damn its crazy as hell

Plentyoffish.com Becomes the Fifth Largest Dating Site and Destroys Existing Online Dating Business Model
5 July 2005
Plentyoffish.com the largest free dating service in the world was established merely two years ago. In that short time span, Plentyoffish.com has experienced exponential growth and now accounts for nearly 25% of English speaking Canadian online singles.

Markus Frind CEO and Founder stated, ?Originally we wanted to develop an online community based on the concept of free dating. That it would take off in such leaps and bounds with minimal effort was not anticipated!?

More than 35,000 Canadian members visit Plentyoffish.com each weekday looking for their perfect match.

Currently it appears that Plentyoffish.com is the fifth largest dating site in North America based on daily unique logins. Plentyoffish.com sparks fear in the heart of the online dating industry. This week alone 100,000 daily unique logins exceeded the previous record of 50,000 daily unique logins of only three months prior. Match.com, Yahoo.com, Eharmony.com and Americansingles.com are the only other dating sites suspected to surpass it.

Radical changes have been brought to the industry by Plentyoffish, ?radical? as Plentyoffish is comprised of only one employee. Sites of comparable size rarely operate with a staff under 50 employees. Technology costs are at a minimum when compared with AmericanSingles.com whose costs exceed $500,000. Plentyoffish.com garners the same amount of online traffic while keeping costs less than $10,000 per month not including advertising.

Michael Jones, CEO of Userplane, "For a free Website with over 5 million page views daily, and over 35 million page views for the Userplane Webmessenger, it?s incredible that a single employee company has grown to such a size. A unique entrepreneur, Markus?s expertise within search engine marketing and online property management, has created what I would imagine is likely one of the most profitable dating sites in existence.?

Plentyoffish.com charges nothing for all of its many services. By contrast most dating sites charge $24.95 to $49.95 per month. When asked how this affects the industry, CEO Markus Frind replied, ?With the recent success of Plentyoffish.com in the Canadian dating market, the executives of Lavalife.com, Americansingles.com and other major dating sites must realize their days are numbered. Who wants to pay when they can get a superior product for free?"



January 25, 2005
Be plenty scared of PlentyofFish
Posted by David Evans

I met Markus Frind, owner of PlentyofFish, at iDate. Markus is quite open about his plans for the industry, which refreshing after listening to various dating executives duck and weave the difficult questions during the final Octoberfest-style executive panel.

Be very, very afraid of Markus. He's made more money each month running dating site affiliate programs than many dating sites make a year. via Google Adwords and Overture than many dating sites make a year.

He's technically savvy, with a deep understanding of the black art of SEO and other marketing tricks. He will steal your Google/Overture traffice before you have a chance to hire Hitwise to figure out where your traffic went. Remember how you felt listening to Scott Butler at iDate? Markus is like that. At first he comes across as a know-it-all, which can be maddening. Plentyoffish, free service, couple hundred thousand profiles, whatever. Then he starts to throw out figures, the kind that make the competition shudder. Markus has the tough skin and the right kind of hubris to believe that he can be a top-ten player in the online dating industry. It's a difficult balance to achieve, as many of you know, and only time will tell, but things are looking up for him and his upstart service.


Markus was nice enough to go on the record with the following. I think you'll be surprise at what he has to say:


Plentyoffish.com is a completely free online dating service, last time this year we had ~30,000 members right now we have over 385,000 members and growth is still accelerating. So far the growth has posed no problems to the site performance as I've designed plentyoffish in such a way that it requires next to no resources to run. Excluding listening fees for the Instant messenger all operating costs (including cost of all hardware) for last year averaged well under 5 grand/month. I think plentyoffish will have a impact on the world of online dating in 2005, as i fully intend to keep plentyoffish free and convert the entire industry to a free model.

His dating forums get 150k posts a month. Yesterday he served 2 million pages views in 24 hours for the first time. Userplane has deployed their A/V communications tools at PlentyofFish. Supposedly PoF is their largest customer. one of their largest customers.

Keep an eye out for Markus and PlentyofFish. 2005 is going to be a big year for them both.




March 20, 2006 -- Plentyoffish.com, one of the largest websites in the world with over 400 million page views a month, is nearly completely run by an Artificial Intelligence.

