On Friday 9th February PlentyofFish launched a section devoted to member marriage testimonials. Within three hours, ninety marriage success stories had been uploaded. Now, five days later there are a total of 295 marriage success stories, complete with photos. See http://www.plentyoffish.com/success.aspx. Industry analyst and watchdog, Mark Brooks, of OnlinePersonalsWatch.com stated, "No other top tier dating site has such an extensive marriage testimonials section." PlentyofFish now gets 400,000 user logins a day and Markus continues to operate it from his Vancouver apartment. The average age of U.S. PlentyofFish members is 39. PlentyofFish is the most popular dating site in Canada, the 6th most popular in the U.S.A. and the 6th most popular in the U.K.
Userplane, a subsidiary of AOL, today announced that PlentyofFish, the world's top free dating site, has joined Userplane's new ad revenue-sharing program. PlentyofFish has more than 1 million daily visitors and is ranked by Hitwise as a top five dating service in the U.S. Since 2004, its members have used Userplane Webmessenger(TM) to initiate, on average, more than 100,000 IM sessions and exchange millions of text and audio/video messages per day.
A major paid dating site put out a press release announcing their ten millionth
member. Markus responds, "Yes, they may have millions of members registered,
but that's to their detriment. We cull and clean out old profiles once they
become inactive and unresponsive. Most other sites prefer to keep the old
profiles in place for excessive periods. It's good for conversions, but bad for
users. I won't do that to my users. I don't have to, we're free." PlentyofFish
surpassed 300,000 logins in a day in August 2006.
On July 22, 2006, Plentyoffish will bring together over three thousand eligible
singles for what will be the largest speed dating event held under one roof. The
record attempt has been pre-approved by Guinness officials and will establish
the first such world record.
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.
I'd like to see a law pass endorsing arranged marriages. In the meantime, I'll study the personal ads, from which to glean my recommendations. Here's an exception: according to its ad, PlentyofFish.com is a hundred percent, "put away your credit card" free. Hopefuls upload a photo and post a witty blurb describing themselves, then cross their fingers and wait. Some report amazing success. One discovered her true love lived two streets down though they'd never met.
Those looking to play the field without spending much cash should check out PlentyofFish.com. In addition to claiming to generate "300,000 relationships a year," the site does not charge visitors for its services.
While it may be tough for the middle-aged of Silicon Valley to find a perfect partner, it's never been easier for the young and the restless in the high-tech industry to make a love connection. A growing trove of Web sites enable search for those who share feelings and fetishes. Check out the free online dating site PlentyofFish.com.
Online dating is 10 years old. But the days of paying to find a match may be a thing of the past if you believe one couple who met online and started their own dating service.
At iDate 2007, vendors demonstrate ways to meet, court, virtual date and even marry without ever leaving home. ...Plenty of Fish, with 400,000 hits a day, was created by Markus Frind, who still runs it out of his apartment. He figured out people essentially exaggerate on profile answers. He follows a more sensible creed: actions speak louder than words. For example, Susie says she wants a solid, stable man who earns $100,000-plus but keeps clicking on profiles of muscle-bound bad boys. Plenty of Fish makes sure she meets plenty of underemployed weightlifters, and some of the stable ones she ignores. "People don't even realize we do this. They just know they are getting results," said Frind.
Frind -- who operates PlentyofFish from his downtown Vancouver apartment -- said he got an e-mail from the U.S. Marshals Service at 8:16 p.m. Saturday. Someone watching Americas Most Wanted had called to tell them they saw Bennett's picture on PlentyofFish. Frind combed through the messages Bennett had sent to other users which showed that Bennett had been sending messages to various women as he travelled north from Arkansas. One woman had agreed to let Bennett stay at her place. Frind checked that woman's profile and realized that both Bennett and the woman had recently logged into PlentyofFish using the same IP address -- meaning they were visiting his site using the same computer. Frind was able to give police the phone numbers of other people she had contacted. Frind spoke with U.S. marshals on Sunday, following Bennett's arrest, and they thanked him for his help. "They told me it was vital information," he said. "Basically they had no idea where he was until I gave them all the numbers and the information." Frind is not worried about the bad publicity Bennett's case may attract. "When you're dealing with millions of people, it's bound to happen," he said. "It's like getting struck by lightning." He said nothing like this has happened on the site before. Frind was never served with a search warrant and voluntarily looked through Bennett and his girlfriend's message traffic. He said he wouldn't hesitate to look at a user's private messages again "if a crime has been committed or someone is in danger."
