Match.com no longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/match-com-no-longer-top-dating-site-sends-in-the-lawyers/

by tortilla • 16 years ago

165 109 16 years ago

plentyoffish.wordpress.com

seiji• 16 years ago

Thanks for reminding me we need to decimate all the horrific dating sites out there. Who's in?

kapitti• 16 years ago

lallysingh2• 16 years ago

Oi! I'm meeting & dating some wonderful women through these things! You just have to know the game and play along.

A little experience with queuing models and Petri nets also helps.

francoisdevlin• 16 years ago

Queuing models and Petri nets? You must be having success.

realitygrill• 16 years ago

Please explain this. I am grinning hugely in anticipation.

gaius3• 16 years ago

Why the downvotes? A better dating site is on YC's list of things they want to fund.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

What's wrong with okCupid, other than being written in C++?

luminary• 16 years ago

I actually wrote about this the other day: http://whislr.com/2010/04/20/a-different-approach-to-buildin...

jeremymcanally• 16 years ago

This reminds me of the Intuit/Mint exchanges, pre-acquisition.

"What you say!??! You can't be more popular then we!! We demand that you prove this to us."

brown9-2• 16 years ago

I'm curious about how common this is with big corporations?

Do they really think someone will be fooled by their demands which have no force behind them?

patio112• 16 years ago

Lawyers routinely resolve almost all of their work with nastygrams (sternly worded letters demanding that someone take action on behalf of their client).

run4yourlives4• 16 years ago

I'm curious about how common this is with big corporations?

My personal experience suggests it's ridiculously common. People who work in large corporations often feel that the way large corporations work is the only way to do business.

Because of that, they simply look at all the resources they require and conclude that since they require this, that there must be no other way of doing things.

This is why startups can succeed - large businesses are stuck inside the boxes of their own design.

eam• 16 years ago

Exactly! Now, will history repeat itself? Will Match try to acquire PlentyOfFish?

tbrooks• 16 years ago

No way. Markus works 5 hours a week and has plentyofmoney, why would he sell?

Unlike Mint (pre-acquisition), Markus already has FU money...

aresant• 16 years ago

Link to original Quicken threatens Mint article:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/19/quicken-online-cant-believe...

pavs2• 16 years ago

Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer. Assuming the number he claims is true, how many users is he loosing because of the site layout?

I might sound like a snob, but I have a hard time taking a site designed like this seriously, I don't care how many users or traffic he claims to have.

As far as dating site designs go, OkCupid looks great.

gte910h2• 16 years ago

Unfortunately for you, dating sites really suffer from power laws. A dating site with 2x people is 4x as effective

kyro2• 16 years ago

Most of the users that use that site don't care about ease of use. As long as they can find matches, for free, they're happy.

chime• 16 years ago

> Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer.

I'd say he knows his target audience well enough to make that decision himself. There is indeed such a thing as being too polished. The reason late-night TV commercials are cheesy and loud is not because the director lacks the skills but rather because it suits the target market. If POF redesigned their site to look like a glamor magazine website, he might indeed lose a lot of users because they might be intimidated by the design.

pavs2• 16 years ago

Its doesn't even need to look like a glamor magazine website (none of the dating websites do). Even if he doesn't need to make the site look half decent, the design itself is broken. Thumbnails doesn't seem to be properly scaled, they seemed compressed in to a smaller version (I could be wrong but the thumbnails are screwed up for some reason) and what is this in ever profile? http://i.imgur.com/Knicz.png

Its less than 5 minutes worth of work to fix that.

samratjp• 16 years ago

You could say the same about myspace, but it's still alive.

mistermann• 16 years ago

I seem to recall reading an interview where this question was asked, and the answer was basically, don't mess with what works....the idea being that, if you're constantly improving, eventually you'll screw something up. He knows it's bad, but he doesn't want to screw things up.

