General News

With the downtime experience last week (see Story), PlentyOfFish.com decided it was a good time to go ahead and add 3 new features to the dating site.

The photo uploader for the profile got an over haul and allows for real-time editing. You can resize, crop and rotate your images after you upload them. This is only available for Flash enabled internet browsers.

Profile themes was introduced as well. For either 5000 activity points or by purchasing a serious membership you can activate and select from a number of themes (background images) to be displayed when your profile is viewed. Once activated, the themes will always be available to you and you can change them anytime.

Finally, a Date Night feature was added. Every week you can add yourself to the date night list which signals you are free this coming Friday and are looking for a date. After every Friday the list gets cleared and is restarted. Members who have paid to receive a Serious Member Badge will be first on the list. This is a good idea, but needs expanding on. There should be 7 lists, one for each day in a week. This way members can specify when they want to go out as Friday may no be possible for everyone.

As we predicted, the Serious Member Badge is becoming more about the additional features you receive when purchased than an indication that you are someone who is seriously looking to find a relationship. It is also now a way to skirt trying to save up activity points for features. In this way PlentyOfFish.com is becoming more like a paid dating site than ever before. That's not to say this is necessarily a bad thing. Free members still have full communication abilities and PlentyOfFish.com will have additional funds in which they can invest more on new and better dating features for members who pay.

For more on this popular dating site, read our PlentyOfFish.com review.

Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch got in contact with Greg Blatt, the new CEO of Match.com to get a comment regarding the recent New York federal court suit filed by Sean McGinn (see Story) According to Blatt in a statement he made to OPW:

Match.com’s continued success depends upon the success of our members in making online connections and turning them into meaningful relationships offline. The allegation that we would deceive our subscribers by encouraging them to connect with inactive members therefore makes no sense and is contradicted by our 14-year record and the hundreds of thousands of members who find someone special on Match.com every year. We understand that finding romance, offline or online, can at times be emotional and personal, and we wish Mr. McGinn well in his search. But his lawsuit is without merit, and we will defend it vigorously.

It is true, Match.com for the most part does not let you know when you are searching that the dating profiles you are viewing are from paying members or not. The only time you can tell for sure is if the member has the Profile Highlight feature (it is highlighted in red). Most other paid dating sites (like eHarmony) operate the same way. What Match.com does do is attempt to return the most active members on the site that fit within your search criteria. Most active users are either the ones paying for the service to find a partner or new to the service looking to see what Match.com offers. What Match hopes with this strategy is when a paid user messages a new user, it will entice them to signup.

Despite how this suit goes, I bet Match will speed up the process of getting the new Platinum Membership out to all markets (Story). It's almost like they saw this suit coming since the Platinum Membership allows paid members to receive messages from any member they have contacted, whether or not they are a free or paid member of the dating service.

The Smiths, a family in Missouri got a surprised when a friend emailed them a picture they took of a billboard in the Czech Republic. The photo was used to advertise a grocery stores delivery service in Prague, over a thousand miles away. The shop owner has since promised to remove the image and has emailed the Smiths an apology. The wife and mother in the photo, Danielle Smith, was surprised and had no idea the picture could be used this way. She still plans to post images of her family but not at such a high resolution.

I still find it a little shocking that people don't realize any image displayed in a internet browser can be taken and used by anyone viewing it, this goes with dating sites as well. This incident of misuse wasn't bad but you can never know what someone will do with your images (putting your head on someone else's body for example). Posting pictures on the internet is here to stay, so my advice is, don't post photos of yourself on the internet that you don't want absolutely everyone to see. Just assume it is in the public domain. Once posted, those photos of embarrassing poses, falls, etc.. always seem to find there way to your friends, co-workers, potential employers, etc... at the most inopportune times.

For the full scoop, read The Guardian.

On Tuesday we reported that Plenty Of Fish was down for over 10 hours. Today we found out why. Late Monday a power outage made POF go offline. With the website already down, it was decided that it was a good time to upgrade the core database server (both hardware and software) which hadn't been touched since 2005. Users of the dating site should see significant increase in speed of the site loading, especially during peak times.

We also found out that there is an upgraded scheduled for image serving. Nearly 10,000 images on average are served per second on POF and they currently have over 200 million images stored. Will we see additional downtime next week while this upgrade is performed? Markus didn't mention any but we may see one if moving image servers doesn't go off without a hitch.

We recently looked at the advertising market for this year and last (see Story) and in 2009 we are expected to see a decline in revenue earned when in previous years, online advertising was experiencing large double digit growth. I don't expect to see the free business model disappearing but it is going to get a lot tougher as companies spend their advertising dollars wiser. The funny thing with free dating sites is, they rely largely on paid dating sites for their income by displaying ads for them. If paid dating sites ever disappeared (which I do not see happening) then the free dating sites will as well.

Barry Diller, CEO of IAC (which owns Match.com and Chemistry), at a keynote address for the Advertising 2.0 conference said

I absolutely believe that the Internet is passing from its free phase into a paid system.

Diller is positive that relying on just advertising as a business model for most websites will not be sustainable in the near future. For his proof of success, Diller points to the iPhone and its popular App Store.

The problem with Barry Diller's iPhone example is, while the App Store has done extremely well, it never had any real competition. Once Google's Android mobile phone operating system matures and more companies bundle it with their phones similar to the iPhones functionality, it should be interesting to see if the iPhone continues to grab as much market share. The App Store is a very structured environment and Apple controls everything, this is both good and bad for developers. Android is open source software and free, this will spark more innovation but could create confusion for less tech savvy consumers.

For more on Diller's keynote address, read CNET News. Read our Match.com review and our Chemistry review for more information on these dating sites owned by IAC.

TechCrunch has an article about how online advertising faired in Europe in 2008 and has a few predictions for 2009. With the recession hitting last year, it significantly slowed the growth of digital advertising. With the downturn of the economy still present, 2009 will be worse and a decline is expected. In 2008 the European online advertising market was worth €12.9 billion or $18 billion in US dollars (in 19 markets) . This is a 20 percent increase over 2007 and while most businesses would love to see an increase in sales like this, the projection at the start of 2008 (before the world recession) was much higher. Search advertising is the leading advertising format that accounts for 43 percent of spending or €5.6 billion. After search is classifieds at 26 percent or €3.8 billion.

For comparison, in the United States for 2008, online advertising was worth $23.4 billion or €16.6 billion. This is an increase of 10.6 percent over the previous year. The Interactive Advertising Bureau, who are responsible for all these number, just reported a 5 percent decline in the United States for the first quarter of 2009, to $5.5 billion.

Read TechCrunch for the full post.