See discussion at PlentyofFish Forums - http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts5895133.aspx
Oct 18, 2006 - Global National Canadian News - Plenty of Fish Out There
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3kZlXq2xYE&mode=related&search=
Last year 12% of newlyweds in the U.S. met through the Internet. So we can
assume a similar number of Canadians did. Clearly there are plenty of fish
available out there and tonight we're profiling one of the biggest nets that
catches them. She was HorseLady3, a small town B.C. girl. He was HappyDaddy, a
Vancouver chef whose search for love took him on the Internet. "I needed an
escape because the separation from my marriage was kind of hard." It wasn't long
before the two found each other. "We hit it off and we haven't looked back
since." Markus Frind is the Vancouver web guru who just happens to be one of the
world's biggest matchmakers. His site,
Plentyoffish.com brought together HorseLady3 and HappyDaddy and thousands of
other couples and he runs it all from his tiny Vancouver office. "I am the
largest website run by one person. I'm doing about 600 million pages a month."
His website is part of a new wave of companies making money on content generated
not by them, but by users. The biggest example is YouTube, the online video site
that Google recently bought for $1.65 billion. Like YouTube, Frind's site is
free to use and is bringing in a heap of cash. [Google Adsense] ads make him
more then $10,000 a day. "The tellers always look at me real funny. They're like
are you some kind of criminal? Why do you come in with a $900,000 check? I
suppose if I went paid, this site could make hundreds of millions but it just
wouldn't be fun anymore and I would have to hire people and I don't know, I just
like what I'm doing right now."
Oct 1st, 2006 - Tricity News - Canada: Online Dating Convenience
With work and kids and soccer practices and doctor appointments, how and when do
people find the time to connect with one another? It's hard and that's why
internet dating sites such as plentyoffish are so popular with singles of all
ages. "The internet dating thing is huge - it's almost like a candy store!" a
user exclaims, noting she could converse with - even date - several men at once.
Supernova2006 was produced in concert with the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School of business. It brings together such luminaries as Jonathan
Schwartz, CEO of Sun and Craig Newmark, of Craigslist. "There's a frenzy of
startups," said Markus Frind, founder of PlentyofFish.com, a free one-man online
dating service in Vancouver, British Columbia. "How many news readers do you
need, or calendars?" he asked, referring to online products that many companies
have bet their businesses on. Frind's online dating service faces its own array
of competition. But he insisted that he is making a profit from online
advertising -- as proof, he has posted the image of a $900,000 check from Google
on his blog -- and declared "I'm probably the only company here making money."
According to Jupiter Research, more than 17 million people viewed online
personals last year, and about 2.5 million paid for them. (It's usually free to
browse; the money kicks in when you want to connect with someone.) There are
several major sites to choose from, including the aptly named
Plentyoffish.com.
Markus Frind is a one-man wrecking machine. He has single-handedly disrupted the
world of online dating with a super-easy-to-use, free dating site - PlentyOfFish.
PlentyOfFish averages 20 million page views per day or 600 million per month.
With Google Adsense running on the site, Frind averages approximately $10,000 a
day in revenue from ads alone. Markus lives in Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver),
is in his late 20s and enjoying life. He has no intention of maximizing his ad
dollars as he is comfortable where he stands.
Markus Frind may be Canada's most successful Internet entrepreneur, although he
doesn't have a huge profile or an appetite to build one. He runs
PlentyofFish.com, one of the world's most success online dating services.
The following is a list of the Internet's eight biggest Google AdSense
publishers. This is a list of individual site owners. Big corporate AdSense
publishers like AOL are excluded.
