PlentyofFish Serious Member Upgrade: Questions Go Unanswered

Submitted by imingle.ca on Monday, 16 March 20094 Comments

Markus Frind, CEO and founder of PlentyofFish.com has yet to answer questions that iMingle.ca posted on his blog questioning users concerns and rather “warm” response to the PlentyofFish Serious Member Upgrade. iMingle.ca has questioned the motives of the upgrade.

Critics of the successful dating site has criticized PlentyofFish in the past for its poor user interface, lack of features and rather unflattering website. Yet, PlentyofFish had continued to devy all the odds and propelled itself into the number one spot in the online dating world. It’s major selling point was it offered was that it was 100 percent free. While other dating sites were charging a monthly subscription fee, or fees to communicate with other users, PlentyofFish leveraged the power of Google Adsense advertising to monetize his site and offered the online dating community something for free.

The success of PlentyofFish was purely by accident. However, Markus Frind has openly admitted himself that his dating site could make much more if he charged. However, he has always insisted that his site would always remaing 100 percent free.

Well, he can no longer call his site 100 percent free. With the launch of the PlentyofFish Serious Member upgrade, the site now charges for some premium services that Markus Frind describes as incentives based on “user intent” and he has given many free upgrades to women on the site. There appears to be no men receiving the free upgrade. Is this a form of discrimination? Is the PlentyofFish Serious Member upgrade aimed squarely at men, trying to get them to show that they are serious about finding a relationship?

Members have openly stated that they would have no problem for paying for upgrades at PlentyofFish, especially if these upgrades provided options that they have requested such as having better instant messaging capability, more photos, and an improved user interface. The serious member upgrade is being perceived as a money grab or a feeble attempt to provide an enhanced user experience.

When the questions regarding the lack of free serious member upgrades for men, and improvements to the user experience was posed to PlentyofFish on Markus’ blog, what was the response? The comment has apparently gotten deleted, just like many of the posts posted on the PlentyofFish User Forums.

Did iMingle.ca strike a chord with these questions or is Markus Frind trying to hide behind his site’s succes and have the online dating community think he’s a marketing genius in adding this pay option to his online dating site?

If past experience is any indication, look for the PlentyofFish progression towards a full pay site to continue. Obviously Markus Frind has changed his business model in promoting premium services that the PlentyofFish Serious Member upgrade is supposed to offer. As this model continues to evolve over the next few months (or years), you will see that the PlentyofFish user base shrink dramatically as users decide to move elsewhere to other online dating sites that offer a better user experience for free, with a much better user interface.

PlentyofFish.com will pay for this marketing faux pas, it is only a matter of time. It has already hurt the credibility of the dating site that was supposed to be 100 percent free. The lack of transparency on the forums and on the blogs with posts and comments being deleted or simply not approved has also tarnished the free online dating site that was once thought that it could do no wrong.

Are these criticisms warranted? Do they have merit? Only time will tell if PlentyofFish will be vendicated through this Serious Member upgrade.

iMingle.ca has yet to be persuaded that this is a good thing for PlentyofFish and continues to rate the serious member upgrade a BUST!

4 Comments »

Davemason said:

If you are not interested in certain people contacting you, you should have the option for filtering in your free online dating service. Most of the services have a filtering option and these can really come in handy when you are trying to keep some people away from you. If, for example, you are not interested in people who are young enough to be your child, you can filter these people out.

- 16 March 2009 at 11:06 am

Alex said:

Nice analysis. He is also in a way giving opportunity to other emerging and much deserving free online dating sites like promatching.com and cupid.com to become more popular among common users. Will be waiting for his answers.

- 16 March 2009 at 2:35 pm

Todd said:

I think Markus is in a difficult position. He obviously wants to change the site, but he can only do so in incremental ways without disrupting his business (signups, traffic, etc.).

For example, I used to think the squashed profile icons were never dealt with out of sheer laziness. I saw in an interview, though, that he hadn’t done it for fear that it would change the site dynamics. It was possible that people actually click on more profiles exactly because it is hard to get a good idea of what the person looks like by their profile icon. So he had obviously put a good deal of thought into just this one aspect of his site.

We don’t really know what the motivations for the serious member upgrade are (other than the obvious money grab). There could be internal financial trends that he’s concerned about WRT ad revenue, for example.

He’s stuck between a rock in a hard place. He started the site free, made assertions about it always remaining that way, and used it as a basis for marketing and branding. If he wants to make a change, he’s going to get flack for it. I think the serious member upgrade is about as incremental a movement towards pay as he could devise. Now we’ll have to see if that was it, or if there’s more movement in that direction.

- 16 March 2009 at 7:23 pm

imingle.ca (author) said:

Todd, perhaps you are correct. I’ve watched many of the Markus Frind interviews that are on YouTube, and the impression that he leaves is as you have indicated – sheer laziness. I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, but he complains on his blog about having to update 100 SQL statements to add this “Serious Member” upgrade. My days of working with databases, we would regularly update 100s of SQL statements, test them and have them ready to deply within a few days.

The trends are clearly indicating that there’s something up with POF, and the future for this market / business will indeed be interesting.

- 16 March 2009 at 8:58 pm