POF (Plenty of Fish)

The concept of purchasing virtual goods may not have been around for long, but it has now become one of the fast-growing types of business online. According to the Inside Virtual Goods report, the overall market for virtual goods in the US is on its way to hitting $2.9 billion in 2012 - that's up from $2.2 billion this year and $1.6 billion in 2010.

The virtual goods industry first exploded on Facebook with the popularity of games like FarmVille and CityVille, in which users purchase currency that can be used within the game. Facebook also added a virtual gifts feature that allowed users to buy and send gifts to one another.

Dating sites quickly picked up on the success of the virtual goods game. Plenty of Fish offers "Goldfish Credits" for purchase in packages of 100, 215, or 500. With Goldfish Credits, users can send gifts to other members or find out if someone has opened their messages. Gifts are publically posted on the recipient's profile for 3 three weeks before disappearing. Each Plenty of Fish member also receives 2 virtual roses when they join the site. Roses are sent when composing a message, but each rose may only be used once during a 30 day period. Because they are a rare commodity on the site, roses are considered an especially strong indicator of a user's interest.

HOT or NOT was also an early adopter of virtual goods. The site offered virtual roses ranging from $2 to $10 that could be sent to prospective dates. Though more expensive, the $10 roses became the most popular option because they sent the strongest signals to the recipient. HOT or NOT also found that the recipients of virtual gifts were four times more likely to respond to the sender than users who did not receive a gift.

To date, Zoosk is one of the biggest virtual goods success stories. Zoosk Coins are a virtual currency used to purchase a range of features on the site. According to the site's FAQ, Coins can be used to "purchase Gifts, arrange for a Special Delivery, receive a Delivery Confirmation for your email messages, and Boost your profile." Gifts are cute graphics, like flowers and pets, that can be sent to other members. Special Delivery alerts a message recipient with a pop-up when they have received a message from a user who has purchased the feature. Delivery Confirmation notifies the buyer when their messages have been read, and Boost is a feature that puts the purchaser at the top of someone's search results or in a special place on the homepage of other interested users.

Virtual goods seem poised to become more popular than ever on dating and social networking sites. It looks like your holiday shopping list just got a little bit longer.

For more on this story you can read TechCrunch. For information on the dating sites mentioned in this article you can read our POF.com review and our Zoosk.com review.

I am not sure if I missed this before when PlentyOfFish starting offering a new paid membership but I noticed today this statement from their upgrade page:

PlentyOfFish will automatically continue your subscription for the same period and amount as your current upgrade.

PlentyOfFish previous memberships never automatically renewed, so it looks like PlentyOfFish changed their position on this point.

For more on this dating site you can go ahead and read our Plenty Of Fish review.

Update 2020-03-30: Good news. POF has announced a new feature called POF Live that allows live video broadcasting to other users including private one on one sessions.

Update 2019-07-09: Please note that POF has since removed the video chat functionality from both their app and website.

After dropping IM for about a year in 2009, PlentyOfFish recently started to offer audio and video chatting. This has been a feature request for a while by many members. To use the new feature you must have Adobe Flash player version 10.1 or higher installed on your computer as well as the required hardware which includes a webcam or microphone.

To start an audio or video chat all you need to do is click the chat link underneath a members thumbnail photo. Once your request to chat is accepted you can then click on the audio or video button found at the top of the chat window.

To find out more about this dating site you can read our POF.com review.

PlentyOfFish has just updated their mobile dating applications for both the iPhone and Android OSs. The big improvement with this version is speed and lower bandwidth use. This is achieved by caching the profile and picture data retrieved from POF so it is only downloaded once or when updated.

Other improvements include easier editing of both photos and profiles. Pinching and zooming profile pictures has been added along with updates to editing your location and searching for local users. Users can also now just search for mobile users near them.

The POF App on the Android Market currently has a rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars with almost 6,000 votes. According to a number of reviews the only thing missing from the app is the ability to chat via text.

For more on this story please read the press release. To find out about this dating site and what other singles think you should check out our PlentyOfFish review.

Over the last few years PlentyOfFish has tried several different ways to monetize their members. They first offered paid virtual gifts back in December of 2008. It didn't last long though and was pulled after about a month. In March of 2009 PlentyOfFish then offered the "Paid Profile Upgrade". This upgrade called the "Serious Member Badge" was designed to showcase that the member was serious about online dating by displaying icons on your images and highlighting your profile. Prices ranged from $5.95 to $9.80 a month. By mid-2010 the Serious Member Badge also offered a few additional features including having their profile appear above others in search results.

Early this month PlentyOfFish started to offer a new regular membership. As far as we can tell this membership has replaced the Serious Membership along with the “privilege of upgrading” assessment which was supposed to weed out all those who were not serious about maintaining a long-term relationship. The new membership offers:

• The new and improved Ultra Match matching system
• Improved visibility on PlentyOfFish including higher placement in search results
• Find out if your emails were read or just deleted
• The use of profile themes
• Who has viewed your profile
• Unlimited virtual gifts through email
• Additional credits for placing gifts on profiles

Membership costs have increased slightly and range from $6.78 a month for a year to $11.80 a month for a 3 month term. There is no auto rebilling but memberships are also non-refundable. With these new membership changes the only thing that differentiates PlentyOfFish with most other popular paid dating sites is that they still allow all members to email and message each other for free.

With the new membership comes a new statistic. If you upgrade to the new membership it will improve your chances by 530% according to PlentyOfFish (I assume this is when compared to a free membership on the site). With the Serious Membership upgrade your chance of a relationship only increased by 230% 😉 (See Story).

I also notice the other week that the domain Plentyoffish.com now forwards to POF.com, this use to be the other way around. The URLs in the emails I receive from PlentyOfFish for matches etc. also use the POF.com domain though the email is still sent from customercare@plentyoffish.com. The site is still obviously called PlentyOfFish so I am not sure why they changed the primary domain at this point to just the initials. Maybe it will be easier to remember for the average user, or maybe there will be a name change in the future? (I really doubt this will happen)

The last thing that has changed is that the forums link is now back at the top of the PlentyOfFish dating site. We notice that this link first disappeared sometime last summer (See Story). The upgrade link in the forums though still points to the old “SERIOUS UPGRADE” page and not the new membership upgrade page.

To find out more about this dating service you can read our POF review.

Plenty of Fish is looking to hire a Database Administrator (DBA) so if you are interested in the job and have the qualifications you should comment on their blog. Markus also released a few statistics about his dating site and what the DBA will be up against. Last year alone Plenty of Fish sent out 5.5 billion messages. This works out to about 15 million a day. He also noted that Plenty of Fish's Behavioral Matching Engine deals with almost 20 billion pieces of data from their 30 million plus registered users that is stored in their database.

What this all boils down to is POF needs some heavy duty hardware to run its website and a DBA that knows how to optimize databases and SQL statements.

For more information on this free dating service you can read our PlentyofFish.com review.