Welcome to HN, Markus. Please consider sticking around -- many folks here could learn a lot from you. (We have very different businesses but I've been quietly Internet-stalking a lot of your work for years.)
Seconded. (And Patio11, I've been stalking you...)
Another highlight, showing how POF early on was all about surprising and obvious innovations (presumably at the expense of polish, as noted elsewhere in the thread). If you're bootstrapping, polish is not your friend. Risky innovations are.
The motion carries. Markus will spend more time on HN :)
Marcus, you shared a great talk a few months ago at Launch Academy and it really helped me get through a difficult period in starting my company, thank you. I had just bootstrapped my company for 20 months (read: hadn't had a paycheque in 20 months), now we're month 24 and things are rolling quite nicely (read: paid myself in April!!!!).
This is the type of stuff us HN folks need to focus on.. POF is your classic "started in the garage" success story. No fancy trendy offices, no upfront VC investments, no trendy website with no product etc. This is true entrepreneurship.
POF is the Google of dating sites, it came in to fill a need already being filled by "big money" and simply did it better, and gave it away free with revenue from advertising.
Personally I love seeing something like that work.
I agree with everything you said except I would love to see more success stories that aren't based on the ad revenue business model.
So many great new ideas come out, and then they slap ads on them to make money. It'd be nice to see some other experiments on how to extract cash from a business.
We make a lot of money from subscriptions today. But when you are first starting out making money from advertising is super easy, taking all of several minutes to add to your site.
Getting set up for payments and running a subscription business is very complicated and takes a lot of time people and money. Time better spent perfecting your product early on.
If paypal had a mechanism to pre-validate, to avoid having 10's of 1000's of dollars frozen, then they'd be fine.
They get hate because their approach to post-hoc fraud limiting has fucked over thousands of people. Don't dismiss the hate, they earned that hate one customer at a time.
I gave up on BuySellAds, they turned me down three times without reason. My site gets more traffic then any other sites they have in that same niche, it follows all of their rules (nothing adult related or inappropriate), and it's better designed than the majority of their sites.
So, I sell my own ads directly now. I can get some of the biggest names in the tech industry excited about running ad campaigns on my site for $10k a week, but apparently that wasn't good enough for BuySellAds. Their loss, they're not going to get my business at this point.
[EDIT: Two immediate downvotes and neither has the courage to explain why. Wow. Is the inconvenient truth hitting to close to home?]
Relying on ad revenue is a moral failing.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product[1]. The rationalization that allowing ads allows you to give your product free to users is a self-serving shame-allaying delusion[2].
[1] Even an ad that tells no outright lie is lying if it is selectively tells a partial truth. The moral test is whether you sell that product with the same pitch to a friend who does not have money to blow. Would you leave out the cons of your product and the pros of a competing one? Would you use psychological tricks to convince your friend she needs it, even though in honesty you know she doesn't?
Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product
My most effective ad incoming, prepare for the perfidy.
Make Bingo Cards Quickly
Create word bingo to fit any theme.
Try now, no download required!
www.BingoCardCreator.com
It is for a SaaS application which makes word bingo cards.
Can you suggest how the ad is deceptive and/or manipulative? If it helps, I'll supply context: it is almost guaranteed to show on pages which talk about making bingo games in an elementary school (or similar) setting.
I spent about $8k last year showing this to ~4 million teachers, homemakers, event planners, and other people interested in topics like Halloween bingo. (A particular thing that it does.) This resulted roughly 80,000 of them visiting a landing page which offered them free bingo cards for their email address. Roughly 20,000 of them took me up on that. Somewhere around 500 of those 20k decided they liked their free bingo cards so much they wanted to pay for the product which I sell.
I have a pretty good idea of where that $8k ended up. Approximately $3k of it subsidizes operations at Google, a company which you may have heard of. The other $5k subsidizes content creation at a few thousand sites across the Internet. Some of them are honestly not net value providers. Many of them are.
One of my most successful ad placements, for example, is on a hobbyist site created by a teacher and her husband. It offers many free printable activities and is ad supported. It's been lovingly maintained since the late 90s or so. My rough approximation of their annual ad revenue is "it would make for a pretty nice teacher's pension in any state."
