Wallyworld

This guy is genius! And I'm so envious. He's taken a pretty simple idea, albeit a twist on an old one and given it (dare I say) balls.

Markus Frind, the 28 year old owner of the "free" dating site PlentyOfFish.com has been pulling in $10,000 a day from Adsense. What is even more remarkable is that he is single handedly (with a little help from his girlfriend and several servers) running one of the largest dating sites on the internet out of his Vancouver apartment.

The headquarters of Plenty Of Fish is on the 16th floor of a brand-new building with panoramic views of the nearby Canadian Rockies.

Markus Frind was born in a small rural town in northern British Columbia. He headed to Vancouver in the late 1990s, went to trade school in computers and rotated through several dot-com jobs before starting PlentyOfFish in 2003 to keep himself busy.

The site was done without much of a plan, though Mr. Frind was intent on finding out how far he could get keeping it entirely free of charge. Most other dating sites charge anywhere between $20 and $40 a month for membership.

The site runs on Microsoft software on a half-dozen machines at a hosting facility a few miles away. From his bedroom, though, Mr. Frind can keep tabs on everything going on.

He's using a server with 2 Quad Core Intel chips(Zeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of ram (only using about 800 megs) and 2 hard drives using Windows x64 Server 2003. Total cost was a couple of grand. He says the system works a lot better when going over 2 million page views an hour. All outbound data is being Gzipped and even then only 30% CPU usage. He has only 1 webserver that serves all those pageviews. Most of the 100 million plus image requests a day are running through Akamai. This server does serve 10’s of millions of image requests directly, but most of those images are in ram so its not much of a load.

There's a March 2006 interview here - webpublishingblog.

Markus has put the cat amongst the dating site pigeons by offering a free alternative to pay-to-play sites like match.com.

Here are some amazing stats. For the week ended April 28, PlentyOfFish.com was the 96th-busiest Web site in the U.S. - most number of hits, that is.

A few months back, Markus posted on his blog The Paradigm Shift a pic of a Google check for nearly 1 million smackers for a two-month period. (Google confirmed the check was genuine).
Markus says his site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year. Holey Moley! $5 - $10 Million a year!!?? Working out of his apartment? Just he and his girlfriend??!!

To me...the amazing thing is how ordinary his site looks. It's your basic, no-frills dating site. In common or garden variety light blue with touches of green. There's nothing hip and trendy about it; Its just clean and uncluttered. And where are these Google Adsense ads that are making him a fortune? Am I missing something here? I can only see four text ads across the top of the page - and not every page either. Alright he's getting heaps of traffic but how can just those few ads generate such enormous figures?

There are now 1.2 million active members. He's making money three ways: via Google's small text ads, with bigger banner ads and through "affiliate marketing" where other sites pay you for sending them customers.

Part of the PlentyOfFish success is due to several converging Web trends - Servers and server software have become simple and reliable enough that they can run on their own, without a lot of babysitting. What's more, a remarkably sophisticated economic infrastructure now exists that allows busy Web sites to make lots of money.

"No one else has ever done something like this before," Markus says. Plenty of Fish is "like my own personal toy."

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