Incredible Media coverage today.

I tried to arrange something in secret with only a few hours notice.     It completely blew up with lots of news papers showing up,  The today show,  local TV stations and  CNN called and said they would be there (There was so much media there by the end of the night no one has a clue who was all there)  and New york times has been calling people this morning.

Word is really starting to get out there,  about how Plentyoffish is more than a dating site and changing what online dating means.

Newsweek Looks at Plentyoffish.

Newsweek has a article that looks to see if free dating sites like Plentyoffish and Craigslist are killing off the paid dating industry.    Looks like there is only a summary online.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/18881820/site/newsweek/

WSJ Article on plentyoffish.

I’ve been getting a lot of attention latelybecause Plentyoffish climbed something like 40 spots on the rankings in 30 days (March/april)  to get into the top 100 sites in the US based on visitors.    And even comscore is reporting Plentyoffish’s usage metrics are going through the roof.   With the average user returning more then every second day to the site.

Its been a strange week already,  Rumors of Bebo being bought for 1 billion,   Techcrunch saying nothing is new and bloggers wanting to quit.     I think there is lots new,  we are on the verge of a massive paradigm shift and  this blog breaks down a paradigm shift well and why so few people see it coming.  

Right now no one knows what to make of me and just writes me off as some odd datapoint,  i’ve come out of nowhere to run a site that no one else has figured out how to do with less than 300 employees.    I feel like the first car, and everyone else is still getting around in carriages drawn by 10’s of horses.    Now if a stranger who has only ever known horses were to ask where are all the horses to pull your car?  How do you explain what a motor is and make that person understand?

Vancouver is at the heart.

In many ways vancouver is at the heart of the new web in the last few years at least when it comes to making huge amounts of money with little to no resources.    Flickr started here,  Adware,  casino’s and domainers etc.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/

What is surprising is that its actually a very small group of  very smart people in vancouver that make a lot money across a lot of industries.  I know some of the key players,  so its always interesting to see stories like these.   Probably going to turn out to be a race to see who can make a billion first from the web in Vancouver.

The winds of Change.

Lots has happened in the last year.

Canada.

Lavalife’s parent company  got taken out by a private equity group.  Alexa says lavalife lost 43% of its traffic in the last 3 months.   We lost a lot of traffic as well because of facebook but no where near 43%. Every major ranking service including comscore Says plentyoffish is number 1 in canada.

UK.
Meetic bought  Datingdirect one of the biggest dating sites in the UK for around 27.3 million pounds.  Daily mailgroup  bought Allegrans dating sites.   Plentyoffish has gone from no where to 3rd in the UK mainstream market.   Market is split between Match.com,  Meetic, Plentyoffish and Allegran.    Singlesnet and Mate1 are now trying to break into the market.

USA.
Singlesnet and True take the lead.  Americansingles and every other former second tier player gets knocked out of the top 10.    Plentyoffish has gone from 140th ranked site overall to top 80 in the US in the last 2 months according to some ranking firms,  blowing past both Yahoo personals and Match and is now ranking 3rd place.   Last year all the second tier sites got replaced and this year all the former first tier sites got knocked out.  No M&A to report here.  

Australia,.

 RSVP the leading dating site got bought by Fairfax for $38.92 Australian.   Plentyoffish is 8th spot now,   but australia is such a tiny country with a low currency no one cares. None of the other major sites are trying to break into the market.

Over all market trends.

Couple of free sites got some funding,  none have shown any year over year  market share gain,   okcupid and matchdoctor where 2 and 3 last year.  okcupid barely takes 4th place now and is on course to take 5th spot this month in the US market for free sites.   Fling.com  came out of nowhere and is taking over the adult market.    Porn like advertising  has become the norm  for paid sites, and is fueling the growth behind true.com, singlesnet  and to some extent mate1 with all their cleavage ads.   

Upgrading servers.

When you get big and do stuff no one else does  there are endless people who have never built a big application come out and say its impossible,   i’m lieing etc.   

http://www.thelinuxlink.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=14426

I did a more in-depth case study with microsoft a while back but not sure when that will come out.  But since then i’ve upgraded my web server.    I’m now using a server with 2 Quad Core Intel chips(Zeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz),  8 Gigs of ram (only using about 800 megs)  and 2 hard drives using  windows x64  server  2003.  Total cost was a couple of grand.       The system works a lot better when going over 2 million pageviews an hour.    All outbound Data is being Gzipped and even than only 30% CPU usage.   To clarify I have only 1 webserver that serves all those pageviews.    Most of the 100 million plus image requests a day are running through akamai.  This server does serve 10’s of millions of image requests directly,  but most of those images are in ram so its not much of a load.

This server wasn’t originally ment to be a webserver,  I just wanted to test out the new quad cores and see how they work.  

Personality Testing.

In response to..

http://onlinedatingpost.com/archives/2007/05/plentyoffish-is-now-echemistrycom

I don’t believe that personality tests can accurately predict who you are going to marry better than chance.  My belief seems to be backed up by the fact eharmony and every other personality testing site refuse to get scientific validation.   I do believe they are useful as  an added feature in some countries.  

I have no plans to compete head on with eharmony or chemistry, that is to force all my users to only be able to message the matches I provide them.

True.com To Spend $90 million on advertising.

http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/tech/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003578104 

No. 1 True.com’s membership doubled in the past year thanks to this policy and its massive online ad push supporting its “safer dating” position. The company plans spend $90 million during the next 12 months for online ads. “We didn’t expect it to be our primary differentiator,” said Herb Vest, CEO at True.com, Dallas. “We were just trying to protect our customers. It’s something people really want and need. It’s dangerous out there.”

Match.com was in negociations to buy eharmony.

In 2004 that is,  as confirmed by the eharmony CEO.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/12/AR2007051201350.html

Now eharmony has gone and hired star lawyers to fight off the chemistry.com attack ads match is flooding the air waves with.

Now if I was in charge at eharmony  i’d just play along…   I’d show a tv spot   where someone gets rejected by eharmony,  then says “maybe its because I am married?”   Then have a huge graphic slam down that says “accepted by chemistry.com”

Strategically eharmony is in a very bad spot and this will no doubt hurt them in terms of signups and conversions. 

Eharmony ads anon Calling.

http://www.pinoy.ca/eharmony/336

I’ll look at adding the same thing,  once a provider can handle UK, Canada and USA and handle the billing.