But I agree with you, the design is painful to look at, and usability could be improved a lot. Why he doesn't clean things up a bit is beyond me.

But then, compared to the competitors, POF may not look so pretty, but functionally it is quite good.

hussong2• 16 years ago

Someone wrote that maybe the crappy, amateurish look gives the site more authenticity, much like a long-tail forum/bb.

If POF's UI was really slick, it might look too commercial for some people.

petercooper4• 16 years ago

Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer. Assuming the number he claims is true, how many users is he loosing because of the site layout?

As many as Craigslist is "loosing," I suspect.

dc2k08• 16 years ago

I can offer one statistic that backs you up. A friend who had tried match.com without success asked me for dating site recommendations. I pointed her to PoF and OKCupid. She went with OKcupid over PoF saying the latter just looked cheap or 'seedy'. He could definitely improve the style sheet without going all super needlessly web 2.0. It would be interesting if he preformed some split tests with the design on new sign ups but perhaps he already has. I did read once that some e-book sellers purposely keep their sell pages looking less than beautiful as they realised it attracted more conversions. The reasoning they gave was that perhaps it gave the impression that they were just common ordinary people and therefor more likely to be trustworthy.

fname• 16 years ago

Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know

Would anyone in their right minds consider this?

ciscoriordan• 16 years ago

Acquisition opportunity?

macrael2• 16 years ago

> Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know.

If you read the letter Match.com sent to him, you will see that he is misrepresenting it here. All they ask him for is proof that the claims he is making are true.

From Match.com: > We demand that you immediately cease and desist from making these false claims. If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims...If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement.

I don't know why Match.com would be the people to follow up on a possible false advertising claim like this. I assume they could sue plentyoffish if they don't provide Match with evidence? As plentyoffish points out, it is likely that Match.com (also?) makes false claims, so this could definitely be bluster. But they definitely don't ask for plentyoffish to reveal their processes.

jdrock• 16 years ago

I can't see how Match.com could possibly defend their case in court if they tried to sue. They'd essentially be asking a competing firm to reveal their trade secrets.

macrael2• 16 years ago

Again, it really doesn't look like they are doing that at all. They are just asking them to prove their marketing claims. My guess (IANANANAL) is that Match could sue for false advertising charges? Or bring evidence to the FTC? Dunno. But they aren't asking for their trade secrets.

False advertising is illegal.

strebler• 16 years ago

Even if they sue, it's Canada. You can only get actual damages (which you also have to prove), lawsuits in Canada aren't lotteries (like in the US).

ebneter• 16 years ago

To the best of my knowledge (and IANAL...), Match has no standing in this regard, and therefore is in no position to be making any demands. Match is not the FTC (or Canadian equivalent).

pmiller22• 16 years ago

I'm no lawyer, either (nor am I ANAL), but I think you're correct. In addition, I believe the FTC only really has jurisdiction to intervene here if it believes actual consumers are being harmed by plentyoffish making the claims they are. Since it's a free site, it seems unlikely anyone's being harmed by anything plentyoffish is doing, except possibly for some wasted time. And, in this respect, I'm sure plentyoffish is no worse than a lot of other time-waster web sites.

pmiller22• 16 years ago

Oh, but you left out the best part of the whole letter! You know, the part where their general counsel says:

    Based on *my* knowledge of the industry, these claims cannot be supported.... [emphasis added]

Because, as we all know, being general counsel of a dating site means you know all about things like how many relationships a dating site with X members can theoretically generate, and such.

