POF (Plenty of Fish)

Almost 5 years ago Plenty of Fish Media launched eVow, and as of April 17 we were informed that the dating service appears to have been closed. The dating apps have been removed from iTunes and Google Play, and the website now redirects to POF.com. Plenty of Fish Media has not release an official statement about these changes but with the service now being completely inaccessible I think it is safe to assume that it has been shut down.

eVow was design to compete with dating sites that specialized in long-term relationships (like eHarmony). With the advertisement might of POF behind it in the beginning eVow quickly grew and was a popular choice for singles. Unfortunately after 5 years and intense completion in the dating sector eVow was not able to sustain itself without relying on the free advertising it received on the Plenty of Fish dating site. eVow must not have been making enough money through memberships and advertisements to justify the cost of taking up advertisement spots on POF (which other advertisers would pay money for).

I think one of the problems eVow ran into is that it also competed with their sister service POF.com. While POF doesn't cater to only long-term relationships, it does have the Chemistry Predictor matchmaking system which does attempt to match single together based on personality types to which is a key ingredient in long term relationships. A lot of members of POF looking for long-term relationships obviously didn't feel the need to move to eVow since POF was meeting their needs.

It's too bad eVow had to close down. The dating service had a lot of good ideas. Unfortunately the dating industry is intensely competitive and most dating services will not survive more than a few years.

Dating website Plenty of Fish (POF) has been making headlines recently for its longevity and user milestones, as well as its recent disclosure of financial information about the company. But thanks to the new anti-spam law in Canada, POF now has an unwanted headline that they have to deal with - the popular dating website has been ordered to pay $48,000 in fines for its email practices.

Canadians complained of Plenty of Fish’s marketing tactics, which launched an investigation by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Competition Bureau into the company’s practices. Specifically, the agencies examined how the company handles commercial emails to subscribers.

According to the disgruntled users, POF sent them commercial messages without a noticeable “opt out” or “unsubscribe” feature. One of the key requirements in the law is that each commercial email contain an unsubscribe mechanism to allow recipients to opt-out at any time. Also, according to the wording of the law, the unsubscribe feature has to be prominently displayed and “readily performed.”

Plenty of Fish agreed to paying a $48,000 penalty and developing a new compliance program to address its problematic email practices. The compliance program will include training and education for staff, as well as corporate policies and procedures regarding email marketing.

The new anti-spam law has been in effect since last year, but the Canadian agencies have had their challenges in enforcing it because of how vast and pervasive the problem of spamming seems to be. Millions of spam emails are sent every day by spammers from all over the world. Experts argued that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Competition Bureau were not equipped to handle such a pervasive issue.

The agencies however, are proving the critics wrong. The Competition Bureau recently alleged that rental car companies Budget and Avis engaged in false and misleading advertising when they failed to disclose numerous additional fees as part of their car rental promotions, including their email promotions. The Bureau is seeking $30 million in fines and reimbursement to customers. And the CRTC discovered that Compu-Finder, a Quebec-based corporate training company, sent commercial emails without consent and like POF, without proper unsubscribe mechanisms. The company was hit with a $1.1 million penalty.

CRTC notes in a press release that POF did not argue with the fine or the accusation, and hopes that by example, other companies will be inspired to change their own email spamming tactics. As for POF, the company continues to grow its subscriber base despite its setbacks, recently announcing its user base has grown to 100 million worldwide.

PlentyofFish might not be making headlines the way Tinder has in the past few months, but its growth continues to be one of the online dating industry’s biggest successes. The company has announced that it hit the 100 million user milestone recently, and also revealed that it’s been a profitable company from its beginning, now with a $100 million run rate predicted for 2015.

POF has relied on a mixture of ads and premium subscriptions for revenue since 2008 (prior to this, ads only). In the last three years however, the company’s user base has shifted from primarily desktop computers to 80-85% using their mobile devices to access their accounts. Other traditional online dating sites have noticed the same trend of their user bases from desktop to mobile.

CEO Marcus Frind admits to website Business Vancouver that “finding love on a desktop computer is quickly vanishing.” Really, the appeal and ease of online dating makes more sense on a mobile device, which can be accessed anytime, anywhere. Mobile access means more users logging in and engaging with each other, a necessity for the longevity of any online dating service.

Frind said: “Since our shift to mobile we’ve seen rapid growth both in terms of users and revenue...Our revenue model has also evolved from one driven by advertising to one driven by paid membership, indicating that, now more than ever, singles are willing to pay for an enhanced user experience.”

For POF, that means their source of revenue has shifted to the mobile space and its premium service. An upgraded membership includes features like detecting when another user views a profile or when a personal message has been checked.

According to Frind, the user milestone and financial state of the company is significant in and of itself - and is no indication of his future plans, though he's never revealed this kind of data before. He’s not looking to take the company public, since he is the sole owner of POF. In recent years, the company also acquired speed dating service Fast Company to complement its offerings, but the main revenue source seems to be POF’s premium dating service.

POF has hit some bumps in the road since its launch back in 2003. For one, Frind refocused the dating site’s image, which had garnered a reputation of being primarily a hook-up site. With the facelift – which included focusing on the mobile app technology and re-branding the dating service for long-term relationships, not hook-ups - Frind seems to have found a winning formula.