In 2004 Plentyoffish.com was growing in leaps and bounds and CEO and sole employee Markus Frind had a decision to make: He could either hire hundreds of employees and convert to a paid service like all his competitors, or develop an AI to run the site.

"It was an impossible technical challenge and one that I couldn't pass up," says Frind. Today, the site's AI does the same job that other sites have hired 200 to 600 employees for. "It is really amazing, you wake up in the morning and think wow I can't believe I created that," remarks Frind.

The site's growth continues at a torrid pace. The online dating site Plentyoffish.com is exceptionally strong in Canada where, according to stats, Canada, more than 1.2% of the population aged 20 to 24 and .8% of the population 25 to 44 use Plentyoffish.com on a daily basis. In the United States Plentyoffish.com may not yet be the dominate player but it has gone from nowhere to 5th position, according to hitwise.com, in less than a year. "Given our current 10% monthly growth rate we expect to be the dominate dating service in the United States in under 1 year," Frind says.

About Plentyoffish.com

Having grown exponentially since its conception in March 2003 Plentyoffish.com is now the only major website run by an AI and a single human. Plentyoffish is the only dating site with 400 million or more monthly page views that has less then 200 employees.

true, maybe i'll create a rip of plentyoffish and myspace and comabine to two into one hybrid monster!

interesting what he says about Alexa: "As for alexa spikes, those are worthless I manupilate my alexa and comscore for competitve reasons. I don't want to be on the alexa 1000 spamlist, and i don't want comscore selling detailed information. In a sample of 600k vistors a grand total of 56 had alexa toolbar."

this is what happened a few years ago in adult. free sites/galleries/pic post lowered margins and made it easier to get a piece of the action. in a couple years the landscape of dating sites could be much different than it is today. i'm not sure if it will take 5 years for that to happen

I believe it - :winkwink:





2hp

You are a moron. Not one intelligent thing has appeared to the right of your name that wasn't quoted.

dam... first yun ye.. now markus...

where was i when they were handing out brilliant ideas in vancouver..

I know you are a true believer but would you care to lose a date, er I mean elucidate a bit?

Wow, pretty bold statement. It'll be interesting to see how the site's doing 12 months from now.

BULLSHIT!!!!!!


This seems to work pretty well in response to these monk-fuckers :thumbsup

Ahahaha that's hot. :1orglaugh

I predict he's gonna be a small fish in a much bigger free dating site pond. He'd better find some quality to go with all that AI quick.

Hm, that's interesting...

Are you fucking kidding me? If they cut him off the effect would be visible on their income statement

---------

4$ Million a year in AdSense?
From a Dating Site? I've put it for long time, and brings me only 100$ MOST, a month... something is fishy here

oh btw, if i had a site making 4 million a year, I wouldn't come even online to post or Message People.
I would be travelling around the world with my own cruise.
Who are you trying to fool.
Hardly right now all the businesses are not doing well. I'm trying my best to pull up some stuff but still... WHO THE ahahaaammmmmmmmmm are you trying to FooL dude.

come on, I know you're better than this. give us a decent response based on your experience. unless what you've been saying about spending $150k a month on advertising...etc. is BULLSHIT :winkwink:

not every one likes to be low key about their success

After browsing on a few biz technology sites it seems his bullshit isn't flying with the real business people.

interesting, thanks. I'll do a search...

links? search terms?

thanks.

Here's one for you, who cares? He obviously makes good money from the site, the damn thing is HUGE. You think if he wasn't making good money he would just leave it? Oh wait, does he foot the bill out of his 9-5 for millions of page views and actually loses money on the site?

The one thing that is common with stories like this is all the people that refuse to believe it. You sound like the crowd that was running around screaming that the million dollar homepage guy was full of shit. It's pathetic.

I tried doing a few different dating sites that were niched and I lost my fucking ASS on them. I could have gone away on a nice vacation on the amount of money I spent and never got back.

So its not all roses out there guys

very interesting. need to sample my visitors too. :winkwink:

He's out making comments about how he's getting $100 mil buyout offers. He's overpromoting his site into a corner. As you know there's a certain section of people that don't take kindly to that sort of thing.

Who said it was? He was the first and is by far the biggest, I seriously doubt anyone could catch him now.

hahahahahahahahahaha it. Markus can't seem to keep himself from posting comments on sites. Om Malik is one of the many skeptics.


