I also seem to be the only person in the world who doesn’t like PlentyOfFish. I just find it a little too unrefined. I like OKCupid, but haven’t had much luck on there – not that I’m blaming the site.

Markus has probably felt a drop recently in sponsors and advertising CPMs on his site because it is a niche audience and buyers like myself aren’t advertising on these types of sites anymore. We are buying up all kinds of remnant inventory from the portals for cheap that have high quality traffic. Markus recently launched a paid service feature on his site. I wonder if this is in response to Match launching a free service or if he is seeing a drop in revenue but maybe not traffic. There is a site like Facebook in Russia that now charges for the same type of service since they have access to over 20M users. If Facebook figures out a better way to monetize its users with micro payment services then it’ll be lights out. If Markus turned his site into a pay service then people will jump ship over night. I have seen it happen with a German free dating site before that went to a paid model and lost their business in months. My comment was that Markus definitely has a valuable property but that he needs to start comparing it to other dating sites and not a property like Facebook if he wants to get a fair valuation for what his business is worth.

“I would like to see Markus get acquired but I don’t think he has a good grasp of what his site is actually worth as he keeps comparing it to Facebook and other social network acquisitions. Trust me POF is far, far away from anything related to FB.”

How do you know how much POF is or isn’t worth? And what makes you think Facebook is worth more? Because you like the site better? In fact, Facebook clearly doesn’t know how much it is valued, because it was stated in an article that it was way overvalued for what it has to offer….in fact, it offers no value to its users, other than advertising. POF has a far greater value than facebook since there is a much greater and targeted purpose in the site (to find a date, plain and simple). In my opinion, POF has a far greater potential to make so much more money through paid subscriptions. Do you think Facebook members will ever pay for subscriptions? The reason why they won’t, is because there is no real value in Facebook.

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Plenty of Fish, on the other hand is a freak of nature. Who could have thought that a one person operation could compete with the big boys (I know he has hired a couple of people now but still). So there is something extra-ordinary about what Marcus has done. He should be regarded as a pioneer and in my opinion the tone of your comments when comparing Plenty of Fish and Face Book is unfair and in a way inappropriate.

Also, I in my admittedly non-expert opinion I don’t see a natural progression from free sites to paid sites. Sure the folks who use the free sites are exposed to ads from paid sites and may fall for some of the trickery and join them to expand the possibilities but I don’t believe the majority would regard it as an upgrade path.

Another non-expert opinion of mine is that in time free sites will eat paid sites’ lunches. Though it would probably be many years (or decades) before nearly all will be forced to be free except those who provide specialized and tangible services.

EuropeanKiss.org is a totally free online dating community for single europeans in europe, canada and usa, which is secure, safe and fun with much more features than any dating site, paid or free.

We have introduced a community moderated system where upon registration, you must complete your profile and upload at least 1 photo and then wait for approval by users of the community, during which time you won’t be able to use the site. This is another security layer we have put into place which prevents incomplete profiles and spammers. We have setup a required number of votes and percentage to approve or reject profiles.

We also check IP address’s against a blacklist for spammers and have put into place the ability to report profile, messages and photo abuse.

Another feature we have introduced is “Certify that this user is Genuine”

If you have met a site member or you are sure for his/her existence and profile/photos, you can certify that this user is genuine. The number of users required to certify a user is set by the site administrator. After the required users have certified a user is genuine, a green check appears next to the user in every search result.

We have found many free dating sites are full of spammers and are poorly designed and want to change the way free dating sites are perceived.

-Brian R.

The industry is a 0 sum game… Free sites take away from paid sites period. Industry traffic has been 1.25% of online traffic for the past few years, yet in the past 2 years POF and singlesnet have gone from nowhere to 40% of US dating traffic. Match.com has lost a lot of US subscribers year over year and so has American singles and yahoo personals and all the others. Those users aren’t going to ever pay again… As for revenues, non dating ads pay more than dating ads… So long term free sites won’t be advertising paid dating sites anyways.