It is very not obvious for me that anyone would be better off if that team decided to take down their site to avoid the moral impurity of advertising. Their users would lose access to many useful, free printable activities. I'd lose access to a large group of great prospects for my product. Many teachers would fail at their goal of playing classroom bingo with their students tomorrow. Their kids would be sad.
But your ads, and in particular the careful placement you describe are not at all representative of the majority of ads most people see around the Internet.
And your example about the hobbyist-site-gone-nice-pension is not a startup. It's also just an appeal to emotion, when the argument is just that we could do with less advertising in general, and that it would be nice if startups could find or have a different way to monetize.
A lot of ads are is deceptive (though IMO, 90% is a bit high estimate), but more importantly it takes a very real mental cost of constantly having to task-switch: when I'm merely looking for information (which is 99% of the time I'm on the Internet), there is an army of specifically crafted boxes of information strewn in sidebars across the web, doing their utmost best to get me out of that mindset and into the mindset of deciding-to-purchase.
If I actually were to have to suffer that I'd never get anything done. That may sound extreme, but there's more people like me that need their focus and it's fragile. Thankfully there's AdBlock and similar tools.
I don't see anything wrong with this type of advertising and I appreciate where you're coming from.
But, ignoring the issue whether most ads are like this or hyper-tuned to psychologically trick you into consuming goods you can't afford, there seems to be another issue here, separate from the parent.
The advertising industry seems to be the biggest pushers of big-data collect-all-you-can-because-you-may-need-it-someday. This automatically erodes privacy for everyone.
For you to have reached that many teachers on such a budget, I assume all this collected data helped immensely, but at what cost?
Please identify the specific mechanism by which you think that an ad for Bingo Card Creator appearing on a page about bingo cards erodes the privacy of Ethyl Smith, a hypothetical schoolteacher in Kansas who is currently viewing the page about bingo cards. It is not obvious to me that this is "automatic" or that there are various poorly specified data being collected which helped immensely other than "It looks like she wants bingo cards. Maybe we show her an ad about bingo cards?"
I think showing an ad for a bingo card creator when Ethyl Smith searches for one is the perfect (and original) mechanism for targeted ads.
What I worry about is Ethyl Smith's emails / chats / SMSs (via hangout) / location and map searches &c. all being collected for the sole purpose of showing her the perfect targeted ad.
In my personal opinion, I don't mind Google using their algorithms and that to extract data from all those sources to display to me relevant things that I'd actually buy, then show me stuff I don't care about. It's not like Google employes thousands of people who pour through your email, chats, hangouts and other stuff to be like "yup, this ad would be perfect for them."
I agree. I use gmail, so I can't in all honesty say that I have an objection to less privacy in return for targeted ads.
But I do get pissed off that the NSA can tell Google to give them that data without my permission and with no benefit to me (I don't live in the US so there's no security benefit to me even if the NSA was increasing US security).
Advertising industry erodes the privacy of Ethyl Smith.
Bingo Card Creator supports and is supported by the advertising industry (and, in particular, corporations which encourage the erosion of privacy).
Every individual can easily excuse themselves from this process by saying there is no direct link between their own commercial effort and privacy erosion, and it's very easy to ethically justify what you individually are doing. After all, no single person or entity is literally saying or thinking "let's screw Ethyl Smith".
Personally speaking, I no longer find this a very good excuse.
If you are against advertising, how do you cease the intrinsic and instinctive self-advertising of human beings?
The study, published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology, found that 60 percent of people had lied at least once during the 10-minute conversation, saying an average of 2.92 inaccurate things.
OP >> 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product
This thread has been characterised with the opinion from people like yourself that advertising is immoral, akin to lying, manipulative, deceiving etc etc <insert descriptor>.
My point stands - advertising is just an extension of social interaction. If you hate advertising, you essentially hate yourself since you advertise continually.
Ah, I see that you are ignoring and misrepresenting the point that I made. Good for you.
Anyway, to respond to your point:
I do not welcome advertising as an extension of social interaction, no more than I welcome someone shouting at me in the street as an extension of social interaction.
Not misrepresenting anything. You are just incapable of accepting that advertising has a place in a market economy and that across society human beings are hard-wired to advertise, even if just using body language.
You have somehow compared this to shouting at you. Whether you welcome advertising or not you do do it. Arguing against advertising is like arguing against breathing.
