Ten Million Dollars A Year For An Ugly Site - Plenty Of Fish

Read From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year in the New York Times tonight; I had PlentyofFish.com a while back in Plenty Of Cash for PlentyOfFish.com (June, 2006); Marcus is hardly new to me.

But, after reading From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year and taking a plentyoffish.com - I've concluded part of the reason that it, and Craigslist, is successful is the textual content and low tech appearance of the site along with a strong user community.

I'm not saying that ugly textual sites do better - were all sites textual we'd be back in pre-netscape days - but I suspect that images and fluff are served way too often, as if we need anymore of that.   It's like …how much whipped cream to we need on our hot chocolate?  Is more better?  Often, it's not.

"…Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience. Wherever a row of members’ photos is displayed, which is most pages, many of the faces are elongated or scrunched because Mr. Frind has not taken the trouble to write the software code that would automatically resize frames or crop photos to prevent distortion. When I asked him why he had not addressed the problem, he said it was a “trivial” issue that did not bother

Maybe it's the transparancy, the utter simplicity of the approach, the free use of the site - that helps it work along with run itself.

 "…Mr. Frind says that close to 50,000 new photos come in every day, each one of which needs to be checked to verify that it is an actual person and that it does not not contain nudity. The work would be costly if Mr. Frind relied on a paid staff to do it.

Fortunately for him, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of humans eager to look at pictures of other humans, and Mr. Frind taps his customers to carry out the reviewing, gratis. Some have made it their principal pastime. Among Plenty of Fish’s volunteers were 120 who last year evaluated more than 100,000 images each. He explains his volunteers’ enthusiasm for the work as an expression of gratitude: “Lots of people feel like they want to give back to the site because it’s free.”

What's happening here is exactly the kind of activity I suggest we do when I was working at IBM.  Large sites have a lot of content - especially large Corporate Sites like IBM.  One thing IBM wanted to do was create navigation that would suggest to a visitor, the best content related to a link or page they were looking at - and this would be generated, more or less, on the fly - but would have to be seeded.

It turned out the project team wanted to talk with stakeholders to evaluate the content of pages related to links a visitor might see - an impossible task for several thousand pages of marketing and support content that was constantly being updated.

My suggestion was to create a widget and get IBM employees and consultants to vote on content, make it fun, crowd-source the ability to evaluate IBM's content and give out rewards - even make contests - make the thing interesting and transparent.

Of course, that never happened.