POF.com has new tastes for online dating surfers

About Plenty of Fish's Mobile App

 

You’d be hard-pressed to find an industry more upended by the mobile revolution than online dating, and like that first fish out of water, POF will need to evolve to survive. Frind says that for people under the age of 35, a whopping 90 per cent of POF’s visits now come from phones rather than web browsers: “Web is not something that really has a future. Everything’s mobile.” Already Frind has almost everyone at POF updating and improving the mobile apps—while only a single developer still monitors the website.

 

Despite the dominance of mobile in terms of visits, Frind says up to 60 per cent of the company’s “tens of millions of EBITDA” still comes from its website. In terms of advertising, “you’re selling stuff for five cents a click” on mobile, he says. POF’s apps therefore make money from upgraded memberships (users can pay a monthly fee for extra features, such as the ability to add more photos). Frind is the first to admit monetization on mobile has a ways to catch up. “Certainly,” he says, “it’s not equal to desktop yet.” And while overall revenue is hitting all-time highs, this year the number of people visiting the website began declining for the first time ever. In fact, IAC’s free dating website, OkCupid, has caught up with PlentyOFfish.com on desktop according to web data firm Alexa (both are top-500 websites globally).

Mark Brooks, one of the Internet dating industry’s few consultants, says that while Frind will never have the deep pockets of IAC, Plenty of fish ’s mobile numbers are promising. Now he just has to figure out how to make mobile visitors as valuable as its declining desktop ones. Brooks points to online classifieds behemoth Craiglist for inspiration. “Most people think it’s entirely free,” he says, “and it is—except for people who want to advertise jobs, and they make a lot of money from that.”

For POF, this could mean finding ways to increase the number of users who upgrade to a paid account. For example, Zoosk, the top-grossing dating app (apps with the highest total revenue) on iPhone, charges users who want to send someone more than a single message. That said, Frind’s priorities lie elsewhere at present. “Mobile is pretty much a land grab right now,” he says. “Grab as many users as you can, then figure out what to do with them.”

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Top 10 Dating Sites On Web 2015

The dating sites review web page muqa.com published a new list at urlhttp://www.muqa.com/plentyoffish/  about the top online dating providers of the year 2015, so the list goes as below:

1.Match - not a surprise... They got some negative press too, lawsuits mostly.  i.e. Recently the one claiming that a photo of a woman who was never a Match member was used on several profiles, which got quite a lot of coverage. The press mostly wrote positively about Match.

2.eHarmony - again, not a surprise. We think, Match and eHarmony don´t need to do much to get press mentions... They lost some key people this year, and the press didn´t miss that. Lately, their new product eH+ got quite a lot of coverage.

3.Tinder - We read something about them literally every day. The articles just say the same again and again and we don´t run them all. Still, there were 46 posts added to the Tinder news category on Online Personals Watch last year.

4.OkCupid - Scored multiple new partnerships, Coinbase, Virgin Mobile, etc.  They announced the restart of OkTrends (but where's the content?).  They also did some questionable things like adding an ad blocker and an "ugly people filter," but these things just spurred discussion and actually brought them more press. They also got some bad press around security issues and the shut down of Tallygram, a Facebook-based friend-finding app that they started in November 2012.

5.AshleyMadison - got some negative press as well in the form of lawsuits against them.  Everything we´d consider to be negative for other dating sites, actually works for them. They like to stoke controversy. They also launched in several countries and got funding in 2013.

6.Grindr - got solid and mostly positive press coverage.

7.Down (BangWithFriends) - launched in February and had a great start with press, but became old news quickly.

8.HowAboutWe - is another site with a solid and consistent press coverage over the years. Actually we never read any negative articles about them - that´s quite unique.

9.Spark Networks brands - Spark Networks as a company and it´s brands also got quite a lot of press mentions.

10.Zoosk - another company with lots of rosy positive press coverage.