The company, which used to employ only Frind, now has 75 employees, and doesn’t seem to be daunted by its mobile competition. POF is holding its own, despite a fickle online dating market.

For more information on this online dating service you can read our POF review.

There’s been an uproar lately with the launch of dating app Tinder’s new premium service, Tinder Plus. The problem? The company is charging users in their twenties $9.99 in the U.S., compared to those 30 and older, who will have to pay $19.99 (and even more in the U.K.).

This has notably sparked some outrage from product reviewers and bloggers, who note the enduring problem of age discrimination when it comes to online dating – especially towards women. According to studies released by sites like OkCupid, young women are more sought-after by men, no matter how old the guy is. According to dating site Plenty of Fish, the ideal age of a single woman is 25 for most of their male daters. And according to OkCupid, that number skews even younger – with the ideal age being 21 or 22, even if the men wanting to date them are in their forties. Once female online daters hit the magic age of 30, they are blocked out from opportunities – some reports pointing to as much as an 80% decrease in messages and matches - as the majority of men prefer to meet women in their twenties.

This isn’t new. And it does explain why many people post old photos and lie about their ages (much to the frustration of the online daters who meet them). So what will these daters 30 and above do with Tinder – will they opt in and pay for Tinder Plus, or will we see more of a dating revolt?

According to Tinder, the company’s move to differentiate pricing based on age really comes down to economics. The company has tested pricing, and discovered that older singles are willing to pay more because they have more income. (The company likens it to services like Spotify which offer discounted rates to “students.”)

The problem with this “economic” view, as some reviewers have pointed out, is that older online daters already have a shrunken dating pool to choose from. (And online dating is a bit different than streaming music – with streaming, you have access to everything offered in exchange for your payment; with online dating, you only have access to those who haven’t filtered you out of their searches, which means fewer options for more money.)

As the Washington Post says: “The [age] problem is so urgent, and so severe, that several sites have spoken out against ageism in online dating in recent years. In 2010, OkCupid’s Christian Rudder wrote an entire blog post dedicated to convincing men that the 30-somethings on his site were just as cool and attractive as recent college grads. On JDate — a paid dating site for Jewish singles — the site’s official relationship blogger, Tamar Caspi, went on a full-blown rant over age.”

The latest move by Tinder might affect its user base, but the problem of ageism in dating still remains. If people are looking to meet someone special, then letting go of superficial restrictions like age only helps open the dating pool – and don’t we all want more choices?

Right from Twitter we have a report that Plenty of Fish is down:

The twitter report is only 40 minutes old (as of writing this at 6:00pm) but we have people commenting that they couldn't access the dating site since 3:00pm EST. If you visit POF.com using Firefox it shows a connection problem with the message "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.".

A new "Dating Services in Canada Market Research Report" has been released in January 2015 by IBSWorld. The report requires payment to read the entire thing (no less than $725 US) but they did release a few interesting statistics for promotion that are worth mentioning.

According to IBSWorld the dating industry in Canada grew 6% from 2010 to 2015. They feel this rate is low due to the recent recession but the rate of growth is expected to increase in the next 5 years.

In Canada there are 255 businesses in the dating industry that employee 523 people. On average this means every dating business employees 2 people. In my experience the case more likely is that most of the businesses employee 1 person (the owner), a few probably employ 2 to 5 employees, and the very few employ 5 or more. The reason for such a low number of employees and high number of businesses is the relative ease and extreme low cost required to get into the dating industry. Free dating site software can be found online and web hosting can be found as cheap as $5 a month.

The report also mentions that revenue generated by the dating industry for the year in Canada is $153 million. This seems rather good especially with 255 businesses which would suggest that on average each generated $600,000 in revenue. This is not the case either. Most of these dating businesses probably either make virtually no money or only generate a few thousand a year in ad revenue. A few probably generate 10's of thousands, and even less generate hundreds of thousands or even a few million. I believe the majority of this revenue is made up of one dating site, Plenty of Fish. POF is located in the province of British Columbia, Canada. All of the other popular dating services are based in the United States. POF is a private company and no revenue numbers have ever been officially released. That being said they are one of the most successful dating sites in the world so I am sure their revenue for a year is probably 10's of millions of dollars. For comparison just take a look at the Match.com dating site. They are a public company owned by IAC and they reported the Match Group earned in the fourth quarter of 2014, $241.5 million US. That is only for 3 months so in a year they generate around 1 billion dollars. Now the Match Group is made up mostly of paid dating sites while POF is a free service which generates revenue from ads as well as paid upgraded memberships. I don’t expect POF to earn hundreds of millions every year but as I said, with their traffic I do see them earning 10’s of millions.

Is this latest IBSWorld report worth getting? It definitely would be an interesting read but the thing with the dating industry is that it is global. If you are opening a dating service you usually don’t just target one country. You would target continents as a whole like North America or Europe. If you are considering purchasing the document I would probably hold off and wait for the US version to come. The US is 10 times the size in population of Canada which is a much bigger customer base.