#1: Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com Plentyoffish.com is the biggest free
dating site on the Internet
Markus Frind, the founder and sole proprietor of the massively successful online
dating site Plenty of Fish, has an interesting theory in one of his recent
posts. The post is mostly about how Markus's site ranks compared to other
international dating sites (answer: number three), but the interesting part for
me was right at the end, where Markus says that searches for info on new homes
correlates extremely well with real economic data such as housing stats. I
think he is on the right track, and that search data will become (is becoming)
an ever more important indicator of consumer behaviour, or potential behaviour.
How many CEOs of online dating networks can you name who have done advanced math
research that led to someone getting the Field's Medal — often called the Nobel
Prize of mathematics? I can think of one: my friend Markus Frind, the guy behind
PlentyofFish.com, one of the top dating sites in the world. Markus recently
posted a description of how he came up with an algorithm that isolated 23 prime
numbers in succession for the first time, and how that research was in turn
cited by Terence Tao in a paper he did on prime numbers, a paper that helped
contribute to him winning the Fields Medal.
Mark Brooks: Plentyoffish is free and has snuck up on the Canadian market and
has now established itself in the American market. It's #5 on the Hitwise USA
rankings for May 2006, no less.
Markus Frind: Plentyoffish is driven by the community. There are one million
people who have moderating powers in the Plentyoffish forum and several thousand
people attending parties all over the country every week. And it's all organized
and done by users. So unlike the paid sites, Plentyoffish is run by the users.
What you say you want and what you actually want are two different things. It
hardly ever corresponds on a dating site. So I just track a user and see what
they're actually doing on the site and then show them matches based on their
actual surfing preferences. My site is deceptively simple but no one knows just
how complex it is under the surface.
Markus Frind rocked the Internet world this week when he posted a photo of his
latest Google AdSense check for nearly $1 million CAD.
Markus Frind: I created the first real free dating and the first one that
actually worked. Just like Google created the first real search engine that
worked.
Markus Frind claims he's earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense from his
dating website, Plentyoffish.com. External
data sources do seem to back him up. Markus is basically a one-man band running
a website that, by his latest traffic figures, is two and a half times bigger
than digg.com. Digg.com
gets 200 Million page views per month, but Markus says plentyoffish gets 500
Million: "It is around 2 hours of work a day and that stays steady because as
the site grows I automate more and more. Some of that work I get my girlfriend
to help me with, she is far more diplomatic when answering mean emails. From
what I can tell i should have no problem running it by myself even if it gets to
3 times its current size."
On the hardware side, Markus gave me these details: "I have 4 servers.
1. DB server
2. Web server, handles 1 million pageviews an hour at peak. No static pages
at all, way to slow. All pages are Gzipped on the fly.
3. Mail Server. Handles 1 million emails/day and also has a webserver that
handles a Instant messager. That translates to 4-5 million polling pageviews/hour
at peak.
4. Image server, Like all major sites it serves images to a massive content
distribution system/cache.
5. Outbound traffic is 70 to 100mb/sec If it was uncompressed it would
probably run at 140mb/sec"
Use function over form to build an emotional connection with users. Blend ads
into content, No flashing crap, make the site useful. Basically all those things
that everyone knows you are supposed to do, but very few people actually do.
There is no magic bullet, but you should always test new designs or new text to
get the result that you want.
For the most part the [online dating] industry wants to ignore the fact i exist
and they are just hoping that I will go away, so they don't have to explain to
investors why profits are vanishing. I think in the future paid dating will
account for 5% to 20% of the overall online dating market. Currently 68% of my
membership in the United states has paid for a dating site in the past, draw
what conclusions you will.
At the Northern Voice conference I met Markus Frind, founder of
Plentyoffish.com. He's Google's #1 Adsense
user in Canada. His site is pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google, he
told me, and has millions of passionate users. Tens of millions of page views
EVERY DAY. What's the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it
"anti-marketing design." He says that sites that have ugly designs are well
known to pull more revenue. Google. Is it pretty? No. Craig's List? Pretty? No.
MySpace? Pretty? No.