Plentyoffish Patent Pending Matching system.

We thought this was an excellent way of matching people,  thats why we filed a patent application for this years ago.

Is Facebook done?

Looks like Google + is going to split the social networking space.   Looks like its no longer going to be facebook controlling the entire space.     Its going to change the dating space a lot because so many companies are advertising directly on facebook.   Whats more amazing is that in 7 years no one has come out with a semi decent social networking competitor until google + came along.

Match.com overun by Nigerian scams?

With Plentyoffish I constantly write more lines of code to deal with scammers than all other code combined. As a result there isn’t a single media story of someone being scammed by Nigerians on Plentyoffish. Nigerian scamming is a massive business. There are many Nigerian scammers that make a living trying to scam people on paid Dating sites. It doesn’t matter how many background checks Match.com does they will never catch someone using a stolen credit cards and addresses. In the last 6 months these scammers have stepped up their game in a big way and it takes a lot of time and effort to stay ahead of them.

Match.com has got some major publicity in the last 2 weeks. Sounds like these Nigerians are becoming an epidemic.

Match.com User Scammed out of 1 Million.
http://www.globalregina.com/Okanagan+woman+scammed+million+online+dating+scam/5067500/story.html

Match.com user Scammed
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/We_Find_Them/online-dating-nightmare-ny-woman-scammed-thousands-soldier/story?id=13898664

match user scammed for Millions.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2011/07/01/308198/Scammer-cons.htm

Another match scam.

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=213114

Match.com user scammed
http://www.bayofplentytimes.co.nz/have-your-say/news/grandmother-duped-in-dating-scam/3950969/

Match.com scams on ABC News 20/20
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/crime/artikel.php?ID=212375

Vancouver riots.

Its crazy outside all you can hear is the constant buzz of police helicopters, even more bizzare seeing the riots unfold on TV now considering its only a few blocks away. Police are firing tear gas, cars are on fire and fires in the streets and looting of the stores.

Wow its just going nuts now its only 9:40… Heavy black smoke over the city and everyones afraid to go outside. Liquer stores got looted and cop cars are getting set on fire. Its going to be a long night. Grandville is just a wall of tear gas. If plentyoffish goes down tonight you’ll know why!

Government Of Alberta spend millions of dollars creating a parody of Plentyoffish.com

You’d think the government of Alberta would have better things to do than spend millions of dollars creating a parody of Plentyoffish.com  and than flood the Print/ TV/Radio with it.

View News Story

Yes syphilis is a serious issue, effecting ~200 people a year in Alberta.   What I don’t get is why parody a mainstream dating site?   Its completely the wrong demographic in many many ways.   The average age of Plentyoffish  is 39 years old not 19.

Okcupid Acquisition was 50 Million + 40 Million earn out.

On January 20, 2011, Match acquired OkCupid for $50.0 million in cash, plus potential additional consideration that is contingent upon OkCupid’s 2011 earnings performance. The amount of the additional contingent consideration ranges from $0 to $40.0 million.

http://ir.iac.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1047469-11-4675

So that works out to 100 times+  ebitda if the max earn out is earned?

Match.com also announced the acquistion of meetic  for around $500M.    Meetic’s ebitda  is around $60M a year so that is a dramatically different.

The real reason  Match bought okcupid is  a couple minutes into this talk by the CEO.

http://ir.iac.com/eventDetail.cfm?EventID=97073

1.  Badoo a free dating site supposidly is earning north of 140M now.   They have no advertising costs so I assume their ebidta is higher than all of Match.com current properties combined.    They currently plan to IPO for  2 Billion. 

2.  In the talk  the Okcupid team signed a deal to stay on for a year  and is focused building a badoo clone that will get profiles via facebook to compete in the space.

From the sounds of it  Okcupid is going to have no more investment in it and left to die off like singlesnet.com,   the focus seems to be to focus on dominating all these new forms of “online dating” such as mobile.

Badoo has grown 40% in the US dating market in the last 2 weeks,    Match.com’s traffic has declined 30% in the last 30 days according to hitwise.

Sonia Varaschin murder/fabrication.

******  Update*****    Curtis Rush  from the Toronto Star just posted another bullshit theory suggesting that someone may have hacked her deleted POF account and than killed her.   This is the same ridiculous theory the police came to us with after an “anonymous tip”.   This reporter is just making shit up and printing it,  even the slightest bit of investigative reporting have shown how BS both these stories are.     Plentyoffish deletes all emails after 30 days  even if you are an active user.     We don’t collect phone numbers, paypal accounts and never have,  we also don’t collect realnames or addresses unless its for paying users.   For some reason Curtis Rush is trying to tie Plentyoffish’s Name to this murder in any way possible.

************************************

This article  by the Toronto Star one of Canada’s largest newspapers  is a complete fabrication.

1.  She wasn’t a user of Plentyoffish in 2010 but had been years ago.     Most older canadian singles are a member of Plentyoffish at some point in their life.

2.  We have the police briefing  they definitely didn’t say any of the stuff  Toronto star says they did.

3.  We have never had a case of a man murdering a women on plentyoffish that i know of.

4.  We talked to the police last YEAR and told them everything they wanted to know and we thought that was the end of it as she wasn’t even on the site.

This entire week we’ve been bombarded by requests from the media trying to write stories about online dating being unsafe.     The simple fact is that Online Dating is the safest possible way you can meet people.    Over 30 million people have used plentyoffish and there hasn’t been a single case of a man killing a women as a result of meeting on plentyoffish.   No other form of meeting people even comes remotely close to that level of safety.

Yay finally passed 6 million logins/day

Finally passed 6 million logins in one day.     Sunday is always peak traffic day for us. Here is a chart of our logins on sundays  going back over 4 years.    Hard to believe after 8 years Plentyoffish still has non stop growth with no signs of slowing down any time soon.

New Laws Targetting Facebook, Social Networks and Dating sites.

Check out this new proposed law from New York.     If you are a company that is either directly or indirectly in the business of dating,  ie  letting strangers in New York talk to other Strangers in New York  you are now supposed to do a brackground check  or put up big warning text if someone from New York Registered and you haven’t done a background check on them.

The proposed law is so broad that any site allowing you to meet strangers falls under the definition.

” (B) “internet dating service” means a person or entity directly or indirectly in the business, for profit, of offering, promoting or providing access to dating, relationship, compatibility, matrimonial or social referral services principally on or through the internet.”

Sites like facebook actually generate more relationships and marriages than the entire dating industry combined,  at least according to the large studies we’ve conducted.   Facebook also has many dating apps on their platform that allows strangers to meet and date.   Social networks like Tagged.com link to dating sites(zoosk) directly from their main menu.   It would be extremely hard for Facebook and tagged to argue they are not “indirectly in the business of dating”.

Unfortunately this isn’t unique to New York  as several other states are trying to pass similar laws or they have already been passed.  This similar law passed in Texas already forces Facebook to provide warnings to users on signup…. If facebook doesn’t put up a warning than it is on the hook for $750 per user registered in new york.   Lets say  Faceook has 10 million people from New York that is a fine of  $7.50 BILLION dollars.

100M dating site IPO

Wow  another dating site that is going public..  That makes 6 in total ?  Easydate, meetic, match.com, spark, areyouinterested   and now….

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110420-716522.html