General News

I just checked and the PlentyOfFish.com paid membership option is now available. We first talked about this late last week (see Story). So to recap, according to PlentyOfFish.com this upgrade shows that you are serious about meeting someone. The real value here though, when you pay for the upgrade is your profile will now be highlighted in gold, in the search results. This means your profile will stand out from the others on the list. Advertising will also be removed from your main profile page and in its place a Gold Star will be presented. Thumbnail images from your profile will also contain a star icon.

What we didn't know last week was the cost of all this. Here is the break down (in USD):

• 3 months costs $29.40 or $9.80 a month
• 6 months costs $46.80 or $7.80 a month
• 1 year costs $71.40 or $5.95 a month

White Label Dating mentions The Tonight Show from the iTV network which noted it is estimated that there will be 15 million singles in the United Kingdom by 2011. According to the post, this will make the value of the dating industry at that point, of over £1billion. By comparison, in 2008 there was 10 million Canadian singles and 93 million single Americans. As a general rule of thumb I found for the G7 countries that roughly 1/3 of the population is single at any one time.

For more dating sites that service the UK, see our United Kingdom dating category.

From now through March 13th, 2009, Perfectmatch members can enter for a luxury vacation to Jamaica! If you win the Grand Prize, you and one guest receive a 4 day / 3 night stay at any Sandals resort in Jamaica with roundtrip airfare included through the airline Air Jamaica. The total value of this prize is $3850 US. This promotion is called Get Restless in Jamaica Sweepstakes and is part of a Perfectmatch's tie-in with the daytime soap opera, The Young and the Restless.

Visit Jamaica sweepstakes to enter. Read our Perfectmatch review for more information on this popular online dating site.

Chicago Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart on March 5th, 2009 sued Craigslist, the popular internet classifieds website. He is accusing them of being a one of the largest sources of prostitution in the United States.

The federal lawsuit filed by Dart's office claims that Craigslist's erotic section is a powerful marketing tool for pimps and prostitutes and makes it easier for criminals to elude police.]

A Craigslist spokeswoman said that compared to all of the legal classifieds on the site, these type of criminal acts are rare. She also said that Craigslist constantly helps law enforcement to track down people who post illegal classified ads.

Sex workers use online classifieds because they find that sites like Craigslist helps to reduce physical violence by customers. This often means as an added benefit, that pimps are not needed. What Craigslist does is offer a buffer between the prostitute and the client through the anonymous email system. Plus, most hookers find that people who use the internet to find sex, tend to have a much lesser chance of being violent.

Police also have used Craigslist to pursue criminal investigations. One example was given from Seattle, where police arrested 71 men in response to one sex ad on Craigslist.

For more on this story, check out Cnet News.

There is an informative interview with one of the founders of OkCupid.com, Sam Yagan, over at The Harvard Crimson. Sam received his BA in Applied Mathematics and Economics at Harvard. The interviewer asks Sam about his first major web project SparkNotes (brand of educational study aids), as well as OkCupid. A few things we learn about OkCupid is that the majority of their users are under 30, web savvy and with an equal, 1 to 1, male to female membership ratio. Boston also happens to be the biggest city that uses OKCupid.com, per capita.

On a related note, our OkCupid.com review is coming along and soon should be finished.

Read the full interview at The Harvard Crimson. For our coming review of this dating site check out the OkCUpid.com review.

Once again PlentyOfFish is planning to offer a paid service. Their previous attempt with Virtual Gifts wasn't too successful. In my opinion it was due in part to the high cost of the gifts, which ranged from $9 to $30. This time around POF will offer an upgrade to the existing free membership which will last 3, 6 or 12 months. Markus, the CEO of PlentyOfFish is calling the new feature the Serious Member Profile Upgrade. It is designed for members to signal to the community that you are serious about meeting your match.

So what do you get when you sign up for the feature? Advertising will be removed from your profile and a Serious Member Star will appear on your profile beside your main profile photo. A star icon will also appear on any image thumbnail of you. Your search result as well, will be highlighted in gold to make it stand out in the standard search results and the gallery search results. We currently do not know the cost of the new features so we will just have to wait for a few days until the new feature goes live on the site.

I think this is a good move for PlentyOfFish as long as they keep the price down, at least in the beginning so the existing members can get use to it. I don't really see members signing up based on showing that they are a serious dater. They will sign up because their profile will be highlighted and stand out more from the crowd.

Will this new feature steal members away from paid dating sites? I don't really think so, most singles who move on from a dating site (Free or Paid) do so because they have run out of other members to contact. Becoming a serious member will not give you any more people to contact.