PlentyOfFish evolution

PlentyOfFish was born free from its genesis (ads supported + commissions earned by sending prospective customers to paid online dating sites, its motto was "This is a 100% Free Dating Service - No Charges Ever", "Put Away Your Credit Card"); then it morphed to a paid site.

The first paid proposal (March 2009) was the "Serious Member Badge". Prospective customers should had passed a Sincerity and Integrity Test before they were allowed to acquire that proposal. It performed as a virtual gift for yourself, a virtual gold medal saying “Serious Member”.


The second and actual paid proposal (August 2011) is different from the first one. It includes a "home grown" compatibility matching system called UltraMatch; a Behavioural Recommendation Engine.
That exclusive feature is only available to users with an upgraded membership, who could discover their most compatible matches on PlentyOfFish.

As one PlentyOfFish member had said in the forums "we don't even know what's in the "regular matches" formula (beyond age/height/child status/smoking/distance variables) much less the "Ultra Matches" formula to know if PAYING to upgrade to "Ultra Matches" is even worth it."

The effectiveness/efficiency level of Behavioural Matching Algorithms are less than 10%!!!
They cannot break ...... The Online Dating Sound Barrier.

PlentyOfFish as a paid site now.

PlentyOfFish wants to be like Badoo in some features.
PlentyOfFish should be classified as a paid online dating site now, and not as a free one.
The "Put away your credit card forever" motto had been thrown away!

As PlentyOfFish stores credit cards numbers, What about security issues? Is it externally audited? (Remember the big hacking incident of last January)

Are free (non paying) members allowed to contact paying members?
Does PlentyOfFish conduct criminal background checks on each member before allowing them to contact other members on the site?
Does PlentyOfFish disclose the % of paying members?
As PlentyOfFish Media Inc. is a Canadian company, but operates mainly in the United States of America, and as a paid online dating site can match U.S. citizens/residents with foreigns promoting marriage; Does PlentyOfFish Media Inc. need to comply with the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005?
Because only dating services that do not match U.S. citizens/residents with aliens as their principal business and that charge comparable rates and offer comparable services to ALL clients, regardless of gender or country of citizenship are exempted.

Remember the Jana Claudia Gómez Menéndez case.

If PlentyOfFish is blocked in Argentina, Brazil and other countries, How active profiles of women and men from Argentina and Brazil are shown when you search? Or those profiles are scammers in USA who create fake profiles?

PlentyOfFish is NOW a paid online dating site!!!

PlentyOfFish has introduced some changes recently including some new designs and features.

* PlentyOfFish redirects to POF
* Online IM chat which also has the capability of video chat!
* The paid membership plans.
PRICES:
1 year at USD6.78/month (USD81.40)
6 months at USD8.50/month (USD51.00)
3 months at USD11.80/month (USD35.40)

in order to use UltraMatch, PlentyOfFish's newest and most advanced Behavioural Matchmaking System!
* With the upgrade you will have the Badoo_like improvement in your profile rankings within searches.

PlentyOfFish is NOW a paid online dating site.

Is PlentyOfFish a free or paid site now?

As from its FAQ's

What is the Ultra Match feature?

Ultra Match is our newest and most advanced Behavioural Matchmaking System!

This exclusive feature is only available to users with an upgraded membership.

Simply click on Ultra Match on the top banner to discover your most compatible matches on PlentyOfFish. This list is sorted by compatibility, so your most compatible matches are listed first.

Ultra Match feature PlentyOfFish

As eVow failed, the owners of PlentyOfFish launched, more than one month ago, the Ultra Match feature, a paid feature inside a free online dating site.

Ultra Match feature says "astronomical computing power required to generate these matches in real time" ???

As one PlentyOfFish member had said "And that kind of goes back to my main question here: we don't even know what's in the "regular matches" formula (beyond age/height/child status/smoking/distance variables) much less the "Ultra Matches" formula to know if PAYING to upgrade to "Ultra Matches" is even worth it."