Chadglni, stop sucking cock. You are swinging on Canadian balls right now.

We are talking about something a bit larger than his $4 mil a year which is possible. You have officially entered into a grown man's conversation. It's someplace children shouldn't be.

I have suspected all this publicity he's been trying to get is for a buyout offer. Getting webmasters to talk about his site doesn't benefit him in any other way as far as I can see - he doesn't need affiliates, he doesn't need more competition ... if anything he wants mainstream publicity to get more US and interenational users.

Not entirely sure what you mean by "He's overpromoting his site into a corner. As you know there's a certain section of people that don't take kindly to that sort of thing"

Are you referring to the owners of match.com and suchlike? If yes, whether or not he's getting free publicity for the site, he's obviously well on their radar and I'm sure they're working furiously behind the scenes to fight against such competition.

I only spend MAYBE 4-5k a month on ads now, but in the "hey day" of 99-2001 I was spending a LOT of ads... for a while, whatever I bought produced profit, or at the very least broke even, and this was without recurring! I was charging 39.95 for lifetime access to www.penilefitness.com.. jesus, had I charged a monthly fee then, I would probably be the one being written about :thumbsup


Anyway, this guys dating site is very nice and congrats to him, but 4 million a year in profit from adsense only sounds fishy, but then again the sites name is plentyoffish.. heh.

I had quarter page ads in Hustler and Penthouse for about 4 months back in 99 and 2000 that still bring in about 40 unique clicks per day... If he had that much money to spend, I would certainly diversify into the adult market as well, and put full page ads in hustler, penthouse and maxim..

within 3 years of that, he'd have some serious long-term traffic and business...

I dont even see a "send this site to your friends" link on his pages.. WILD!

He's just retarded. He probably owns www.stillsomefishleft.com and bitter nobody is signing up.

Oh no, he hyped himself into a corner. Now the "grown men" will kick him off the internet.

You idiots crack me up. :1orglaugh

thanks for this. interesting stuff.

pretty amazing you're still getting so many daily visits from six year old magazines.

I'm not a cheerleader for this guy or this site by the way - just find it a really interesting story. and as far as I know it's $4 million revenue from adsense, not profit. he's probably getting commissions through other programs too, but I've no idea of course what his private figures are.

from his radio advertising, tv advertising, search positions, alexa ranking...etc. $4 million a year isn't impossible I would say. the whole artificial intelligence angle is interesting, but I'd be surprised if it's as accurate as he says.

If you look at page views then the $$$ we are talking is not that huge. Compare it to THEHUN.com.

The free advertising he is getting is blowing up his site. Not sure if he wants a buyout but think of all the new profiles he gets with every new news article. I think it was really smart. He is not the only free dating site but now he has turbo charged his growth.

at this point, he is truly creating his own competition. there are ways to get buyout offers without the self-aggrandizing posts. so what's the next dating business model? I think I have an idea. :1orglaugh :winkwink:

.

Look at this -

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...entyoffish.com

I know he stated he screwed with but still informative right now.

interesting. is he getting mainstream publicity too?

true. maybe he just likes to brag. :winkwink:

No, not at all. I'm not factoring in the competition. Who cares what they think. I'm talking about the VC firms and potential buyout partners he's targeting with this blitz of self promo. From what I can tell it's only him doing it and he's doing a good job to a point. What I'm referring to when I say he's overhyping himself into a corner is when he goes and makes statements like:

You let others speculate or make that statement for you. Not for the fact that it isn't true, it may or may not be, but for the fact that when it comes out of his mouth it just seems like pure hype. That makes any investor pause.

The $4 million a year I wouldn't argue about. Plenty of people here make that so it's not some distant unachievable number to anyone in this business. Although your average mainstream moron is absolutely fascinated by it! LOL

I say good for him, the site is simple and even if he makes half of what he claims he's really doing well on a novel idea. While I'm not happy about the free dating trend I'm not bothered by his success.

The only thing I will say about him personaly that's not flattering is that I think it's time to hire a pro to keep the publicity wheels turning in the business circles. He needs some help. Webmasters are easy to flatter. The wrong statements can cost you a lot of money on the biz side of things.