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September 18, 2007

Hot Or Not Abandons Free Model

Duncan Riley

28 comments »

Hot or Not have abandoned their much publicized move to a free model.

According to an email from Hot or Not’s founders, since moving to a free model the site had become inundated by spam:

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.”

As before, Hot or Not will now have a free level of membership then a paid tier for sending messages to profiles.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 10:32 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Robert Park

    September 18th, 2007 at 10:43 am

    This is kind of funny in light of the NYT post you just posted. :)

    I think free has a lot of pitfalls for mainstream content, spam being just one of them, let alone the unsustainability for specialized difficult-to-produce content like speculative investment research.

  2. web 2.0

    September 18th, 2007 at 10:59 am

    hotornot is soooo web1.0 and 1999ish. let it be the past. no matter what you are trying, you just can’t reverse the cause. plentyoffish is the way to go, at least for now.

  3. web 2.0

    September 18th, 2007 at 11:02 am

    hotornot is soooo web1.0 and 1999ish. let it be the past. no matter what you are trying, you just can’t reverse the course. plentyoffish is the way to go, at least for now.

  4. Wil Schroter

    September 18th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    Not sure “paid content” and “paid contact models” are quite the same.

    Time and time again we see that subscription-based contact models tend to work well around trusted services.

    Paying to read articles, view videos, etc… not so much.

  5. justsayhi.com

    September 18th, 2007 at 11:14 am

    justsayhi.com is also free and solved the spammer problem

  6. Yibrushn

    September 18th, 2007 at 11:26 am

    Can you imagine a world without spam?

  7. TechcrunchBook

    September 18th, 2007 at 11:32 am

    You get what you pay for!

  8. myonlinecupid.com

    September 18th, 2007 at 1:00 pm

    Oh well, lots of free dating sites out there including ours.

  9. Ted

    September 18th, 2007 at 1:04 pm

    Sounds like a bunch of bull to me. Don’t the TechCrunch forums stop spam, as well as any number of other free sites through well known mechanisms. Couldn’t they even still require the credit card and charge you only if you’re identified as a spammer and/or blacklist the card number?

  10. Duncan Riley

    September 18th, 2007 at 1:25 pm

    Robert
    I think there is a distinct difference between a content model (newspapers) and a service model like Hot or Not. Hot or Not is more utlility than magazine, the ratings part aside.

  11. Fabian Schonholz

    September 18th, 2007 at 1:37 pm

    This is so unfortunate.

  12. Intelligence of the jews

    September 18th, 2007 at 2:12 pm

    Well this is interesting. Free == SPAM.

    Well, HotorNot is the classic story of a web company that can monetize without raising VC money. They came up with clever monetization models (dating) on top of their Hot or Not feature.

  13. Tony

    September 18th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

    Spammers make me soo mad. It’s unbelievable that these people can hold the rest of the internet to ransom

    Someday we have to get the technology to track these people and shut them down

  14. Markus

    September 18th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

    Fighting spammers and scammers is very hard. Much of my code and time is spent trying to keep my site clean. Its under constant attack day in and day out and by far my biggest competitive advantage has been the fact I can keep my site clean. Its probably the biggest problem in the industry, but no one talks about it because it doesn’t exactly increase signups or make you more money.

  15. Fresh Prince Of Bell-Air

    September 18th, 2007 at 3:27 pm

    This is a PR stunt, they abandoned it because it’s financially untenable, not only because of spam.

    This likely means that HotOrNot is done, because there is not much options left.

    The difference between 1999 and now for HON is not that they do not use Ajax while others do, but the presence of Myspace and Facebook that largely address the same dating market.
    Myspace and Facebook do not have to be profitable, due to the current bubble, and this is unfortunate for HON since they are not subject of the same competetive pressures.

  16. sean3

    September 18th, 2007 at 5:47 pm

    I think a lot of you guys are speaking too soon on the hotornot issues, most of you seem to be speaking out of ignorance or either have little knowledge of making business decisions.

    As for the owners of hot or not. charging is something I think you should have kept in the first place. Instead of reducing the charges to a “free” model a friend and I thought that maybe reducing the price to $1 or $2 bucks would have made more since.

    It would have definately beat out the NO INCOME hangover, and also kept the current subscribers satisfied as well as attract newer members.Because price drop alone is enough to make headlines these days..just ask Steve Jobs.

    and as for the backlash you’ll receive for bringing back the paid service model, I’d have to say consider it just trial and error learning experience, in which you realized that dramtic changes from one end of the spectrum to the other can still have a Negative effect. You’ve made good decisions and you’ll make bad ones but the fact that you 2 are thinking and adjusting to this ever changing industry is what will be the cornerstone to your continued success.

  17. Robert Park

    September 18th, 2007 at 10:35 pm

    Fair enough, Duncan. :)

  18. SearchPartner

    September 19th, 2007 at 5:56 am

    My Free web 2.0 dating SearchPartner.Com, also had it’s share of spam initially when launched, but I’m able to cut down spammers very well now.

  19. Pierluigi Rotundo

    September 19th, 2007 at 10:36 am

    What I think is that sometimes we have to do a mea culpa, everytime we post unwanted comments, spam, etc…

    PR
    http://www.linkedin.com/in/pierluigirotundo

  20. iMarketingGuru (SEO Wiki)

    September 19th, 2007 at 10:43 am

    Free is not necessarily always good. One thing that would help in the case of Hot or Not may not just be paid memberships but possibly some form of reputation management? The negative side to reputation management though is the issue of astroturfing the reputation system in place. AS for the paid model, what else will Hot or Not be giving their users for the paid membership? We’re talking about high school kids here, they are cheapskates unless if their friends use the service as well (Network Effect 101, the network may be too small/not loyal enough).

  21. Tom

    October 16th, 2007 at 6:16 pm

    Why didn’t they just impliment the whole anti-spam wierd letters in a picture that you have to type correctly to send your message. Were they really that lazy?

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