"The site simply doesn't seem as honest as it used to be. I'm definitely not bothered by the implentation of NEW tools that are pay-only from the beginning (like Ultra Match) -"

"I wouldn't think it's worth it either. I don't think having access to "Ultra Match" and a few other things is worth the cost, especially seeing how hit-and-miss the usual matching can be."

If POF is blocked in Argentina, how local singles from Argentina can be displayed???
 

interesting article about PlentyOfFish

The Globe and Mail had published an interesting article about PlentyOfFish.

No word about the PlentyOfFish Chemistry Predictor or PlentyOfFish Marriage Predictor or the Serious Member Badge or the failed try to sell virtual goods or the commissions paid by paid online dating sites to free sites in order to be profitable nor the USD200,000 paid to appear in  Britney Spears' "Hold it Against Me" or the money paid to Lady Gaga's "Telephone" musical videos or the money spent in TV ads "Your Other Half is Waiting" and "Find Your Other Half" nor the ads in the NYC subway and on taxis and buses in Boston nor the Speed Dating events.

The annual revenue of IAC's Personals (Match, Chemistry & others) is USD 400 million.
The annual revenue of PlentyOfFish is in the range of USD 30 - 40 million.
Nearly the same persons who paid to Match are the ones who want to use PlentyOfFish for free, paying with precious time.

The "Behavioral Matching Engine" at PlentyOfFish is performing as placebo, effectiveness/efficiency level less than 10%.

PlentyOfFish is transferred to Pof

 I had noticed 4 days ago, the traffic of PlentyOfFish is transferred to Pof. Now all the traffic is concentrated to Pof.

Badoo's COO (Bart Swanson) Interviewed By StrategyEye

Badoo's COO (Bart Swanson) Interviewed By StrategyEye

KEY POINTS:
Dating sites are after people who are looking for serious relationships.
Badoo is in over 180 countries, and monetise in over 120 countries, with 30 to 40 different payment methods.
The only number that Badoo released was in December last year that Badoo's has a run rate north of USD 100 million.
The number of users that pay, in certain European countries it can be somewhere between 5 to 15% of users, obviously in other countries, like in South America, it can be less than 1%.
Badoo's users, on average, meet 8 people online.
They end up talking and roughly 50% of those people meet face to face.
Badoo is first and foremost a free service.
2 ways in to monetise. By customers who pay for subscriptions, getting various added services such as advanced search. The other part is the premium one-offs (you can promote yourself and digital gifts).
(the hottest trend in digital media right now) Location-based services on mobile, because I think everybody is seeing the same trends that we’re seeing and I don't think it's just early adopters.
But I am tired of saying: WOMEN do not like location awareness because they feel being hunted by men.

Remember I had estimated Badoo's revenue in a previous post.

I also asked "Will Badoo collapse soon?"
I am testing Badoo Argentina and discovered the real database of active members is
5% women
and
95% men

Online Dating mini report

Online Dating mini report, they use data from IBISWorld

PAPER: The Role Of Linguistic Properties In Online Dating Communication

"The Role Of Linguistic Properties In Online Dating Communication – A Large-Scale Study Of Contact Initiation Messages"

For people who look for a partner, online dating largely increases the pool of potential mates. At the same time, users of online dating platforms have to cope with a large number of approaches and, therefore, need to choose selectively who they decide to engage in a conversation with. Especially, since the costs of rejection are low on online dating platforms, it is a common strategy to spam others with superficial approaches. With this in mind, and in the absence of nonverbal cues, targets base their decision of whether or not to respond to a message on (a) their impression of the sender's pictures, and (b) cues which they extract from the content of the message.
The purpose of this study is to hypothesize on which linguistic properties of a message in computer-mediated communication may signal various qualities of its sender, to predict how those properties determine a target's decision of whether to respond or to ignore an initial message. Employing the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis, relevant variables are operationalized from a corpus of 167,276 initial messages of an online dating platform. Regression analysis is performed in order to test the hypotheses. Results are discussed with respect to design implications for online dating platforms.

