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I just read on Twitter that the Inc. Magazine article about PlentyOfFish is live. And the Money Comes Rolling In covers much of founder Markuk Frind’s personal as well as professional life, including his site’s rise as one of the most popular web destinations.
Entrepreneurs, do not read the article near sharp objects or firearms, you will want to use them on yourself when you’re done reading. Or, you will be inspired to crush Plentyoffish and take over the free dating market. I hope you choose the latter. Markus unapologetically tells the entire online dating industry that you’re doing it wrong. I for one disagree, because traffic doesn’t equal success and the site is practically unusable to me, but the sentiment rings true in many ways.
Markus doesn’t have anything good to say about Match or Yahoo Personals, yet their ads are all over the PlentyOfFish home page. Love the irony.
So much for spending an hour on the phone with the Inc Magazine reporter who wrote the article.
He came out of nowhere, and he didn’t seem to give a shit,” says David Evans, who writes the blog Online Dating Insider.
I’m more nuanced than that during press interviews, really. I think I called him ignorant and obstinate too, but in a good way.
What do we learn about Markus:
- Plenty of Fish is on track to book revenue of $10 million for 2008
- He works 10 minutes a day
- His girlfriend is afraid of ghosts
- He discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever (2002)
- The site creates an estimated 800,000 successful relationships a year
This quote had me searching for a tall building to fling myself off of.
“The site pretty much runs itself,” he explains. “Most of the time, I just sit on my ass and watch it.” There’s so little to do that he and his girlfriend, Annie Kanciar, spent the better part of last summer sunning themselves on the French Riviera. Frind would log on at night, spend a minute or two making sure there were no serious error messages, and then go back to sipping expensive wine. A year ago, they relaxed for a couple of weeks in Mexico with a yacht, a captain, and four of Kanciar’s friends. “Me and five girls,” he says. “Rough life.” As Frind gets up to leave, I ask him what he has planned for the rest of the day. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I’ll take a nap.”
Let us look in the direction of Vancouver and silently nod our heads to a guy who has built an incredible company and lives a lifestyle we all wouldn’t mind living. Now step away from the ledge and get back to work.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m interested in where the 800,000 “successful” relationships number came from; is this from users leaving the site specifically stating they’ve closed their accounts because they’ve found a match? I’ll check out the article to see if it offers more explanation.
I think a case study on PoF is in order. I’m interested in things like:
How much they spend on acquiring traffic each month.
The breakdown between Google ads, dating site affiliate marketing ads and straight advertising – performance-based, CPM, etc.
How much are the traffic stats inflated?
Millions of visits a month is impressive by any standard, but that doesn’t mean the site works.
I am beguiled by the fact that people click on so many ads. Maybe their cookie lifespan is longer than other sites?
I have been called an elitist New Englander- I find the quality of the people on the site not to be up to my standards. You’re free to make your own mind up about the quality of the people, but nobody seems to argue that point, at least here.
We really need a JD Power and Associates kind of rating system for dating site. Review sites are a joke for the most part. How do we balance measurement of traffic, active profiles, amount of emails sent, first/second dates and successful relationships?
The success numbers come from the exit surveys, and according to the US census 15% of relationships end in marriage, so we do at least 120,000 marriages a year… which is more than match.com and eharmony combined.
I have a problem with applying census data to your exit survey. I could poke a lot of holes in that series of assumptions. I think it would be a great idea if dating sites had a standard exit survey? That way we could get closer to apples-to-apples comparison.
Markus, your new nickname is “pillowfight”.
Have you ever seen another dating site that allows you to delete your account, asks you if you met someone or how many dates you went on? All the other sites just focus on revenues and could care less about if the users are successful. THats the main difference between free and paid…
Have you ever messaged a single user on plentyoffish?
You are saying that free dating sites care more about their members? Snort.
The problem with this kind of ranking system is access to the raw data for starters, as you well know. Few sites are willing to give anyone this kind of access or information. I’ve gleaned a bit here and there, but in the end sheer numbers just don’t cut it. There has to be a comparison of sorts, i.e. a site that gets 40% of its members married off within a year of joining as opposed to one with 5% is of course going to rank higher. And how do we measure quality? I’ve got readers and friends that just adore POF and can’t say enough amazing things about it. Personally, I’ve been a member for years and have yet to get an actual date from the site, yet I’ve have made countless friends via some meet and greets hosted on their forums. I’ll also say there is an unusually high number of users looking for sex and not a relationship per say, but that may just come with the free dating site territory. No fees = less inhibitions for many. But does that mean its less successful of a site in connecting users? If both parties were only looking for sex, I’d say no.
I’ve been compiling a list of such data ala Lust in Translation style (nonfiction read that compares infidelity by country) for the past year, but am often frustrated with the lack of information and still have huge gaps in coverage. What crucial information do you think should be found on such a list – useful for both singles and dating site owners/marketers?
I think it would be interesting as well to see how many people put their accounts on hold/private/hidden because they are in a relationship and want to see where things go, using the same questionnaire.
Measuring quality is difficult, I’ve always said it’s a blend of metrics.
Type: social, casual dating, serious dating, matchmaking
Tests: yes/no
Active daily users
# users in area code
emails/winks send
Profile freshness
# relationships (6 months or more, profiles on hold)
# marriages
Just a start, I think I’ve posted this list here several times before, off to search around, amazing how much data is on this blog that I post and forget about.
I hear you about meeting people. I’ve dated amazing women on OKCupid one week, the next I’ve met someone who is now a good friend. Can’t underestimate the social aspects. Remember when Match had a social networking component? Most people don’t. That was circa 2002 I believe.
I think the easiest way is to build what’s called a proxy server, which can go to a dating sites and by masquerading as a number of accounts or IP addresses, can make a series of searches for specific geographic areas. That way you could find out how many people between 18-32 are on siteA in metro NYC or Omaha. Other queries could be by gender, sexuality, religion, etc. It would be really cool to do them as heatmaps. That way, people would know which sites have better coverage in their area. Probably breaks terms of service for most sites but it’s for research purposes.
Can’t measure success that way, but it would be helpful, at least to me.
Caveat: If a site is successful, even I wouldn’t care what it looked like.
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jackspar.
Online Dating
MARKUS IN PYJAMAS!!!
Ridiculous, sensationalist articles like this are a good thing for the industry – they get people online to try online dating, usually through PoF and the rest of the industry makes money from it.
Markus doesn’t make a huge amount of money in comparison to most paid online dating sites and we don’t really know how much profit he genuinely makes (how much is he paying to get the traffic to his site, server costs, etc).
But he does well – he has his place in the industry (a little bit more love from him wouldn’t be a bad thing) but what he has achieved cannot be replicated. I think it was foolish of Match not to take over PoF or perhaps even more foolish for Markus not to sell at the right point. But PoF will beat any commercial offering because the members run the site – it’s a true community, something very few dating sites do right.
Still gives a grown man no right to wear pyjamas :)
Ross
You keep saying he doesn’t make a lot of money like I go on about unannounced traffic costs myself, but the fact is he’s making an extraordinary amount of money and he works a heck of a lot less than we do.
We will never get love from Markus, it’s not in his nature. One man, one island. That’s part of his intrigue.
Why sell now, I would wait until ad revenue bottoms out, buy for lower price and ride the tide back up to where it was last year.