Carry on downvoting me; I care a little above 0 about my karma score. It just shows me that advertising detractors cannot form a coherent justification for their views.
- You don't prove that you could have done better through product reviews and word of mouth (which is now web-scale via social media), especially in a world where you didn't have to compete with other products that make false claims through advertising.
- You didn't refute my claim (via the footnote link) that if people paid up front for Google, the other content creation sites you mention, as well as the hobbyist site, that it would actually be cheaper for everyone, both on a monetary and social cost-basis.
And wow, over 50% of the cost of your product went to advertising! In a world where people discover things via web-scale word-of-mouth (e.g. social networks, product review sites, recommendations from field- or topic-specific authoritative websites), your product would be 50% cheaper, and even cheaper than that considering people would not waste money buying products due to dishonest ads.
Yes, we are in a sort of catch-22. Because people are so used to getting their web for free (even though as I point out that is an illusion), a huge majority of us would have to boycott ads to change the system to where non-ad-supported business models could thrive. But those of us who dare to do it first, before that critical mass is achieved, are likely not to survive.
But a seemingly insurmountable catch-22 doesn't mean it isn't messed up and not worthy of critique. Remember, history is replete with such situations. When we all lived under totalitarianism, a small number of people could rule over a vast majority only because to unite people into a rebellion, you have to speak up, but if you speak up, you're head gets cut off.
He doesn't negate your points because there were none to negate. Well, except for that clearly accurate "90-99%" figure you quoted. Your personal crusade is not a rebellion, and no one is trying to cut off "you're" head.
Sure, we all agree that deceptive advertising is deceptive. That's wrong, but not all advertising is bad. I think you'll be surprised to find out that 95% of people (yay, making up numbers is fun!) actually don't mind that google tracks their activity so they can show more relevant ads. I typically don't click on them, but hey, more relevant ads still makes my overall experience better and I really don't care if we get there because some of my search history was (relatively anonymously) logged on some of google's servers.
Also yes, word of mouth leads a lot of people to discover new products, and may be cheaper than traditional advertising in dollar amounts, but it's likely a much greater time investment that may not even pay off in the end. Likewise, patio11 could pay the hobbyist site, and google, and any other "legitimate" advertising platform directly but I think the time commitment to find those valuable platforms, enter into an agreement with them, and deal with all the associated details may not be worth it for him.
In the end, it's about finding a cost-effective way to get your products in front of its audience. That may be "word of mouth" (and I don't want to get into that debate, but product review sites tend to be more misleading, biased and corrupt than a lot of ads), or it may be ads. To each his own, but you don't need to condemn everyone who doesn't share your overly idealistic views.
"All ads are manipulation" is one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is: ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages.
Let's say you invent a shoe that makes back pain go away. How do you get information out about it?
- you can tell everyone you know and hope they tell others (word of mouth)
- you can pursue PR stories
Or
- you can advertise
Let's assume these are the greatest shoes in the world and that everyone who tries them loves them. Word of mouth will work eventually, but it'll take 5-50 years for everyone who wants the shoes to hear about them.
The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims.
Remember that government programs to provide health insurance to poor children spend a significant amount of money on advertising to make sure people who are benefited by the program know it exists. I drive past CHIP billboards all the time.
As you said to toomuchtodo, I think you are missing the forest for the trees.
"Ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages" when honest, but when dishonest they are a mechanism for inferior products to overcome good products and unnecessary products to manipulate people into buying what they don't need.
So what proportion of ads do you think are the former, and what proportion the latter? Maybe you're being honest about your shoes (which still doesn't mean you're right), but what about all the others? What about the big established shoe-makers? So easy for them to claim the same thing, and you won't be able to compete with their large marketing budgets. That's fixed by word-of-mouth? No, you already dismissed that mechanism.
I think most people will agree with me that at least 90% of ads are dishonest on some level. Even if it were only 70%, ads simply replace the information shortage problem with an overwhelming misinformation problem.
The only reason the government needed to spend so much money on advertising the health programs for children is because we've become a society inundated with misinformation (Obama Care is evil!) and news programs that focus on celebrity gossip and missing jetliners instead of truly useful public information (because ratings drive ad revenue). If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. If it weren't for the ad-driven information ecology we have today, there would be much better ways for the government to get that out. For one, it's what the news is supposed to do (as a journalistic duty, not to increase Nielsen ratings/page views to increase ad revenue).