... we review the literature with respect to how the usage of words of particular categories in a message may signal various personality traits and formulate hypotheses on the effects on a target's decision to respond to a message or not.

The tremendous growth of the online dating industry (van Grove 2010) has led to the possibility for people to initiate contact with potential partners at a scale that is unprecedented in human history.
Both females and males are less likely to respond to an initial message if the sender uses more self-references. People seem to associate personality traits (e.g., depressive symptoms; Rude et al. 2004) with such behavior which discourages them to further engage in conversations.
As expected, female targets are more likely to respond to lengthier messages while men are less likely to reply to such messages. This gender difference suggests that men should invest more time to articulate longer messages while women should keep the communication shorter if they want to be more successful in receiving feedback.

eHarmony is TODAY a 11 years old obsolete site, a HOAX.

eHarmony is TODAY August 22nd, 2011 a 11 years old obsolete site, a HOAX.
You cannot stay 11 years in the Online Dating Industry without innovating, saying "scientifically proven" and eHarmony does not have any proof (peer reviewed scientific paper) and scamming members with automatic rebilling.



Parship is nearly 11 years old obsolete site, a HOAX.
True is a 8+ years old obsolete site, a HOAX.
PerfectMatch is a 8+ years old obsolete site, a HOAX.
Chemistry is a 6 years old obsolete site, a HOAX.
Meetic Affinity (Match Affinity or Dating Direct Affinity in UK) a 6 years old obsolete proposal, a HOAX.
The PlentyOfFish Chemistry Predictor is a HOAX.
FriendScout24 BQ-check is also a HOAX.
Be2 game over, it was also a HOAX.
OkCupid, Zoosk, Badoo are only for fun dating, for entertainment purposes.

Actual Online Dating sites and many Researchers / Academics are fully intoxicated with different versions of the FFI five factor inventory / Big5 or other proprietary models instead (like Chemistry or PerfectMatch), to measure personality traits, and all of those tests are more simplified versions than the 16PF5 normative personality test.

WorldWide, there are over 5,000 online dating sites
but no one is using the 16PF5 (or similar test) to assess personality of its members.
Without offering the 16PF5 (or similar test measuring exactly the 16 personality factors) for serious dating, it will be impossible to innovate and revolutionize the Online Dating Industry

Obsolescence of Dating Sites offering Compatibility Matching Methods

Online Dating Thesis

If you had read this thesis from August 2010, remember:

Actual Online Dating sites and many Researchers / Academics are fully intoxicated with different versions of the FFI five factor inventory / Big5 or other proprietary models instead (like Chemistry or PerfectMatch), to measure personality traits, and all of those tests are more simplified versions than the 16PF5 normative personality test.

WorldWide, there are over 5,000 online dating sites
but no one is using the 16PF5 (or similar test) to assess personality of its members.
Without offering the 16PF5 (or similar test measuring exactly the 16 personality factors) for serious dating, it will be impossible to innovate and revolutionize the Online Dating Industry.

The Terrible Cost Of Patents

Erick Schonfeld had written an interesting article about "The Terrible Cost Of Patents" at TechCrunch.

* We are in the middle of a patent bubble.
* Technology companies are spending billions of dollars on assets which they need primarily to defend themselves against the rising tide of patent litigation, they won't invest in new products, new jobs, new facilities or other economically productive activities. And by and large, they will not use those patents to create new products.
* What you and I might consider an improvement, a patent lawyer might consider infringement.
* Patents were originally conceived to protect inventors—people and companies who contribute to the advancement of society by creating new products. But in the past decade, something went horribly wrong. Patents are increasingly became nothing more than financial and legal weapons, to be amassed in portfolios by "non-practicing entities" (i.e. patent trolls) and used to extort protection money from economically productive companies.

More info from PricewaterhouseCoopers full pdf study "Patent litigation trends 1995-2009 and the impact of recent court decisions on damages."

