The Full Email

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Dear loyal HOTorNOT star members,

Based on feedback we got from many of you, we have decided to start requiring star memberships on HOTorNOT again. While many of you saw how going free would be good, you also warned us that this would probably lead to more spammers and fake profiles.

You were right, this is exactly what happened. The spammers got aggressive to the point where they were screwing up the system, even causing the "someone wants to meet you" emails to not be sent for periods as long as 5 days.

We don't really regret trying to make the site free so everybody can use it, but it's clear that most of our users believe an inexpensive paid site works better than a free site filled with spammers.

If you left the site after we went free, we hope you'll come back and join again. If you are still here, we hope turning subscriptions back on has a noticable impact for you, helping you meet more people without having your time wasted by the spammers.

thanks, and have fun!

Your friends, Jim and James :)

James Hong's Reply to Valleywag's post of this story

Tim, Instead of just making assumptions about what I was thinking, you could have just asked. We don't keep anything we do at HOTorNOT a secret, in fact we're tragically transparent. Were the assumptions I made 3 months ago wrong? I'm not sure, they might be.. but even if they were wrong, I would have no problem admitting it. Sometimes we are right from the get go.. sometimes we are wrong and have to readjust.

The truth is that I still don't think an advertising model was the wrong thing to pursue. The fact that revenue was already 1/3 of what subscription revenues used to be was a promising sign, because that was all generated using Adsense... selling direct would likely have landed us making more than before. Of course, it would have required a lot of hardwork, but I think it would ultimately have worked out.

No, this decision was not based on business models, it was based on us realizing that worrying about your user experience is more important than how you monetize. If we lost all our users because of the spammers, it wouldn't really matter which business model we chose to apply, right?

As for other free sites being able to deal with the spammer problem while we were not, I really can't say why. Maybe they're smarter than us, or in most cases, still too small to attract the attention of spammers... or maybe they do have a problem but it's just not apparent because they don't talk about it?

I don't know. I don't have insight into their systems, and it is always a presumptuous and unintelligent thing to do to make conclusions about other people's businesses without having any data. So was I wrong 3 months ago? I don't know yet. For all I know, I might be wrong NOW, switching back. What I do know is that until we are confident that we can effectively fight the spammers off without having to charge, we have to keep charging.

But lets be honest.. I'm not going to feel too bad about that, either. Even when I was in the 9th grade flipping burgers at Burger King for $3 an hour, I wouldn't have complained about paying $6 a month for a service that connected me with lots of hotties.. and we got a lot of feedback from women that any guy too cheap to pay $6 was probably not the kind of guy they wanted to date anyway (our system only requires 1 of 2 people to be a paid member for them to communicate.. so even under a subscription model, our site remains effectively free for most women) james

What Valleywag has discovered is that they don't have to bother getting things right in order to generate a lot of page views. They're like a troll in that respect.

I wonder if they started out with this plan, or if they just discovered it by being careless and noticing it didn't hurt their traffic.

They certainly aren't the first "journalists" to use the trolling tactic. Dvorak and Orlowski are two other examples that come to mind.

Mm, yes, and Donna Bogatin. She was beating on us for a while, but she seems to have stopped. What's distinctive about Valleywag is that it's a site and not just an individual.

Maybe we should make up a name for them. Journotrolls?

trollporters

That's better. Trollporters it is.

It's really not. Trollporter - some big green dude who carries bags, or a futuristic way for troll folk to travel instantly. I suggest Journatroll, it rolls of the tongue a little better than Journotroll. As a plus its fairly easy to work Journatrollism into a sentence where you would have said Journalism.

Hmm, maybe journatroll is better. A lot of these people aren't really reporters, more editorial writers.

reportroll

maybe trollurnalist or some derivative

I like the ones that lead with troll better.

Unless valleywag changed their post, I see nothing wrong with what they posted there. In fact, the above reply is more inflammatory.

That said, the reversal to a payed model seems fine to me. It even sets a good example for the rest of us who have sites where payed is the way to go for them.

Interesting. Sometimes you need charging as a design feature, not just as a business model.

That's not entirely true. Charging is an easy out for handling spam, but lots of companies handle that sort of thing technically. There's one of two things happening here:

1) Hot or Not doesn't have the technical chops to reign in the spam.

2) Hot or Not isn't comfortable with the free dating model anymore, but wants to blame the switch back on something people might have sympathy for.

I actually would bet on the latter, but if it's the former (as they claim), I might be more worried about their future.

Is there any free dating site with the 'technical chops' to reign in spam? So far as I can tell, none of them overcome spam directly via technology.

eHarmony - Subscription

Match.com - Subscription

Myspace - Gets spam; though it's less of an issue because it seems like spammers haven't been able to figure out how to emulate a typical real profile, and because many people use the site to connect with people they know already. In other words it's not technology or effort from Myspace, it's that the model is different.

Facebook - Pseudo-dating site, like myspace, plus it has additional restrictions on creating an account.

Any other dating site I've seen has spam all over the place.

OkCupid.com's pretty good about it. Maybe I'm biased.

Also, dating sites aren't the only sites susceptible to spam. Craigslist would probably be a spammer's heaven if they didn't have such great community filtering features.

You're right, Craigslist is a good example. But even there there's enough phishing going on that I'm not comfortable using the dating section. I've had success finding apartments though.

The difference with dating sites, though, is that they only work when members are active, aggressive, and open with their personal information. They work best in a way that spammers will rush to exploit, at which point everyone gets frustrated and stops using the service. This doesn't stop spammers, and pretty soon the ratio of valid profiles to fake ones is ridiculously small.

More importantly, Craigslist uses pay to filter spam in other ways: real estate and job listings.

In that case, it was "asked" for by the users.

plentyofish.com apparently does a pretty good job.

No no no.

Fake profiles are still a huge problem. Facebook handled it early on by severely limiting their audience but that solution simply would not work for hotornot.

You tell me how to effectively solve this without driving your users away... I found some decent solutions but it's not nearly as easy as stopping spam.

I kind of suspect 2) too.

As do I. James seems like a really cool person, but I feel like he's dishonest sometimes. The flimsy excuses for not sharing the massive profits with employees in the past and this case where they could easily require simple credit card verification to get the same effect. Very weird behavior.

> "The flimsy excuses for not sharing the massive profits with employees in the past ... "

Kind of a socialist sentiment, doncha think?

From what I know of the whole deal, these two dudes built the core of the business in 7-30 days, and layered in the payment/dating stuff later on. (pretty obvious/inevitable)

No one accuses Bill Gates of being socialist and he made more of his employees millionaires by sharing than almost anyone in business history.

He is obviously lying. This is not even a debatable point.

It's called spin. A representative of the business is giving a half-credible excuse for reverting to a process that will be unpopular but that will also generate more revenue. Politicians don't change their stances on abortion because of changes of heart...they do it because it will net more votes

For whatever reason it's taboo for a press release to say "we're taking this course of action because it's more profitable", unless you're talking to stockholders and not users, because 1. all business actions are taken with profitability, short term or long, in mind, so it goes without saying 2. you would piss off your users who care only what you give to them and rarely at all whether you're making money or not

credit card verification?

Sounds like a porn site. That's a terribly unmarketable idea.

Too bad they already hired a bunch of developers for the revolution and paid them with a huge chunk of the company. When a leader raises an army, he had better go to war.