> The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims.
If you in your experience (I'm assuming you're not young) don't see that at least 90% of ads (be it for products or political candidates) are misleading at best, then it's unlikely anything I say will convince you.
No, most ads I see have a product they are selling that they present in a positive but truthful light.
I don't expect a company to pay for air time to tell me why I wouldn't want to buy their product.
If you're going to hold ads to the standard of complete and total disclosure about a product, without even omissions or the possibility for misunderstanding, then 99.99% of all human communication is misleading.
And as much as I like parallelism, your assertion that I'm missing the forest is baseless. I've talked only about the general terms. It's fine to disagree with me, just get your facts tight so we can have a productive discussion. If anything you seem to be arguing that I'm missing the forest for discussing the theoretical biosphere.
Manipulating people into buying a product is called "sales." It's not necessarily a bad thing. If you truly believe in your product and in your heart believe it's the best solution for the problem it solves, you do not have to be deceitful in selling it.
Your argument requires one to believe that advertisement is immoral. One could easily make another argument that selling anything for money that could be given away for free with ads hurts the poor who then are denied access. It wouldn't be true, but it would be built on just as much of a foundation (read none) as yours.
Show me some strong statistical studies showing that "90 to 99% of ads" are deceitful. I've watched a lot of ads. I don't think that number's even close to correct. Slick? Sure. Deceitful is a strong word.
I doubt Tyler Durden would spend a lot of time on Hacker News railing against corporate culture.
HN is subsidised by a pure market economy entrepreneurial construct- a construct in which advertising has a firm place at the table. It is very likely the antithesis of Tyler Durden.
Apart from the counterarguments already cited, this seems very one-sided. You don't seem to apply any blame when it comes to the customers to whom the ads are shown (or apparently deceiving).
They choose to purchase from advertisers and ignore en masse most any product that isn't advertised in some way. It's fairly obvious that they want to buy things and they want a certain kind of advertising that leads them to buy those things. What you seem to be arguing for is a place where people just walk around and look for stuff they need/want and if they ask "Where can I buy this thing I need?" for the manufacturer to stare blankly and shrug.
There is a place for businesses like POF, but there also is a place for businesses with huge VC investments, fancy offices and many employees. Totally opposing strategies though, the first being pretty risk averse and starting out slowly and climbing a long way to the top, the other being all-in from day one with huge expectations and potential in a short timeframe. Both mostly don't work out, but as i personally already went through the latter and failed (no VC, just a 2 year accelerator adventure with some moderate funding), i'll not do it that way again.
Every now and then I'll read something on HN that tempts me to experiment with the latest hot technology or platform on my little side project.
Then I remind myself it's not just a little side project, it's meant to be a business and I think of an article[1] I read about how Markus built POF with just plain old ASP.NET - it's not ideal, but the important thing is it works and the business success speaks for itself.
Keep in mind that ASP.NET 1.0 was published in January 2002 and PoF was launched in 2003. It was actually a side project to learn the latest hot technology.
May I ask how plain old ASP.NET is not ideal? What are the main scalability problems you've encountered?
Your link shows some things they decided to do to make it work; which of these problems would have been avoided using other tools? Which of these problems could not have been solved by using a more suitable architecture (using ASP.NET techniques)?
I believe it's against the Adsense ToS to share any data except gross earnings. However, I find these data very interesting and am personally glad you shared them.
Quote:
9. Confidentiality
You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without our prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes: (a) all Google software, technology and documentation relating to the Services; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance as pertaining to the Services; (c) the existence of, and information about, beta features in a Service; and (d) any other information made available by Google that is marked confidential or would normally be considered confidential under the circumstances in which it is presented. Google Confidential Information does not include information that you already knew prior to your use of the Services, that becomes public through no fault of yours, that was independently developed by you, or that was lawfully given to you by a third party. Notwithstanding this Section 9, you may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments resulting from your use of the Services.
What they will do? Ban his account?
#1 PoF dont use Adsense anymore.
#2 This was 8 years ago - I believe any legal action couldn't be taken for such a long ago by Google as their policy changed dozens of times and this will bring more advertising for them rather than damage their business.
I didn't realize PoF doesn't use Adsense any more, but I was more interested in letting HN users know in case they were inspired to share the same kind of data and risking having their accounts suspended.
