Wallyworld

Markus Frind of Plentyoffish free dating site is an absolute internet legend. He's managed to turn a small, simple idea into a multi-million dollar earner just by harnessing the power of the computer and the web. Here's an extract from an interview last year with Mark Brooks of Online personal Watch -

Why is Plentyoffish a Web 2.0 site? Because, like other Web 2.0 sites, Plentyoffish is driven by the community. There are one million people who have moderating powers in the Plentyoffish forum and there's 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.

I read that you had a check for $900K from Google for two months Ad Sense sales. What sort of pay-per-click (PPC) spend does it take to generate this?
I don't spend more then 10% of my monthly income on advertising. Pretty much the entire thing is viral. I never did any pay-per-click at the start, not in the first two years and then after that it was just a growing. The community was really built by word of mouth. There was a need for a free site and because no one else was providing it, it just grew like a weed. A lot of people just don't want to pay for dating sites. I'm providing a service for millions of people and it's costing me barely anything. These other sites, they're all just out for people's money.

How many employees do you have? How many uniques a month do you get and how many servers does Plentyoffish.com run on?
Just me, myself and I. Google says it's over 3.4 or 3.5 million uniques a month. I run Google analytics which records all my traffic.

I have five or six servers; one database server, one web server, an image server, a mail server…it's a dating site; it's not rocket science. You don't need thousands of servers.

I have highly optimized the database and the site, so I guess normally everyone else is using two to three hundred servers and I'm doing what they are doing with more complexity on top of it. I've invented stuff like multi-dimensional wheel sieve. I create very advanced algorithms. The more you search and the more you use the site, the more it limits your view of the people you see. So if you only message smokers, then it doesn't matter what pages you're on, you're only going to see smokers. It generates a database on the site that's built around your preferences, which is something that no other dating site is capable of doing yet. It's technically not feasible for them at least using known algorithms. I invented algorithms that no one else thought were feasible.

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.

Let's go on to the final question. What's your advice for other Web 2.0 start up web entrepreneur's about making money?
Build something useful, simple in ways that people will use. Explore things like Ad Sense, affiliate programs, and just explore ways of making money. Most 2.0 companies will never make a dime and they're not built to make a dime. So I would start looking at how to make money before you even design or think about starting a business.

Here's a link to a video from NBC Today show showing Markus at work. He says he only spends an hour a day servicing the site. I don't believe him. But I do believe the million-dollar cheques he's getting from Google Adsense. Amazing fella.