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.
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Hilarious! I too was interviewed about POF a while back for a major magazine. Forty five minutes later I thought I’d given the reporter a lot to work with, but when the magazine came out, my sole quote read, “People like it ’cause its free.” *sigh* Ah well.
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.
Happens all the time, I don’t mind anymore, it was a lifestyle piece after all.
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?
He recorded 2 days of following me around and maybe 20 words I said made it into the article… I said match.com was dieing after we looked through their last quarter where it showed them decreasing revenues in the US year over year and in the conference call it says Match has 70% of their revenues in the US.. As for yahoo I was talking about the advertising side.. they owed me a few hundred thousand and after 5 months of un ending screwups I finally got my money.
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.
Reporters are like that. Taking quotes out of context is common, but I think he did an ok job.
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”.
Thats why i don’t use the marriage number..
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?
Me? I’ve been on your site for years. That doesn’t mean I use all the features or email women often but I’ve been through the process many times and I get the weekly list of local members.
You are saying that free dating sites care more about their members? Snort.
The JD Power and Associates idea is a solid one. I review sites, but I can only do so much based on the end-user experience. Few people (well, my readers anyway) ask whether or not the site they are using is one with a high success rate; they want to know if there are lots of people in their area, how easy the site is to use, and what the cost is – and most are willing to pay something, in my experience.
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?
Match.com asked me when I closed my account why I was leaving; so did eHarmony and a few smaller cohorts.
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.
To be fair, there are several review sites that have great reviews and content, I was speaking about the majority, the thinly-veiled affiliate marketing sites.
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.
Online dating services generally require a prospective member to provide personal information, before they can search the service provider’s database for other individuals using criteria they set, such as age range, gender and location.
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jackspar.
Online Dating
Are we not going to concentrate on the main problem with the article – the utterly ridiculous, indisputable fact:
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
His success crosses over into the entrepreneur, IT and business world as well. Most of the people who read his blog are not in the online dating business. Much of the time they are talking about advertising, disk arrays, and ho much memory the servers have, which broadens his appeal.
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.
Rather than wanting to shoot myself or wanting to crush PoF, Marcus’s success is an inspirational path that I want to thread towards. I have to disagree with you about PoF being unusable whatever the his personality might be. I have used it personally and had better return on time spent than Match. There is something to be said about his no non-sense approach. He also has some subtle but very effective and innovative approaches that make the whole process pretty effective.
““The site pretty much runs itself,†he explains. “Most of the time, I just sit on my ass and watch it.†.”
Hmm, intersting. Let me enlighten all of you on Markus’ idea of how to run his site. Markus REALLY does NOTHING — he doesn’t provide support for his members; he doesn’t screen out users who are “unfit to date” as his site advertises; he doesn’t screen for pedophiles are those who are misrepresenting themselves.
Markus doesn’t even have the basic security confirmation by email system other sites used to assure themselves that they are dealing with a reputable person.
And let’s not talk about the forums, which are run in a Nazi like fashion, where racists and bullies are allowed to target newcomers and attack them at will.
Markus has “rules” posted but his Moderators (if there are any — I personally believe Markus has a number of aliases he uses in the site to post comments and provoke users so that he can ban them) the Moderators don’t follow the rules and they don’t ask the most abusive members to follow the rules either.
And did I mention banning? Yes, the moderators will ban you for mysterious infractions like stating that racism is wrong or abuse is wrong or bullying is wrong.
Once you are targeted by the “Moderators” (Markus) your days of free speech are over — and remember (or if you didn’t know) any posts made in the forum are linked to your profile page — so Markus can set people up to participate in arguments where he triggers them and makes them look bad. Then he bans you.
I know people who have been banned for 20 -30 years!!!
If you’ve been targeted by Markus, he WILL spend an enormous amount of time chasing you down — through his sock puppets — in the forums and targeting you for attacks, libel and slander.
Just do a google search on POF and see what the members have to say. I know that everything goes when we’re making the all mighty dollar and since POF is “free” (is TIME free???) the members should just accept whatever Markus dishes out, but creating a site where members are abused and treated like they have no rights is not what I call GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE.
Sure Markus is sucessful, like Bernie Madoff was successful.
Markus numbers concerning his sucessful rate are bogust. Markus CREATES the users himself, and WRITES HIS OWN exit surveys. It’s all smokes and mirrors designed to drive traffic and increase revenue.
hmmm i don’t know what to say about the article but, i love POF not because is free but is simple and easy to navigate.