Markus Frind, founder of PlentyOfFish, recently posted some interesting statistics about his users age and income. He reveals they’re older and richer than those on other sites, and because of that believes he’ll ride-out the recession better than his competitors. Markus says he’s not sure why his stats skew that way.

I have three reasons:

1. Older people tend to be richer than younger people. Extrapolating a higher-than average income from an older-than average user-base is as obvious and misleading as it’s true.
2. Younger people tend to be more sensitve to good design and are therefore less likely to join a site that looks as basic/rough on first glance as PlentyOfFish.
3. PlentyOfFish’s selling points are its size, its cost (free) and its features. The cost doesn’t impress the young (Facebook’s free and much better featured), the size isn’t impressive (everyone under 25’s on Facebook or MySpace already) and, like its design, PlentyOfFish’s feature set is dated. For older people these things aren’t true. If you’re over 45 you’re more likely to meet someone you know at PlentyOfFish than at MySpace, you probably don’t care if PlentyOfFish has video streaming and a mobile app, and you’re sensitive to cost because the best free sites (social networks) don’t work well for you. So older people choose dating sites based on size and cost and the biggest, cheapest dating site is PlentyOfFish.

This argument seems far more plausible than the contention that PlentyOfFish has some mystical ‘value’ only an elite band of wealthy people are sensitive to. Anyone care to disagree?

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