Check out the homepage on plentyoffish.   There is a music video from Flo Rider and  Akon  using plentyoffish  to find dates…

http://www.plentyoffish.com/florida.aspx

Match.com has released their 2009 success rates here

http://www.iacadvertising.com/pdf/Match%20Overview%20One%20Sheet.pdf Or Here

56 million first emails sent per year
132 million winks sent per year
12 couples got married or engaged today thanks to Match.com
Users go on 6 million dates each year. ( ya right)
1 in 1369 dates leads to marriage on match.com (6 million / (12*365))
Match.com makes 1 Million dollars a day from subscription revenues.
That is $83,000 in subscription revenue for every marriage that comes out of the site.

Eharmony also has public stats.

http://www.eharmony.com/advertising/singles

118 couples a day get married or engaged.
eHarmony obtains 12-15K new users every day
full audience turnover every 6.5 months!

Does anyone have any links to studies etc that show how many marriages are produced by dating sites ?

http://www.physorg.com/news164292891.html

Anyone seen a hard copy of the magazine article?  Looks like a long summary…

Got a few emails today about this scam…   Its just some idiot i’ve never heard of before trying to sell his domain name.   Who in their right mind would buy a .org anyways,  isn’t it reserved for charities and non profits?

Last monday we upgraded our core database server after a power outage knocked the site offline.      I haven’t touched this machine since 2005 so it was a major undertaking to do it last minute.     We upgraded from a machine with 64 GB of ram and 8 CPU’s  to a HP ProLiant DL785 with  512 GB of ram and 32 CPU’s and moved from SQLserver  2005  to 2008 and windows 2008.       The new SQL Server is far more powerful,   on the previous server when we passed 130,000 concurrent users replication would fall behind dramatically for no reason.

We also made several major changes to the site.

1.   Introduction of themes,   you can use 5,000 activity points to ad themes to your profile  or you can buy a serious membership and get it that way.     Even if your membership expires you still get to keep them.

2.  I introduced a feature called date night.     Every week starting at friday 2pm PST  you can signal to the community you are free for a date on the following friday night ,   serious members will get displayed first followed by everyone else.    The next friday the list gets cleared and people can add themselves to the list and signal they are free for a date for the following friday.

3.  Launched a new flash uploader where you can rotate, resize and  crop your thumbnails.

In the next week we will be upgrading our image serving,   we are nearing  10,000 images served per second and existing stuff just isn’t cutting it.    We will be moving our 200 million images over to RamSan…      Hopefully when all this is done  I won’t need to do anything till the site doubles or triples in size again!

Exciting times here,   tomorrow my first programmer starts.    Its going to be nice having someone else to write code for plentyoffish!    In the last few months  POF has become the undisputed leader in the US market,  far ahead of companies like Eharmony and Match that only have 3-5% marketshare.

Now comes the hard part,   which is growing the market in the US and coming up with more innovative ideas that help bring people together.   I think many of the assumptions that dating sites are built on are wrong and i’m going to be doing a lot of R&D to see if i’m right.

http://www.onlinepersonalswatch.com/news/2009/05/userplane-ist.html

I removed userplane from plentyoffish a few weeks ago.   Userplane cost me more per month than my hosting does….   I wonder what the future of IM is in dating,  my UK pageviews increased 30%  in 2 weeks and my visitors and signups also dramatically climbed after removing userplane.

On friday I disabled the instant messenger on my Plentyoffish and today completely removed it.   It is by far the biggest strategic mistake i’ve made with the site.  Within 4  days of it being inactive  my UK visits increased  10%  and Australia is up over 15%….  I suppose it should have been obvious because no other major dating site has a IM system.     Its hard to remove a feature that is used by hundreds of thousands of users every day  but in this case the data clearly shows the site is better off without IM.

I’m also testing out a new plentyoffish logo seems to work ok…

Heres what i got in my email today

I have a bit of news about your campaign. Rupert Murdoch has decided to put all dating & dieting campaigns on MySpace on hold for a few days. They are discussing about dating creatives currently and planning to come up with a set of standards for them. I wanted to notify you and let you know that the campaign will be halted today and I will keep you updated as soon as I hear some news. I apologize for the inconvenience

In the next serval days i’ll be releasing a paid feature on plentyoffish.    With this optional upgrade you can signal to the community that you are serious about meeting someone.  This upgrade will last either 3, 6 or  12 months.

1.  On paid dating sites most buys are impulse and in the signup process.    Paid sites monetize on Impulse,  plentyoffish is going to monetize on user intent.   I believe we will have far more members that are serious than paid sites.   Its one thing to be tricked into paying (paid sites),  its another to go out of your way and pay for something.

2.  There will be no addtional features and funcationality for users,  this upgrade will be strictly to signal intent to the community.

3.  There will be no changes to existing users or new users.   The site will continue to work as it always has,  except some members can now choose to stand out more.