"A scan of Twitter reveals a lot more people talking about actually using Match.com than Plentyoffish"

There's the biggest flaw in his theory. If you've scanned the people who have profiles on POF (or any other free dating service), you might draw the conclusion that the people using such services are not part of the tech elite. Yes, Twitter has a large user base but it is not mainstream.

Here's why it gets so many clicks: A lot of the ads on POF are for alternate online dating sites, so there's a 100% match between the people visiting the service and the people who might click on ads. By definition, if you're visiting POF, you're not in a relationship and thus POF isn't satisfying your need to be in a relationship. So what are you going to do? Search for a better dating site. And, coincidentally, POF has already done that work for you by surrounding every inch of unused space with dating site ads. It's both a dating site and a dating site search engine.

It's that simple in my opinion. But I do love a good conspiracy theory!

Yep. POF is the world's most elaborate banner ad for other dating sites. It probably gets a bloated CPM for having targeted traffic, and I wouldn't be surprised if it could support a high click-throgh rates on CPA ads for the other dating sites -- because it's fairly useless for dating, itself.

I'm not sure if the author was being serious or satirical, but it's kind of a shame that the article was so dopey, because there's probably a real story here.

But why do so many people go to plentyoffish in the first place? Do they get more clicks per user than other sites?

This is so hilarious that it feels wrong to nitpick it. But in the interests of science, this survey technique:

A scan of Twitter reveals a lot more people talking about actually using Match.com than Plentyoffish...

... is like a freshman-class exercise in Spot The Sample Bias. Twitter users are hardly a representative sample of the online population, let alone the population at large.

Twitter users alone is a small sample, but I think there are other anecdotal samples that support (but can't prove) the author's hypothesis. I can't remember anyone talking about PlentyOfFish, and this includes people who have tried multiple dating sites. Compete, Alexa, Google Trends and other traffic estimators also show Match having higher traffic. The only statistics showing PlentyOfFish as bigger than Match are the comScore numbers quoted by Mashable.

It's also important to remember that Markus Frind was accused of overstating the PlentyOfFish traffic levels to generate buzz years ago when the site first became popular. Although the post went off into a satirical conspiracy, there could still be something fishy going on.

Well, it could certainly be that Frind's stats are off -- accidentally, or on purpose, or for the same reason that many scientists' stats are off. (They make an initial mistake, and the positive feedback from that mistake creates a big disincentive to reexamine the data too closely.)

If so, it's a joke on the web stats industry, which seems to be... well, a joke. If people had any confidence in the accuracy of these traffic estimators, there wouldn't be room for a wacky conspiracy theory, right? Does anybody really know how many people visit a site, besides (perhaps) its owner? I suppose Google might give me more definitive data if I paid enough and signed an NDA in blood.

Google Trends seems to paint a similar picture: http://www.google.com/trends?q=match.com,+Plentyoffish&c...

PlentyofFish's revenue numbers aside, one really has to be amazed at their sheer traffic numbers. If the market share stats are to be believed, Match.com and eHarmony are getting trampled on despite their outsize national advertising budgets, deep-pocketed investors and clearly more polished products.

I'd really be interested to know how PoF is pulling so much traffic.

I'm embarrassed to say but my own logical reasoning leads me to the conclusion that I might actually want to date one of those super intelligent PhD bots.

Google, do you hear me? Or are you just a creature of Microsoft meant to stop the DoJ from breaking them up?

Wait is this an actual analysis or a joke? I'm not familiar with the blog.

Clearly reads like a joke to me.

It's a joke... You know, like... haha... funny. That kind of a thing.

Right.

But why's half the thread treating it like an actual analysis?

There are two claims here: "POF is not really that big", and "Emergent AI clickfraud bots are causing POF's traffic". People who are treating this seriously are assuming that the first claim was the real message, and that the author merely indulged in some whimsy after. I think it more likely that the second claim, the joke, was the point of the article, but there's a lot less to be said about that, and so people who want to say something serious about POF are ignoring it.

Because people have no sense of humor? Beats the hell out of me, and I wrote it. They're debating it on the comments of the post itself, too. I thought it was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek, but maybe I should have suggested that Markus was secretly an alien or something.

I was equally perplexed. I thought it was hilarious and then I went to the comments and thought Isiah Thomas was running the Knicks again.

Hey, sorry, I missed that it was a joke too. I only read half way through, sounded like crack-potery so I stopped.

I've worked in the online dating industry for long time, and yes, POF is making lots of money, though I don't know exactly how much. Adsense is only one part of how they are monetizing their site.

The idea that it's all click bots is just silly.

As with any good conspiracy theory, there are chunks of truth in there. There are many people doing this type of activity on smaller scale.

Interesting analysis, though it became a hit outrageous at the end. With the degree of fakeness he is proposing, how is it possible that the degradation of content quality went unnoticed? And A.viary?

I'm not one to hate on awesome and successful startupa, we should also consider this. POF doesn't have the members it says. POF had growth, decent size. Publicise startup story and millions in income, millions in members. Press written, and your numbers jump.

Just like the situation with a video on YouTube. It wasn't the video that made it have high view counts. It was the video being publicised as having a huge view counts because of an exploit - and people went on the page, and the view count increased.

This is completely nuts.

In my experience when the outcome of something is a lot of money, some people do whatever to make it happen.

I wouldnt bet anything against Google or PoF not messing this

Is today April 1st?