Plenty of Fish - Dating Site

Introduction:

PlentyofFish is a Vancouverite's free online dating site. It is the biggest different than other dating site is free. On many occasions, that Frind's company consisted of just on employee--himself. While he had hired another employee in late 2007, it was only to assist in providing customer service.

The concept

Social networking: it was defined as a group of 100 to 150 people drawn together by family, work or a hobby. Through the Internet, social networking had expanded to hundreds of millions of people around the world, creating a virtual community for people to interact with one another about anything and everything.

Web 2.0: it was term first coined in 2004 at a Web conference whose theme was "The Web has become a platform, a foundation upon which thousands of new forms of business would emerge."

Business model:

PoF was free to users, a feature that differentiated it from other online dating sites. PoF had built an engaged, passionate community of users who felt emotionally attached to the site. This created high switching costs for users as well as allowing PoF to benefit from network effects. PoF was sustained by revenue from companied advertising on the site, such as banner ads, Google ads, and affiliated dating sites. Ads sent users to other sites, even other dating sites, which in turn generated revenue for PoF.

External analysis:

In 2008, Frind used ASP.NET web application framework, because "it is trivial and easy and gets the job done." And what he had done is about 10 to20 times more efficient than what anybody else has done with ASP.NET.

Implementation:

Frind use "one web server, one mail server, two database servers now and a couple of little web servers to run the Userplane instant messenger." This has lower operating costs. His choice for a DBMS was SQL Server 2005.

Sustainability:

Frind had added a VoIP which allowed users to send voice messages to other member. This ease of use allowed members to immediately "jump into the pool," establishing online conversations with whomever they chose. PoF uses Web2.0 systems; it was able to take advantage of this new business model by encouraging user contributions and their collective intelligence.

Discussion:

As a new online dating site, Pof has advantage of it provide free to users. It was sustained by revenue from companies advertising on the site. This business model will succeed and sustainable because there are more and more people will jump into virtual community pool in the modern time. They will easily accept fangled things. However, Pof's revenue only comes from advertising in not enough. In order to achieve increasing