Markus Frind Destroying His Dating Site

Submitted by imingle.ca on Tuesday, 28 April 20092 Comments

Markus Frind, once touted as the owner of the “next big thing” in online dating sites, has started destroying his online dating site Plentyoffish.com. Plentyoffish was the largest free dating site around, with millions of visitors each month. Then something happened that is a definite start of the end for this site. PlentyofFish has removed its instant messaging feature and has now started a pay option that offers nothing more than a yellow graphic – no more functionality for their so-called “Serious Member” upgrade.

Markus Frind has refused to answer many questions that iMingle.ca has sent his way, but that hasn’t stopped the criticism of what he has done.

Members on their forums, bloggers around the world and just users in general hate the moves that Plentyoffish have made in these last few months. In fact, the other free dating sites are showing a major increase in traffic as members rush from a failing company to other free sites.

Markus Frind is no longer perceived as the genius in this competitive niche. Plentyoffish is seen as a company without direction, lack of development and now appears desperate to hang on to market share.

Watch out Markus Frind, the competition has you in its cross hairs and your company will fall big time if you don’t turn it around.

Markus Frind is destroying his almost “free” online dating site with these off-the-wall upgrades and moves. What will be the next thing that Markus will do? Who knows. Plentyoffish is now suffering for his poor business decisions.

2 Comments »

Top UK Dating Sites said:

I am not quite sure you are right about Markus destroying his dating site, the changes he is introducing will change the site as it was know before but not necessarily destroy it. I used to run a free dating site on a much smaller scale than plenty of fish and believe be its a very hard work for very few reward. In the blog where markus announce this, he said the removal of IM actually helped traffic. Lets give him say 6 months to see how the site does after the radical changes.

Temi

- 28 April 2009 at 5:10 am

imingle.ca (author) said:

Terri, we’re not sure that traffic increased because of more users or because of a better user experience. Looking at the comments on his forum, and the outrage that many members have over this, it’s a poor move. The IM feature of Plenty Of Fish actually cost him money, but the ads displayed on it brough him revenue that apparently paid for itself after the first month.

As for the serious member upgrade, we can’t find a single person that has purchased it, and Markus has given so many “free” upgrades to women, that the men that we’ve interviewed here at iMingle have indicated they think it’s wrong to not provide some men with upgrades. It shows the true intent of this so-called upgrade.

- 29 April 2009 at 3:00 am