Class Action Calls Match a 'Scam'

Class Action Calls Match a 'Scam' / More than 90% of potential dates are "phantoms," suit charges

More than 90 percent of the potential dates on Match are canceled subscribers, people who never subscribed, duplicates, or phantoms the company created to snare its USD40 a month subscription fee, a class action claims in Federal Court.
According  to  its  website,  "20,000  singles"  join  the Match community  every  day  and  "hundreds  of  thousands" of people  find  love  on  Match.com  every year, the suit notes.

Please read "Match marketing campaign morphed"
and remember last January, the CEO for Latam Countries, Mr. Claudio Gandelman from Match Argentina recognized 75% inactive profiles.
"Caras y Caretas" (Faces and Masks) is a high society magazine.
Article "Te espero en la banda ancha" (I wait you in the BroadBand, article about the Online Dating Industry Market in Argentina) page 84.
- Match Argentina claims 4 million Argentinean profiles, but admits they are only 1 million active profiles (not paying members, only active profiles). The article, written by the journalist Juan Pablo Urfeig clearly says "Desde Match reconocen que de los cuatro millones de inscriptos en el país, sólo un millón se mantiene activo"
"From Match, they recognize that the four million registered in the country (Argentina), only one million are still active"
[i.e. 75% of profiles at Match Argentina are useless at all, they are inactive]

Match marketing campaign morphed

Have you seen Match is asking affiliates to stop mentioning total number of profiles or signups per day?

"We would like to ask for your immediate assistance in removing any marketing copy that refers to the number of free or paid members on Match or the estimated volume of users joining Match on a daily basis. Examples of such copy that we have seen includes, but is not limited to, 'Over 15 million members' or 'Over 20,000 singles join Match every day'. Due to a change in the Match advertising policy, these types of marketing claims are no longer allowed.        
In addition, if you are currently using or find any creative or landing pages that quote these types of claims please let us know.  We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, but appreciate your prompt action.         
Please be assured that Match continues to be a leader in the online dating industry and plans to continue its aggressive investment in its brand through television advertising, online display, search, e-mail marketing, and affiliate marketing as it has for the past 15 years.         
We appreciate your support."

Is it due to Match Lawsuit ?
Lawsuit Claims More Than Half Of Match.com Profiles Are Inactive Or Fake

Match's marketing campaign morphed to "1 in 5 Relationships Start Online & More of Them Start at Match"

NEW PoF Portuguese Version

In a previous post I had discovered PlentyOfFish translated to German, Spanish and French.

Now PlentyOfFish is available in Portuguese.

It seems the owners of PlentyOfFish are improving the site to sell it as soon as possible.

Time to begin denouncing the
"PlentyOfFish Chemistry Predictor"
"Teste de Personalidade do Plentyoffish - Química no Relacionamento"
"Predictor de Química en relaciones de Plentyoffish"
"Die Plentyoffish Beziehungstest-Vorhersage (POFCP/POFBV)"
"Test de personnalité de PlentyOfFish"
as a HOAX, a big FRAUD in several Consumers' Associations worldwide.

NEWS about eHarmony

eHarmony wants you subscribing to the whole year (eHarmony PREMIER plan USD 41.95 per month, billed in one payment of USD 503.40)
Remember in other post I had written about high acquisition costs in the Online Dating Industry. (Meetic and Meetic Affinity)

When you first create a profile, eHarmony used to send you 7 new matches, but they are 8 now.

See the explanation about their matching system. It is not a credible version about how it really works.

The NetLog case

1) falling down due to Facebook effect.
2) trying to resurrect inside Facebook.
3) Facebook bans NetLog.

OKCupid says to Online Dating Industry to Innovate or Die

Last February 2008, Founder of America's Largest Free Online Dating Site Speaking at iDate2008 on the Need to Embrace Bold, New Ideas.
"OKCupid says to Online Dating Industry to Innovate or Die"

But what really happened? After 4 years of that article, they sold te company to Match (the IAC) and ran with the money.
because Match (the IAC) does not want to innovate.