In any case, this is just meaningless legal posturing. In the United States, where anyone can bring suit against any private entity for any reason whatsoever, a C&D letter from a competitor like this would barely register on my radar screen if I were one of the people at plentyoffish who's paid to worry about such things. Judging by the last sentence of his post, that seems like exactly what the post author is going to do about it.

btilly2• 16 years ago

FYI plentyoffish is basically a one man show. And he claims to be doing it part time.

petercooper4• 16 years ago

Good luck to Match.com - not. Any company could try and use this as justification to find out things about their competitors. For example, 37signals claims: "Over 3 million people use our web-based apps to get things done the simple way." Sending them a letter saying that you don't believe them and that they must substantiate the claim by return mail would, I suspect, be met with much laughter.

staunch4• 16 years ago

37 signals line is genuinely horseshit though. They're quite clearly counting people who signup as "people who use our web-based apps". That's a truly false and misleading claim. It's beneath them.

Timothee• 16 years ago

But isn't everybody doing that? Or, at least a lot of people?

If your database has 3 millions lines in the account table, it feels better to use that number than the number of accounts that, say, logged in in the past x months. Especially if that second number is way less.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I feel it's one of these games where since everyone is doing it, you have to catch up one way or the other.

patio112• 16 years ago

The great thing about user numbers is that you have so many to choose from!

There are straightforward, well-used definitions of "user" for which I have 60, 1.5k, 2.9k, 50.0k, and "well over a hundred thousand" users. They're all equally true and none of them singly or in combination tell you a thing about the health of my business unless you're intimately acquainted with it.

run4yourlives4• 16 years ago

Sorry what?

What else do you call people who sign-up if not "users"?

They don't say that "2 million people use our apps and all of them signed in yesterday", they're just giving you an idea of the total number of accounts they have in their db.

It's marketing, not horse shit.

jarin4• 16 years ago

Hahaha that is hilarious. As someone who has a dating site as a client (http://setformarriage.com), the numbers are especially funny to me :)

TotlolRon• 16 years ago

Lawyers. What will we do without them?

jjs• 16 years ago

Lawyers. What will we do without them?

http://images.google.com/images?q=champagne+popping

http://images.google.com/images?q=fireworks

http://images.google.com/images?q=parade

MichaelApproved2• 16 years ago

Until you need one

arethuza• 16 years ago

Old joke: How are lawyers like nuclear weapons? If one side has one, the other side has to get one. Once launched, they cannot be recalled. When they land, they screw up everything forever.

Sukotto• 16 years ago

Our current system of law is the least worst to date.

It sucks... but everything else we've tried sucks worse.

sosuke• 16 years ago

Match.com has been bloating numbers for a very long time, they just seem pissed that throwing money at downtoearth.com didn't pay off. I'd love for them to be forced to be truthful about their numbers for a change too.

kadavy2• 16 years ago

From the comments: Yeah, 15% sounded high to me, too. But, from my Commission Junction account:

23 leads 3 sales —– 13% conversion ratio – about right.

oakenshield• 16 years ago

A recent blog post from OkCupid dissects Match.com (and eHarmony, to a lesser extent) to bits: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/04/07/why-you-should-...

_3ex7• 16 years ago

Here is an amendment I made to the flowchart in that post:

http://i.imgur.com/FRGX0.jpg

not_an_alien• 16 years ago

Awesome read. I love the guys at that website, their blog posts are always insightful.

capedape• 16 years ago

Nice chart. I love when they break things down like that and can confirm that the graph with the girls is authentic (been out with 2 of them) One thing these numbers don't take into account is that when people pay for something they're more likely to take it seriously. It's anecdotal, but my experience with hundreds of dates over the years is the women are less flaky on Match vs. OKcupid. It's a case of having to develop a good flake-dar, such is the price you pay for free. Saying that, I'd never want them to go pay, I hope OK and the like destroy Match, they're just better companies with better ideas.

benashkan• 16 years ago

Traction really scares competitors.

kyro2• 16 years ago

I'd like to hear what grellas has to say about this. Does Match have anything to stand on here? Do they have any sort of case?

ulvund• 16 years ago

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. –Mahatma Gandhi

javery• 16 years ago

This is on the wall above the front desk in the lobby of Red Hat headquarters. Always love reading it every time I go in there.

Match.com no longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers

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