POF.com Removes Viewed Me Feature = Lessons In Branding IRT

So a trending topic today today was how pof.com (Plenty of Fish) removed a free featured and has taken into their paid member only section. I wanted to mention it because there are businesses thinking about doing something like this right now, and there will be more in the future. So what happens to a brand when they try and take something which they offered for free, separated them from their competitors and was most likely a key ingredient to their success? While they say the move is to help cover the costs of removing banner advertisements, it seems a good chunk of their users would rather have the ads back.

Since this literally just happened over the weekend we’ll be able to see how this all plays out for the Vancouver based company. There is potential for a large enough sway from their users to get the feature back and settle for an ad based revenue stream. Either way they swing it I think it’ll at least do a great job of getting them in the news which means links and social buzz galore. The POF forum has been lit up with non stop threads complaining about their decision to remove the viewed me feature. As you can see from the picture below, their support staff will be quite busy fielding complaints from there, social media, emails and their support phone number.