Of course he receives permission to publish the revenue, back in 2006 when publishing the first check, in 2008 when his NYTimes article published his earnings, www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13digi.html?adxnnl=1 ; why wouldn't he now?
By the way almost no one believed he was earning that much even after Robert Scoble first interviewed him in 2006. (Link is now dead for whatever reason.)
I saw 'plentyoffish.com' on the Lady Gaga video 'Telephone'. I just Googled that product placement and, allegedly, site visitors went up 15% as a result of that incidental appearance in that particular video:
If that is a true statistic then, regardless of what was paid to get that product placement, the return is quite phenomenal compared to the click through rates of online advertising.
If Markus is listening, it would be good to know more details on how that success came about and worked out.
Also, cheeky joke question, for all that effort put into a dating site and with all that money made, did you get any good dates out of it?
Plenty Of Fish is one of those things where they caught lighting in a bottle and kept it there for a decade. It would be easy enough to get a site to millions of pageviews and let it die on the vine. It would also be easy to hire too many people and feature creep yourself into irrelevance.
It takes a great combination of luck and skill to take the early success and sustain it.
From a technical level POF is not that great. From a UI perspective it's pretty good. From a aesthetic design perspective it's up there with Craigslist. Working at POF is like working at McDonalds. It's temporary. Pay is anemic for even the people who control the site, so they'll bounce once something better comes along.
In terms of running a company, I would prefer a style more like the guy who started MineCraft. Ie. Million dollar bonuses, really creating a corporate culture! Making employees live their dreams.
> Working at POF is like working at McDonalds. It's temporary. Pay is anemic for even the people who control the site, so they'll bounce once something better comes along.
I don't think that's necessarily correct. I know people who have been working there for quite some time and enjoy it.
I've used it and had plenty of good experiences. I went on about have a dozen dates and ended up making some good female friends. There really is a wide range of people on there.
(disclaimer: I'm a male)
Hard to argue with such numbers... However I just created a test profile and the experience is less than stellar (many items in the French site appear in English, and I just received an email with the following title: "&&recievername%% résultats du test POF", etc.)
Obviously, users don't care for those kinds of details; what we'd like to know is: what do users actually care about? (in general, and specifically for a dating site)
These sites work on network effect, pretty similar to social networks, I guess. It helps to get a reasonable product quickly out there that does not compromise too much on the user experience and privacy.
In India there is a job site called naukri.com that has horrible user experience, but is still the number one job site. But it works and does the bare minimum without much issues. It would be tough for anyone to crack that market without non-trivial capital.
I'd be quite curious how the AdSense revenue has dropped off since 2006, as the platform has evolved a lot since then, not to mention people have had a long time to get used text-based contextual advertising.
From my earlier reading on this site, essentially the other dating sites bid up ads quite highly, presumably because the lifetime value of a dating customer is quite high for a paid site.
It was a lesson I'll always remember - if you're going to build an ad-revenue-based site, then do so in a field where there are major players throwing around big money on adsense or similar. You get to effectively monetize their users by providing an advertising channel.
> if you're going to build an ad-revenue-based site, then do so in a field where there are major players throwing around big money on adsense or similar
It is not field based. Every company has their own bidding budget. Take any field, you will be able to find clients who are ready to pay higher CPC than avg because they have money
Not really. The same person as a customer will have different lifetime value to a company in different industries. That is dependant on the stickiness of the product, the sticker price, and the nature of the product.
Credit Cards and Insurance will always have higher CPC than florists. That's inherent, and that's what I mean by choosing the field carefully.
Just checked out PlentyOfFish.com The UI has a distinct 90's feel to it. If you check out okCupid, it looks more up to date. May be this is the craigslist of dating sites.
In the same way many musicians would argue that music was better in the 70s, one could argue that UIs were better in the 90s because there were less options and trends to confuse developers.
I remember spending a couple of years working on duplicating his success. Though I had fun it was ultimately a failure, and it seems obvious now just how much PoF's success was a combination of Markus's own talent and being a first mover.
So, based on these numbers...he's doing ~$25M/mo today? I know he runs his own ad system now, but presumably he would be doing as well as he was doing with Adsense or better (or he would go back to Adsense).
