Do Ugly Sites Sell Better?

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I guess this is the reason why I put up a dating site called Filipino Friendster World. At first it looks very simple but I chose to update it to a better version of the software. I think being an ugly site doesn’t mean it will suck massive traffic. Maybe because of it’s functionality and simplicity why it became so popular.

And during the early days of the internet there were quite few free dating sites (1994)and that became an opportunity for PoF. I wish I knew about setting up a dating site in the early days of internet and maybe I’m a millionaire now. Anyway if you are curious about my dating site, it’s not hard to find. Just type “filipino friendster” on any major search engine on the internet and you will find it at the top.

Well, there’s “simple,” and there’s ugly. Yes, Google’s homepage is quite simple, but it’s not ugly. Plenty of Fish is incredibly ugly for such a lucrative site. It’s even worse than MySpace. On top of that, as far as dating sites go, it’s one of the worst out there in terms of features, moderation, options, and even *grammar* in the POF content (not talking about user profiles). It’s mind-blowing how the site is making so much money and has collected that kind of userbase.

Hi Abe,

How about a test?

Choose any of your sites which already have a good amount of traffic. Try removing the image header and see what happens to your earnings. Perhaps you can use a randomizer script to help remove the effects of time (i.e., higher earnings on Tuesday vs Wednesday, etc)

In some cases, I’ve seen that header-less sites earn more versus sites that have the exact content and layout (except for the header image).

Funny in a way what some people call ugly. I went and did quite a bit of poking around on PoF when I saw the reports on the $10,000 a day.

It could well be that mant designers confuse the word “ugly” with the word”simple” and “action oriented”.

There is no purpose behind PoF than to get people signed up (to increase the size of the database … equalling more fish in the ocean” and to make it easy for users to seach. I could list a thousand sites with missions similar to PoF who put tons of graphics, Flash and other useless “designer toys” in the way of the user … and obviously none of them rake in $10K a day.

Google’s main page is “ugly” by many people’s definition too … but for those who know better, howe come your stock isn’t worth about $400 per share.

Form should follow function … there’s a lot people could learn from PoF if they put aside their egos and analyized how the site is designed to meet its objectives.

And RE: the bandwisdth question .. the simple functionality of PoF is one of the reasons the bandwidth is managble.

ANyway, all can see I’m not an art school grad ;-)

10,000,000 pageviews a day?

Sheesh – what’s his bandwidth costing?!?!