scams

THE PARADIGM SHIFT -- Nov 1 -- Looks like the media finally wakes up to the fact that much of the social gaming/virtual currency is in fact a complete scam.   Its been a open secret for at least the last 3 years,  that no one ever questioned any of this is absolutely amazing.

A lot of the networks promoting these offers are nothing but a smoke screen and if you dig deep enough you will see many of the people/companies pushing the offers are facing multiple lawsuits in many states.    The top people/companies in these scams are pulling in revenues of over a million dollars a day.   Should be interesting to see just how much of an effect this will have on facebooks revenues.