Thanks Markus! It's great for the community to have data like this to learn from. I've tabulated the image for anyone interested in looking at it as a spreadsheet, which can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17yKe82aozcBegNs2YfPU...
If you'd prefer that this not be made public please let me know.
He knocked over one bowling pin to start: he conquered the Canadian dating market, started locally and moved across the border.
That can't be replicated again in the dating market, it's hyper saturated now, but that concept holds true for most any market and for most any product or service: you have to conquer that first market.
Keep in mind that's just the ad views, not the analytics for the entire site. If he began testing AdSense briefly in June, it wouldn't show the traffic the site had in May.
His site from archive.org reveals some interesting things:
At the top of the page are links to promotional systems. I'm guessing he basically used link exchanges, similar to how imgur used a traffic exchange (mgid.com) to dramatically bolster its early start.
So it appears that if you can build something that gets 2 million page views, you can probably live off of just ad revenues from AdSense.
The rough cost of click seems to be fluctuating around 0.25-0.50c but gets stabilized to almost a dollar later. I guess people usually don't think about the fact that when you click on a ad, you just made someone pay a dollar to someone :).
2009 brought more upgrades, including move to HP ProLiant DL785 with 512 GB of ram and 32 CPUs and SQLServer 2008 and Windows 2008, and In the next week we will be upgrading our image serving, we are nearing 10,000 images served per second and existing stuff just isn’t cutting it. We will be moving our 200 million images over to RamSan
Markus is POF accessible to screen reader users? I remember attempting to use the site several years ago with my screen reading software and was unable to do so.
And, as good as I think the site is, it's not the best looking or most modern. Which just goes to show, release early/often. Don't paralyse yourself trying to be perfect.
Instead of being angry about how websites store your password, why not use a different password on every website? You should be doing this anyway, as due to the way the web is designed you have to trust their server at least momentarily with your password anyway, and it would be downright stupid to send them a password you use on another website.
If the password database is somehow stolen without the website being compromised, sure. When people manage to break into the database they almost always seem to have gotten access through an exploit that takes control of the web server, though (which makes intuitive sense if you think about it). But it turns out that the really correct way of doing authentication, a challenge response rather than the idiotic "send my password to the server, allowing bugs along the route in SSL or malicious administrators to steal the password in transit", happens to make you lose that benefit anyway, as the client has to be given the algorithm to hash and salt their way to what is then effectively the password.
It used to be the case that a lot of their validation was also client side. E.g., the title section of your profile had an arbitrary length size in the input box but not their database, which was an unrestricted VARCHAR (or equivalent), if you removed the maxlength attribute of the input you could put paragraphs of text in it and it would happily destroy the layout to display it all.
I would wager they've done a "forgotten password" action and were sent their original password, always a dead givaway. Doesn't mean they're not encrypted in the database, but that's not good enough either.
Well, really, I think the big difference at the time was just that it was free. OKCupid was a later followup on the same idea, but most dating sites at the time were pay-to-message at best.
You find very different people on PoF than on the pay dating sites. Or even than on OKC, which forces you to expose more of yourself to become visible.
When this originally came up people were saying that, they use it as a reminder to keep using the site. But you can get the same benefit using a login link or something, no need for all the security issues.
The email itself is actually a call to action, it's telling you your new matches. And it's actually weekly. It looked like this before:
Hello yournamehere,
Thank you for signing up on MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS XM.
Remember your password is *****.
http://www.plentyoffish.com is larger than all other free dating sites combined.
View your latest matches here --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/viewmatches.aspx
1. You can now easily check your messages via a cell phone.
2. Latest signups -- > http://www.plentyoffish.com/lastsignup.aspx
3. Users online in your city -- > http://www.plentyoffish.com/lastonlinemycity.aspx
4. If you have found your match you can delete your account in the help menu.
5. Read your new emails here --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/inbox.aspx
6. Who checked out your profile? -->http://www.plentyoffish.com/whoviewedme.aspx
7. Compatibility Test to Measure Chemistry --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/poftest.aspx
http://www.plentyoffish.com
At some point the password line was just replaced with:
http://www.pof.com is larger than all other free dating sites combined.
I wanted to see how hard it was, so I tried it, and the CAPTCHA was fairly straightforward, it wasn't even difficult. I got it first try, maybe you didn't notice you ONLY need to type the letters under the circles?
